Improving Customer Service – The Three Most Important Things

By Kristina Evey • August 2nd, 2010

Mark Sanborn

I recently had the privilege to interview Mark Sanborn, author and speaker about leadership, service strategy and turning the ordinary into the extraordinary. During our conversation, he gave me his answer that many of my clients and small business owners ask regarding trying to improve the customer experience through service.

KE: What are three things that every company or organization should be doing right away to improve customer service?

MS: Number 1 - I think all customer service is predicated on a simple idea. I think all business is predicated on a simple idea. Say what you’ll do and do what you say. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Don’t create expectations you can’t fulfill. Make sure you’re every bit as good or better than you’re advertising. So No. 1, say what you’ll do and do what you say.

Number 2 – Treat customers like friends. That doesn’t mean you have to be their friend, it just means treat people like they’re friends. My friend Fred Shea, who I wrote about in my book The Fred Factor is an extraordinary postal carrier. I said to Fred, I said how is it you’re able to give such great service to all the customers on your route? Fred said, well I don’t think of them as customers, I just think of them as friends and it’s easy to take care of your friends.
I think that’s a pretty good guiding principle. If you want to know how to treat people, here’s a question, how do you treat your friends? Assuming you have some. We hopefully all do.

Number 3- The third thing is, and this one will really get the attention of management, compensate customers for mistakes you made. Don’t just say “Geez, I’m sorry.” We had a customer who, because of a snafu in our system didn’t receive something they ordered. We reshipped a second one even though the first one was on the way. Gave it to them for free and paid the shipping.
In other words, we didn’t just fix the mistake, we compensated them for the mistake. It’s not enough to just fix what was broke. You need to demonstrate your commitment to the customer. And by the way, when you do that and the data gets to management about the money you’ve had to spend to keep customers happy, that will certainly get their attention focused on service delivery.

KE: That’s right. When they see it coming out of their bottom line, they also understand that they could have done right the first time, too.

If you’d like to read the rest of the interview, please click on the resources tab and you’ll find both the ebook and audio versions of the Customer Centric Conversations.