Module 4- Selling the Product- Part 3
Customer service and how to improve it
Customer service is the experience a customer gets when using products made by the business. Satisfied customers make repeat purchases and recommend the product to friends, leading to additional word-of-mouth sales.
Customers want to buy goods and services that meet their needs at a price they can afford. For example, a café thrives when friendly staff serve tasty, well made meals, in generous portions, at competitive prices.
In MyBnk programmes, teams have to establish themselves quickly in a marketplace. Poor customer service will immediately affect their sales, especially if rival teams are offering better services. Teams need to realise that high levels of customer satisfaction creates a significant competitive advantage.
EXAMPLE: How not to do customer service
Successful businesses define the quality or standard of service needed to meet customer needs. For instance, a café can aim to take no more than 5 minutes to serve any customer once they have ordered their meal. MyBnk teams may decide to offer fast customer service or decide that a more bespoke customer service is appropriate.
Ensuring that quality standards are met requires:
Clear agreement of roles and responsibilities. Everyone in the team needs to know what they're doing so that the customer has a positive buying experience e.g. one person packaging the purchase while someone else takes the money and sorts out change.
Innovation or introducing new ideas and methods. If customers are not buying their product or service then MyBnk teams need to quickly think of other ways of attracting custom.
Listening to customers helps a business adjust its products to better match consumer needs and respond to any problems.
EXAMPLE: A BMB team wasn't making many sales as the marketplace was a parents' evening where people were waiting in queues to speak to teachers. They sent out a roving sales team with products and offered parents the ability to buy in the queue.
We ask all MyBnk teams to write a short customer service charter outlining how they will keep their customers happy.
EXAMPLE: TNT, a delivery company, developed a 2 year programme to communicate its customer promise to employees and customers- Actions speak louder than words and that when we say “Sure we can”, we mean it’. . They aim to offer on-time delivery, 24/7 tracking and personal attention. It was hoped that the customer promise would differentiate TNT in a crowded market (at least 13 direct competitors). If you're keen then you can read more about TNT's customer service model here.
EXAMPLE: Morrisons, the supermarket, has also heavily invested in customer service- using the HOT model, 'Hello, Offer, Thank' and rewarding staff who deliver excellent customer service. Read more about the Morrisons customer service approach here.
Understanding customers
Customers compare price with customer service. Few customers expect high quality service when buying low priced items. For instance, travellers using a budget airline accept that they must pay for extras such as an in-flight meal. First class customers expect luxury seats and free champagne. The challenge facing all businesses is to remain competitive. They must keep prices competitive while offering a better service than rivals.
Teams will need to work out what their customers want and be aware that different customers may want different things. In order to understand their customers, MyBnk teams may want to think about the following things:
Ease of use – educating customers so that they know how to get the best from the service or product and designing services that are easy to use and access
Personal relationships – building a rapport with customers to make them feel valued and that their needs are important, so that they tell others about the business
Priorities- what is the customers main need or want? How can that be met in a cost-efficient (ideally free) way by the team?
EXAMPLE: A BMB marketplace had students, parents and teachers as the target audience. The students wanted a good price and quick service, the parents wanted to know how BMB fitted in with Business Studies and teachers wanted to see if the team could explain key terms while they were selling products.
EXAMPLE: This clip is focussed on projects rather than products but makes a good point about the importance of seeing customers as individual people.
EXAMPLE: Check out the following infographic - mainly focussed on B2B sales but good section on the top personality traits of salespeople. The top salespeople tend to be modest, conscientious, achievement, curiosity and good listeners.
Dealing with challenging customers
It is important that MyBnk teams think about how they will deal with challenging customers if they encounter them at the marketplace. Other prospective customers will be at the marketplace, listening to how complaints and challenges are dealt with so it's key that teams have a plan.
People are twice as likely to talk about bad customer service than good customer service (see infographic for more details).
There are a number of things that teams can do when dealing with challenging customers:
1. Think like a customer- why are they unhappy? How are they feeling? It's important that teams distance their own feelings.
2. Listen to their concerns- It's important that teams listen carefully to what the customer is saying and give them an opportunity to tell their story. Conversations can be started with, 'Let's go over what happened..' or 'Please tell us why you're upset'. Nothing should interrupt the listening stage.
3. Repeat customer concerns- this is used to check understanding of the issue and allows agreement on how the problem should be solved.
4. Show empathy and apologise- teams should use their body language and words to show that they understand why the customer is upset. Most customers will just want an apology so it's important that teams say sorry as soon as possible.
5. Give a solution- while some customers may be happy with just an apology, it's important to offer some kind of solution. This may be a discount, refund, something free or even asking the customer what they would like.
6. Take action- whatever is agreed with the customer needs to be carried out.
7. Use the feedback- a challenging customer may highlight an issue with the business. Teams should learn from the experience and make sure the situation doesn't happen again e.g. if customer was complaining about lack of change- the team could run and borrow change from another team.
EXAMPLE: An approach of T&M Cabinets’ towards customer service. MyBnk teams are not going to have long-term customers but there is some sound advice including treating every customer as if they are the only customer and using people's names.
EXAMPLE: Richard Branson on why customer service is so important to the success of Virgin Airlines. It's quite long but worth watching the first and last few minutes.
