Session 7: Entrepreneurial Customer Service
In this session you're going to learn about Entrepreneurial Customer Service. You'll learn
what Customer Service really is, why it's important to relate to your customers as human
beings, how to create raving fans that tell other people about your company, and much
more...
So - what is this thing called "Customer Service"? It's about planning out the customer's experience, step by step. One classic definition of Entrepreneur is "one who manages a theatre production." In a lot of ways, Customer Service is about that - managing the production of an experience other people have - in this case, your customer's experience. When you give them the experience of getting taken care of really well, they like you and trust you, and it makes it likely that they are going to buy from you again. They already know you and they know you'll take good care of them.
Human beings like to buy from other human beings. Many Entrepreneurs make the mistake of wanting their company to come across as some huge, faceless company. But people don't want that. They want a human to take care of them. That's why everyone is annoyed by those huge voicemail systems you have to navigate through. People want to talk to a person, not a computer or machine.
Another way to think of this is that your business, to your customer, is really a person. When your customers are interacting with your business, whoever they are interacting with IS the business to them. If a customer interacts with someone in your business who doesn't treat them well, the customer doesn't think the employee was bad... they start thinking the entire business is bad. So we need to script out the entire customer experience and relate to the customer as a human being.
One of the mindsets of delivering great customer service is to get clear on what great customer service really feels like. I bought my first nice car a few years back. It was a Lexus. When I took it to get serviced, not only did I notice they had washed my car... they had even put chocolates on the seat. I immediately thought that Lexus is a higher level of car company.
In crafting your customer service experience, it's important to realize that humans bond with other humans by telling stories. If you want your customers to tell other people how great of an experience they had with your company, you need to give them stories to tell. You want to script out their experience with your company and product so that they have great experiences to share. For example, I used to work for a real estate training company.
They used to tell their students that buying a home is an intense emotional experience with emotional windows of opportunity during the process. If you make an impression on them at these times, they're going to tell great stories about you. So students were taught to visit their clients when they got their offer approved, with gifts, ideally at their office.
What happens when you do this? Everyone in the office comes over to look, and everyone in the office sees you - the real estate agent - and people will ask for your business card. Plus, when people in the office go home that night, they may tell their friend about this cool thing that happened at the office today... and so the story gets passed around and the agent gets more business.
