This weekend a friend told me a story about a customer service experience that just blew her mind.

She has a silver chain that she wears around her neck for good luck. She managed to get the chain tangled in all sorts of ways. After spending a good hour or two on a Sunday afternoon trying to fix the thing, she had remedied all but one remaining stubborn knot. She could not get it out, no matter what she did.

So she put it back on, put it around her neck and went to the mall in search of a jewelry store willing to help her out. Once at the mall, she told me, she walked up to one of those kiosks they have in the middle aisle – not a traditional store but a stand-alone kind of thing you might miss if you weren’t looking for it.

Right away she was greeted warmly and personally. She was embarrassed to present her silver chain to the man behind the counter because she wasn’t sure if this small job was something they would even look at – or if they would charge her for the service in the first place.

The man at the repair stand took one look at my friend’s chain and got to work right away, goggles on his eyes, tools in hand. The entire job that had taken all afternoon for my friend to improve just a little bit took about 60 seconds for him to fix entirely. He even showed her a trick to avoid these little-but-seemingly-insurmountable knots in the future.

When he was done, he looked up at her and smiled. She smiled back and asked, “What do I owe you?”

He looked at her, shook his head and, she told me, said, “It was my honor to help you. Now go and have a great day.”

And with that, he put her chain back on her neck and sent her on her merry way.

Consider the answers to these questions:

* How do you think he made her feel?

* Where do you think she will go next time she needs a jewelry repair? Think she would even consider going somewhere else? Think the repair man made a customer for life?

* Think she rushed to tell every friend (including me!) about her experience?

Now, think about your own business and the level of service you provide:

** Have you ever made a customer feel the way my friend must have felt?

** Have you ever provided a service that may have been fast and easy for you but nevertheless significantly changed the life of a customer for the better?

** Have you ever provided a service that “WOW-ed” someone so profoundly that they told everyone who would listen just how amazing your product/service was?

Take some time today to think about great service. Not just service. GREAT, above-and-beyond service. What would providing such service mean for you, for your customers, for your business?

*** Good service is expected. It is about delivering what people expect and doing so anywhere from adequately to well. Great service is delivering what your customer did not specifically ask for – in a good way. It is going beyond the immediate problem/solution scenario and defying expectations.

*** Know who you are selling to. Learn everything you can about your target market so you can customize your service to their needs and wants. Talk to them and listen to them. Then deliver. And deliver again and again.

***Be human. Remember the Golden Rule? Treat people the way you want to be treated – kindly, respectfully, personally. Acknowledge them in every way possible and never take them for granted.

***Remember, your word is your bond. If you promise or guarantee something, you must deliver on it. And, whenever possible, over-deliver. If you fail, make sure you have ways to make it up to your customer quickly and definitively, no questions asked.

***Focus on the relationship to make the sale (not the other way around). Your business may be entirely web-based and unlike the brick-and-mortar operations of yesterday, but it is still built entirely on connections and relationships. Don’t neglect this most basic part of sales – no matter how big you get or how virtual you are.

               

Tags: Customer Service, virtual business

This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 3:38 am and is filed under Customer Service. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.