andrewjdumont.com

The “Customer Love” Effect

Posted on 22. Jun, 2009 by Andrew Dumont in Marketing, Startup Life

Tony, the CEO of Zappos said it best, “The first dollar spent towards marketing should be spent on customer service.” We all know it, the greatest form of advertisement is word-of-mouth. But, how do we achieve it? How do we build evangelists for our brand? The answer is simple, amazing customer service. That’s it.

The game has changed, customer service has morphed far beyond a simple interaction via email during the period of 3-5 business days. True customer service is building a relationships, that’s why we like to call it, “customer love”. With strong customer service comes compassionate users, which in turn equates to increased traction and sales.

Below are a few tips to help transform your everyday customer service to “customer love”.

Factor it in - Too many businesses view customer service as icing on the cake. Let’s put it this way, it is the cake, a big fat slice of Oreo Cheesecake. Factor it in to your budget, staffing, etc. We hired our Community Manager, Alex for one reason, customer love. It was one of the best investments we’ve made.

Take it outside – Customer service has grown past a simple email exchange, you’ve got to put a face behind the exchange for it to truly be effective. People want to talk to a person, not an automated machine. It all relates back to transparency, connect with everyone you chat with on Facebook, Twitter or anywhere else you can think of. Facebook has a great tool that allows you to easily import email addresses and add those contacts as friends, check it out here. Not only does this help to better the relationship with your users, it also helps to keep your users up to date with any new features or information about your company.

Make yourself available - Let’s face it, none of us are the CEO of Microsoft or Ashton Kutcher, if you make your phone number or email address available, you aren’t going to get bombarded with calls… trust me. With that in mind, it is very important to make yourself available, at all times. Your users need to know that they can contact you if they have questions or problems, this helps to build trust, the most important aspect of business. A lot of people are afraid to do put out their contact information, so this is a place where your business can really shine in the customer love department. In case you were wondering, my personal cell is 360.319.1387, go ahead, give me a call.

Get on the phone – Every single person that creates a Tatango account gets a call from somebody on the team. Seriously, no joke. Not only does this call allow us to connect with our users on a different level than any other company out there, it also helps us understand where people are getting confused on the site (if at all). I can’t emphasize this enough, we’ve built countless friendships and long lasting relationships with our users as the result of one simple phone call.

Build a community - People want to feel as if they are a part of something bigger. Take Apple for example, they’ve created a cult like following because their clients have become very passionate about their product. Every Apple user turns into a fanboy very shortly after owning their first Apple product because of the strong following that surrounds their company. Community is a very hard thing to build, but if you’re able to do it, it’s priceless. Get Satisfaction is a great tool for businesses looking to build community. Get Satisfaction provides your users with an easy-to-use interface to express questions, concerns, bugs, feature requests and feedback.

Utilize video - Sit down in front of a camera and introduce yourself to your users. You need to make a personal connection to achieve effective customer service. Below is a video from our Community Manager Alex from Tatango. This video gets linked up in every support email he sends… do this.

Tags: customer love, customer service, get satisfaction, Marketing, tatango