Small Talk with Jude: Customer IS Everything
Yes, yes, I can hear you say - we’ve all heard that before but, with limitless choice and fragile brand loyalty, customer retention has to be fought for, so I want to place customers right up there - front and centre.
And actually, it’s not about US thinking the customer is everything, it's about the customer FEELING that THEY are everything.
My first proper job was a 6 month stint as a beauty consultant working for a very expensive brand of Revlon, Ultima II. My sister worked in HR and got me the gig on the ‘Midnight Diamonds’ promotion team, touring all of the major London department stores in a sparkly black dress with floaty sleeves. At 19 I was completely out of my comfort zone, knowing very little about make-up and even less about sales.
On the team were two incredibly handsome guys dressed in black velvet suits. They were masters at spotting a woman about to walk by and opening with ‘excuse me madam, who did your make up today’. The woman, flattered by the attention of a gorgeous young man, would answer that she had. To which they would reply, ‘but it’s truly dreadful’. The crestfallen woman would quickly be told she wasn’t making the most of her extraordinarily beautiful eyes whilst being guided towards a seat for a make over. An hour and £300 later (this was the early 80s!) she’d walk out feeling a million dollars and like someone had really looked, listened and understood her!
Dubious and risky tactics but the point is that everyone left feeling really good and that’s what customer service means to me.
Amazon did an amazing job of leading the way for great customer service for online purchases with communication, convenience, reliability and speed at the heart of everything they do. 30 years on, they’ve pretty much upheld their reputation in this respect, if not in others, and we could all learn something from them.
For us, as a service provider, we don’t have millions or even hundreds of daily customer interactions where it doesn’t matter if you lose some, so those customers we do have are truly precious.
For us it’s personal; we need to, and do, build real relationships with our clients, politely infiltrating their business to become an extension of their team, allowing us to make them feel seen, listened to and understood - it’s the best way we know of providing valuable support.
So what does it mean on a practical level?
We’re not Amazon so our customer service priorities are different. For us it means being flexible, responsive, proactive, creative and caring. We rarely (never?) say no to a last minute request which piles the pressure on for us, we always strive to exceed expectations, we often propose or find solutions clients didn’t know they were looking for and if we don’t know how to do something, we’ll use our own time to work out how.
Customer IS everything, for without them we are nothing. Acquisition is so much harder than retention and we should all remember that. Not every now and then but every single day.