Customer Service in Today’s Market Part 1

Customer Service in Today’s Market Part 1

In today’s world of mass media, your customers are bludgeoned daily with hundreds of offers from a plethora of companies, all of which claim to be the best or the lowest priced or in some way try to convince your customer that they cannot survive without taking advantage of this “One special offer!”

As a result, consumers are more wary than ever of the “too good to be true” messages that they are exposed to every day. In this new marketplace, developing your company’s reputation is more critical than ever.

You must look at your marketing and answer these simple questions: are you marketing to the right people, and what message are you sending to them?

In a perfect world, every manager would have a perfect perception of who their customers are AND those customers would be the ones they had hoped to attract when they originally designed their marketing plan. However, that this is not always the case. In fact, if we were to be painfully honest about it, those who do not have sufficient knowledge of their customers are probably in the majority. I support this statement with two points.

First, developers and marketers may call it a given that certain types of attractions will draw a certain demographic group. That may have actually been a fairly accurate assumption at one time, but our market is changing right out from under us and that assumption has never been more untrue than it is today. In the very least, the massive availability of credit is allowing young people to spend more money than our parents did at their age.

Secondly, it is often difficult for managers and marketing professionals to spend excessive amounts of time getting to know their customers on a personal level. There are simply too many decisions to make, too many things to be responsible for and too many places to be. That can easily translate into a misunderstood clientele and if you outsource your marketing or ad work to an agency, for example, your problem is compounded. Hence it is all too often that generic, misspoken messages about a company are given to the wrong people in an effort to entice them with things that they’re really not that interested in. Now, what do we do about it?

First, you need to ask yourself some difficult questions about your company and its character. The more honest you are with yourself, the greater the results you will see from your efforts. Are you sure that your customers are who you think they are? If you haven’t run detailed demographics on your customers in awhile, you may be amazed at what you find. Also, spending some time ‘on the floor’ with your customers first line service personnel will help you understand who your customers are and what makes them tick. The front desk clerk might know that the bar would get more business if the guests knew where it was (easily fixed, right?). Maybe a large group of local college kids have started coming to the bar on Sunday afternoon to watch sports and they always ask for a certain drink that your bar doesn’t stock the ingredients for. If you only knew, you would stock the ingredients, wouldn’t you?

After looking at your actual recent demographics and getting to know your typical customer through the staff, you may be surprised to find out that your customer base is not the group that you thought it was. Congratulations to you if your efforts only prove to yourself that you have had your customer pinned perfectly the whole time; you are ahead of the curve. But be prepared to find out that the type of customer your marketing media is designed for might not actually be your biggest customer at all. If that is the case you will be confronted with the question of whether you want to change your business to attract the kind of demographic group you had originally chosen to pursue, or do you want to change your media to more effectively speak to the group that is already there? In either case, for your marketing and customer service to be as effective as they could be, your media and customer service plan needs to match the character of your business, and all should be designed to attract and satisfy your specific clients.

Personal • Experience • Factor
“A customer’s experience with your company. Your PEF is, effectively, your reputation.”
Roy H. Williams – Secret Formulas of The Wizard of Ads (1999, Bard Press)

This is one of the most important concepts that every business should strive to master and how well your business masters it may very well define the difference between survival and exponential success.

If a customer has a certain expectation of how their experience with your property should go, and you fall short of that expectation, your company scores a negative PEF.

If you exceed that customer’s expectation, you score a positive PEF. It’s that simple. Your PEF, combined with accurate marketing, is a formula for guaranteed consumer happiness.

How can you work to attain a positive PEF? First, you must begin with an accurate marketing strategy. If you outsource your marketing or ad work, make sure your ad writers are onboard with who you are. They should actually have experienced your services for themselves or at the very least they should have your company’s honest character pitched to them so that the picture of the image they create for you is accurate. Nothing assures customer experience failures like over-sensationalizing the experience. Learn what your strengths are and focus realistically on those. Then, either improve your shortcomings or come up with ways to compensate for them and you have a winner on your hands.

In conclusion, the basic idea behind creating a positive PEF is to create a BETTER experience for your customers than they had expected. To do that, you must understand what they expect. Whether because of your marketing media, word of mouth or simply based on an impromptu conversation with the reservations clerk over the phone, your client walks through your door with a certain level of expectation.

Exceed that expectation.

Once you have mastered your marketing and maximized your PEF, your company’s business will grow, not by percentages, but by multiples.