This is very mold still getting small business on stuff today we're talking about customer service I can already hear through this video camera, I hear a huge groan. Why don't we got to talk about customer service? I'll tell you why. Because you're stuck. You think that customer service today is only a call center or you think that in order to offer great customer service, you got to do like Amazon or you got to do it like Zappos. That's not the case.

The reason we have to talk about customer service is because you see, I dream about customer service. And I know other people have some more interesting dreams. But a lot of times I'll be having a dream or I'll be sitting in a restaurant, and I'm leaving my next meeting. And no one's servicing me and I looked at left, I look to my right. And I wake up in this cold sweat screaming and yelling. Now I'm not sure what it says when I dream about these kinds of things, but it does make me realize that I know that customer service for your business really is the new marketing.

You know, I used to have this button that said, give me good, great customer service and nobody gets hurt. And I used to wear whenever I shopped around to let people know what I expected. A lot of folks think that the golden age of customer service really is over that mostly customer service just sucks. And that customer service A long time ago was really about people paying a lot of attention to you. Imagine back to a time with gas stations when as soon as you pulled in. These two men would rush out in uniforms and they would pump the gas for you and they would vacuum your car and clean your windows and check your oil.

Now I know it's hard to imagine that so long ago, but that's what a lot of people thought, great customer service. This was now when we thank people for any product or service we received. The reply simply is no problem. And I keep thinking, why is it no problem? I just bought something from you Why should ever be a problem? I think so much on when I see US Postal carriers.

And I think what's wrong with this picture? I've never seen a US postal carrier who wasn't on their cell phone, because I believe smartphones are really distracting us from giving great customer service. And the other issue is, is that people are constantly plugged in to their smartphones, distracting them on what they're really trying to do. Now, meet the enemy. The enemy of great customer service is we're constantly distracted through our cell phones, through our email through voicemail jail. There's a great picture here.

I fly a lot for American Airlines. And when I was getting on a recent flight, I saw one of the ground personnel Had headphones on, and he had placed his smartphone right next to his ear. And then he had duct tape it around it so we could talk wirelessly with hands free on his phone while he was doing his job. That didn't give me a lot of confidence in him being able to do his job really effectively. Now, of course, when it comes to customer service sagas, you gotta meet Mona, the hammer. Now more of the hammer was well into her 80s.

And she wanted the simple things in life, like most of us do. She wanted cable TV, so she called up Comcast, and they said they would be there sometime between two and 6pm. Now, I know you might be surprised, but Comcast didn't show up during that period of time. So of course, she very commonly called Comcast again, and they scheduled them to come over. They actually showed up this time, but they didn't finish the job. Well, Mona got really upset that the next day she went down to the local Comcast office and she was going to give The manager they are a piece for mine and tell him what she thought.

She arrived at nine o'clock and the administrative assistant the office manager said, Alright, the manager will be right with you. She waited till 10 o'clock, she waited till 11 o'clock. And by three o'clock in the afternoon, and she was still waiting, the administrative assistant came out and said, Sorry, the manager had left for the day. Now, as you can imagine, Mona was not pleased. She came back to the Comcast office the next day, she brought her hammer, and she smashed every single piece of equipment that she could find at the Comcast office. Now, I'm not suggesting that you take customer service in your own hands, like Mona did, but it does give us an idea how important people think Customer service is and what a poor job that most of us do, where you can really set yourself apart from all the other competitors.

You see, because customer service really is the ugly stepchild. We pay all sorts of money to our salespeople to bring new customers in the front of our business, but unfortunately, through Customer Services, we don't pay them very much people walk out through the back. And that is not really effective. Customer Service in this world of the internet where everyone can talk to everybody else, really is the new marketing. And it's not really that hard to do, you know, used to be that in 1955, it was really all about applying people to give great customer service. And of course, this is still done today in a lot of hiring hotels.

But for small business owners, giving great customer service now is all about technology, leveraging mobility, social, the cloud, and big data. Of course, phones used to be painful. And I know that some of you watching this video, have actually never seen a payphone except in the movies, that it's all about smartphone these days. Technology and customer service started a long time ago with the automatic out of New York where you would actually go into a restaurant and all the food was in these machines and there were these little Little doors, and you would put your money in, and you'd get your food out of machine. And of course, technology has come a long way since then, it's been 30 or 40 years since the first ATM machine was. And now all of us use self service to buy our gas check in at the airport many times check in at rental cars, at movie theaters, and of course, self checkout at the grocery store.

They're even places where you can scan your whole order. And it's already done for you before you check out. I was up in Washington and they actually have a vending machine that has self service art, which is amazing. And I was amazed by this customer service and a local medical lab that I go to sometimes where you there's no people there, you walk up to this screen and you have to press lab EKG lavvy kg or specimen drop off. Now I've never pressed specimen drop off but what I really want to do is press that I really wonder if an arm comes out and you have to put the specimen right there. Back then Customer service is where you To know everybody's name by remembering them in your mind.

And now, things are still incredibly personal. But you can practice what I call fo personalization. And Amazon a lot of their companies do this now, because you use a technology called cookies inside the internet browser to track who that visitor is. And you can call them by name. And I love that because when I go to Amazon, they actually tell me what I bought in the past what am I buying like to buy in the future when I go to my local retail store many times that I've been there maybe 50 times before, have no idea who the hell I am. back then.

If you want to buy a car, you could have it in any color, as long as it was black. Now we have the power of one ever since Burger King said you can have it your way. Everybody wants to customize for you think of Keurig coffee where now it just makes one cup and if you want blonde roaster, you One dark roast, everybody in the family can have something different. I also love the new Coca Cola freestyle machines that are popping up all over at movie theaters. You just don't have to get coke or sprite, or Mr. Pigs, you can mix all those together to actually create your one special drink. My son has one that he calls the rocket bomber.

He just loves it when he goes to the movie theater, he can actually have it his way. Back then if you ordered something over the phone or through mail or email, it took a long time to get there. And even after Amazon standardizes two day delivery and Zappos said two day free delivery. Now, the top people in the industry are offering same day delivery, Amazon, Walmart and eBay. That's really what you're competing with. years ago.

If you wanted to buy a piece of clothing and you want to see how it looked on you, you'd have to go in and actually physically try it on. Now there are apps out there like swivel that can show your image in that particular outfit. It really is quite amazing. You know, back then in order to communicate to customers, pretty much all you had was the phone, or letters. And then people would come in person, or perhaps you had faxes, and then you had emails. But now there's so many different ways to communicate with your customers that in some ways, it becomes harder.

In some ways, it really becomes easier. So let's really go back to why it's important to take a look at our customer service, because it all starts with a BLT. And what a BLT is that before customers are going to buy from you, they need to believe, like and trust you, before they'll ever even get started with you. We talked about this previously, that when you're approaching a customer, you're always somewhere on this wheel in the sales process. You've got to know or believe, like and trust, try, and then they'll buy from you. Hopefully they'll repeat and they refer you to someone else which actually is the golden answer.

And you have to remember Customer service is very difficult because people love to complain. Now, this is no surprise to you. There's some surveys that were done by Harvard Business Review that said that 25% are likely to speak positive about you. But 65% are actually likely to speak negative about you. What's even more impressive that 23% of customers who had a positive experience, tell 10 people, but 48% of the people that had negative experience, tell 10 people, so not only is those people have a negative experience, they're going to talk to more people. So it multiplies.

In the world of the internet now, reputation really is the new black reputation is forever. It used to be in small towns where every customer could talk to every other customer. That was really what people listen to now over the web with peer reviews. That's what folks listen to and it really is happening with social media because they are talking about you studies show that there's 184 counts conversations that happen every single week about the products and services that we buy. So this trust the meter has really shifted. According to Nielsen, we trust when people post reviews online 70% of the time, but it's quite amazing.

We trust that twice as much as we do online ads, or branded websites, what people say about you really does matter. But there's all this technology to the rescue, and we're going to talk about it in the next video, it can really help you create the new customer service for your organization. Unfortunately, what is great customer service, it really is different from customer to customer. And so what makes the customer mad, the biggest thing is when 56% report having to re explain the same situation over and over again. You remember when you call a customer company up and then they don't respond, then you got to call them again or you get transferred from one person to another Harvard Business Review said 60 2% of time, that's the biggest problem is talking to multiple people in the company having to go over the same thing over and over and over again.

Remember, what gets remembered by a customer is not all the experiences they had with you. But it's their last experience. And it's their peak experience. Giving outstanding customer service creating a wonderful customer experience is so hard because it's never the same from customer to customer. And in fact, in many ways for research, the internet has made it replaceable. So a great customer service experience is a constantly moving, ever changing target.

And we're busy because we're constantly focusing on different things in our business. Now. What's of critical importance in this entire process is the things that get in the way of you offering great customer service. I wrote about it in my book called bam, delivering customer service in a self service world. Here's some of the things that you're starting to say to yourself, I can't expect my minimum wage workers to give great service. That sound familiar, the computer system I have just thinks, or customer service is just plain common sense.

I don't have to train anybody. And by the way, I don't have time to train my staff. I remember, in one of my companies where we had new people come in, we not only did we get any training, we had them build their own desks. Some of you were saying, I use voicemail to keep my expenses down, or my employees don't do what I tell them. These are all things to get in the way. And in fact, other things that get in the way are these customer service myths.

And we're gonna bust those myths right now. The first customer service myth is that the customer's always right. Do you repeat that mantra to yourself over and over again, the idea is that we need every piece of the business so badly that we're going to do whatever the customer needs to make it right. I will tell you that if the customer is always right We'd be out of business. Now this myth was started by Cesar Ritz back in the early 1900s, where he said liqui Nay, I don't even remember what it was in French. But basically what it says was, the client is never wrong.

And this was refreshed by the famous Nordstrom story where someone came into one of the retail stores and tried to return tires, and they took them back. Now the amazing part about this was that they don't even sell tires, that will do anything to make the customer right. Another myth is that unhappy customers are just part of doing business. The idea is that, hey, all we got to do is be reactionary. If a customer brings us to a problem, then all we got to do is make it right and there'll be a customer of ours forever. Guess what?

That's wrong. I shopped at the local Great American bagel, and I ordered 12 bagels and I asked them, would they slice them for me? And they said, Sure. We're going to charge you five cents extra. I was appalled. I was angry.

I didn't say anything. And I got My bagels, and I never went back to that place again. And I've told this story over 100 times, most your customers will not complain, they'll just go off and sulk in silence. The other myth is that common cards and surveys actually tell us what customers think. Let me tell you, and let me be very, very clear about this. There's only three kinds of customers that respond to customer surveys, the ones that are really, really happy, the ones that are really, really unhappy, and the one that you pay to actually respond to you.

Have you ever been to a local grocery store or Petco, where on the bottom of your receipt, it says, well take our survey and get $3 off on your next order. How unbiased is that? Now, there's a lot more myths in the book vam. But really, what I want to focus on is we've got to create a manifesto, a customer service manifesto in our company, so everyone knows what are the principles that we stand by, and let me give you some suggestions about what should be included. In that Manifesto, the first thing is we need to set the customer's expectations. Because if you as a company don't set those expectations, the customers will set them for you.

And that's really going to be a problem. You have to make sure that whatever those expectations are, you deliver on what you promised, have a standard, train people on that process and make sure that you have a feedback loop. Another part of the manifesto is that you should promise the customers that when you're dissatisfied, you will listen to them. Most customers realize that you can't fix a problem right away. All they want is empathy. All they want to do is just be listened to you.

Another thing that should be included in your manifesto is that when things go wrong, not that they'll be easily fixed, but you'll be easy to reach. There's so much voicemail jail out there, customers get frustrated and they're angry just when they just come to you and that's on top of what their problem is. Another way is that to resolve the customer issues in a reasonable period of time and try to compensate you whenever possible. Now reasonable is different depending on what your situation is. If I'm stuck on the side of the road for a tow truck company to come get me, well, reasonable might be 30 minutes. If my heating breaks in the middle of the summertime, well, maybe you could take a few weeks or a month, but set what those expectations are.

It's also very important in your manifesto to admit when you've made a mistake. Now I know in this litigious world, it is very difficult to admit when you made a mistake, but when you say you're wrong, suddenly it takes all sorts of pressure off the customer. The other thing is, we must and I'm going to repeat this again, we must empower our employees to solve 90% of problems are out there. The worst words that a customer complaining could hear is, well, I'm sorry, I can't help you. I'll have to pass you to my boss so you can re explain it over and over and over again. Now inside your company, you need to start developing your own customer Manifesto.

Think about who are your customers? What are the three customer service principles that you really want your business to live by? And are these really practice inside your business? Or are they just myths, think about what the true value of a customer is outside of just revenue. It can be the timing of that revenue, it can be the referrals that that customer gives you. It can be the additional products that they buy, it can be the feedback they give you.

It can be that they stay with you for a long time, or it can be their brand power. Remember, you would much rather have Oprah Winfrey as your customer than me as your customer because then you can stand on the shoulders of her brand. Remember, customer service, and an internet connected world that really has no boundaries. Every action you take, adds and subtracts from your brand. And a customer sees everyone inside an organization really as equal. I remembered I was staying at a local hotel Last week, and I was waiting for the elevator, and I was looking down at my smartphone, multitasking, answering emails, and I didn't realize that the elevator had actually come.

The maintenance person cleaned the hallway said, Sir, your elevators here. I thought that was amazing. They didn't have to interrupt their work to help me. I thought much more favorable about that company after that incident. Remember where most of us are selling commodities. Customer service is really the only sustainable competitive advantage that really is out there.

Let me do a couple of quick hits on best phrases in customer service that will really put your customers at ease. You can say welcome. Thank you for coming. How can I make your day better? I understand how you can feel that way. I'm sorry.

Please come back. These simple phrases to train your staff on really will make a difference. Remember, as always, we're striving for minimal achievement. Where are you Stop when it comes to customer service and what's the one change that you're going to make today? This is very old still getting small business stuff. Have a great day.