Best practices: Customer relations
Listen up
Five finalists have one goal: hearing their customers
by Elizabeth Martin The No. 1 rule in customer relations is this: Listen to the customer. It may seem obvious, but it’s not always easy to do.
The five finalists in the category of Best Practices in Customer Relations have all taken very different approaches to listening to their customers, but all have achieved a high level of customer service.
For Carolyn Herfurth, listening to her customers meant being their champion.
Herfurth, who runs The Entrepreneur’s Source, a franchise-selection consulting firm in Minneapolis, has created a monthly e-newsletter featuring her clients. Since the company’s goal is to help individuals become entrepreneurs, the newsletter serves not only to promote Herfurth’s business, but also the businesses of the entrepreneurs she’s helped.
“I can’t be a full-time salesperson for each of them, but I want to help them succeed,” she says. “I was also looking for a way to inspire other entrepreneurs or entrepreneur wannabes to build up the courage to buy or own their own business.
“I talk about where they were when we started working together and I talk about their journey and then of course reveal what the business is and encourage every reader to patronize that business.”
The newsletters has been beneficial in terms of goodwill, she says, and she has heard that they have created opportunities for some of her clients as well as some referrals for her business. But she shared some words of wisdom with the audience as well.
Herfurth says that the 75 percent open rate on her newsletter can be attributed to a good list of recipients and creating valuable content for her readers.
“It’s almost like opening up a People magazine every month,” says Herfurth.Be aware of the type of time commitment that you’re making.
“It takes a lot longer to put it together than I would have ever imagined,” Herfurth says of her newsletter. “But it’s worth every minute.”
‘What else is there?’“For me, what else is there? If you don’t have customers, you don’t have a business,” says Michael Miller, president of Eden Prairie-based Hound Dog Products Inc. He outlines the steps that Hound Dog has taken.
Defining the “customer continuum” is an important first step.
“What I mean by that is, there’s not just one customer. It would be easy to say, ‘Well, lawn and garden tools, you think of somebody using lawn and garden tools as a homeowner,’ ” he says.
In Hound Dog’s case, the continuum includes retail stores that buy their products as well as the end user.
Next, the company defined its ideal end-user based on the company’s core competencies. Hound Dog even gave its ideal customers names and back-stories.
“Bob and Cindy” are 35 to 45 years old, suburban, pressed for time and, says Miller, “lawn-competitive.” The company’s other customer segment is “Earl and Emma,” who are older than 55 and have more time to devote to gardening, but have limited mobility. “Now comes the fun part. Go out and listen,” Miller says.
All of the ideal customer research and segmentation in the world aren’t going to matter if you’re not listening to, and reacting to, what your customers truly need.
Miller also encourages the audience to appoint an “internal concierge” or champion for each customer. Finally, measure.
“People do what you inspect, they don’t do what you expect,” he says. No acronyms allowedGood people skills are critical to the customer service success of Eagan-based Orbit Systems as well.
“We set out to build a Fortune 500 infrastructure for small and mid-sized businesses that our clients could just take for granted. It would run all the time,” says Steve McFarland, the company’s president.
“So our challenge was to take a bunch of technology people, and get them to put away their pocket protector, put away their propeller caps, get rid of the acronyms and actually speak the way that normal people speak.”
Orbit Systems also recently changed its mission statement to read: We will be the best customer service organization in the world, McFarland tells the audience.
“The bar hasn’t been set very high,” he adds. “When was the last time you were at a restaurant, when was the last time you dropped your car off to be serviced and you walked away from that experience and said, ‘Wow. I was at the center of their universe during that time’? It doesn’t happen very often. People have forgotten what customer service is all about.”
Orbit Systems also began hiring based not only on employees’ technical aptitude, but also on their attitude.
Orbit has a 90-day temporary-to-permament hiring arrangement through a local placement firm. That practice alone has had a significant impact on the business and its customer service focus, says McFarland. The reason?
“I’ll tell you something. You can’t fake attitude for 90 days,” he says. “You might be able to fake it for 30, you might be able to fake it for 45, but you get beyond that, and real attitude comes out.”
Spanning the globeWhen your customers span the globe and several time zones, customer service takes on a whole new meaning. That’s the challenge for Lakeville-based Precision Language Services, which offers translation services to clients around the world.
But Patricia May, the company’s president and CEO, has boiled her customer relations philosophy down into two simple phrases: “The Golden Rule” and “The Bottom Line.” The Golden Rule is the adage of treating others as you want to be treated. To that end, May and her employees began putting together a list of “the stupid little things that bother us about customer service.”
One of May’s own irritants was being asked to give her information to four or five individuals on the phone before speaking to someone who could help her. When clients call Precision Language Services, they give their information to the person who answers the phone and that information then precedes them if they need to be transferred to other employees. When it comes to The Bottom Line, “80 percent of your problems will come from 20 percent of your clients,” May tells the audience.
May notes that the company has European and Asian clients who send the company documents to be translated at the end of their work day and want it done by the time they return to the office.
Precision has invested in a relational tool to better pair translators with clients based on language, area of specialty and what companies the translator works well with. In addition, the company has invested in a data transfer Web site to eliminate the hassle of sending large files via e-mail.
The site is available to anyone around the world who has Internet access and an Internet Explorer browser. Clients can “drop off” files at the site and retrieve their translated materials there as well.
But technology alone doesn’t constitute good customer service.
“Underlying the technology is the people,” May says about her translators. “If they’re not good, they don’t work for us twice.”
For clients’ stomachsUpNorth Consulting provides IT resources to large companies in the Twin Cities area and has a nearly 100 percent customer retention rate.
That retention rate isn’t solely due to owner Diann Albers’ oatmeal-chocolate-chip-walnut cookies, which she personally makes and delivers to clients and prospects in cans decorated with the UpNorth Consulting logo. It’s much more basic than that: a company’s product should do what it’s supposed to do.
“Actually, I’ve always taken somewhat of a twisted view to customer service,” Albers says. “If someone was selling widgets, I thought it was always interesting that they would wrap their customer service around their product, such as saying, ‘Our widgets will fit, and they’ll be delivered on time.’ Well, duh!”
“To me, customer service should be something that goes above and beyond what your product should do.”
But that’s just what too many companies do when it comes to customer service. They promise the obvious. Albers believes that customer service should be above and beyond what the product is already supposed to do.
“You know what, I’m probably not any better than my best competitor. But I will tell you one thing: I’m old, I’m cranky, and it makes me miserable when I hire a below-average performer because it makes your life miserable and my life miserable, so I don’t do that,” Albers says.
Customer service is a process that runs through everything you do, she tells the audience. “Now, I know that not all of you are going to run right out and buy some cans at Home Depot and slap some labels on them and learn to make oatmeal-chocolate-chip-walnut cookies,” says Albers. “But what I can challenge you to do, is to kick up your customer service focus a notch and engage your clients in a new and different way.”
[contact] Diann Albers, UpNorth Consulting: 952.224.8656; dalbers@upnorthconsulting.com; www.upnorthconsulting.com. Carolyn Herfurth, The Entrepreneur’s Source: 952.920.0084; carolyn@e-sourcecoach.com; www.theesource.com/cherfurth. Patricia May, Precision Language Services: 952.435.8178; pm@precisionlanguage.com; www.precisionlanguage.com. Stephen McFarland, Orbit Systems: 651.767.3321; sjmcfarland@orbits.net; www.orbits.net. Michael Miller, Hound Dog Products Inc.: 952.828.9008; mmiller@hound-dog.com; www.hound-dog.com
