Chapter 3 - Beware of Unhappy Customers and The Internet

The internet has changed everything. There is nowhere to hide now for companies who provide a poor service or poor products.

The level of service, attention and care which is delivered by your workforce is now exposed bare, more so than any other time in history. The internet has raised the bar on service and excellence that you must offer.

Why do I say that?

Simply because customers are now able to share their own experiences about your products and services with the world in a way that you have no control over.

Think about all the customer review sites, ratings, blogs, network forums, product review sites, newsletters, websites and podcasts, not forgetting sites like Youtube. It is now more important than ever to provide customer excellence at all times, by all members of your staff (not just your salespeople), so that your customers only have positive things to say about you.

What if your company was reviewed in the same way as books are reviewed on Amazon.com?

If like me, you buy most of your books from Amazon, you cannot help but be influenced by the customer-review star rating on there.

If other customers have consistently rated a book with just one star, then there is usually a good reason for that. If the reviews are mixed, with most giving five stars, and one or two giving one star, then chances are it is still a good book, but doesn’t quite meet the tastes or needs of every reader.

If the book has been given five stars, then I certainly have much more confidence in buying it, and almost don’t want to miss out!

You can rest assured that sooner or later, with the rapid development of Web 2.0 and the plethora of customer review sites, your own customers will start reviewing your company in the same way as readers do on Amazon.

It has already happened in the hotel business, an area I know relatively well.

If you spend five minutes on the web looking for reviews of a hotel you plan to visit, you will very quickly come to a website called Tripadvisor.com where previous guests rate their stay at a hotel, share their candid photos of their rooms and post comments about their experiences, good or bad.

Over the past few years I have stayed at numerous hotels on various writing trips and always make a point of checking Tripadvisor.com beforehand, being careful to stay away from hotels where customers write that the service is poor, or the rooms are below standard.

The power of customer blogs

If as a company, you are either lucky or unlucky enough to have customers creating their own blog or website about you, the opinion of a single customer can make a dramatic difference to the financial performance of your company.

If a customer takes exception to your poor service, lack of customer care, or your employees’ indifference, it is all too easy for them to create a blog for the world to see. In fact, not long ago a building constructor was building several new luxury houses around the corner from where I live, and dumper trucks passed down the street each day, spewing dust, sand and silt onto our houses and cars.

I rang the company several times asking them to contact me as I had a complaint about them, and wanted to speak to the managing director whose name forms part of the company name.

I never heard back from them.

On about the fifth day when every car on our street was literally covered in a layer of thick, brown, dirty silt, I etched into the baked on dirt of the windscreen of two cars (so it stood out clearly for all to see) the name of the construction company on one car, and the name of the managing director on another car. I took a photograph of these two cars, together with a photograph of the construction company’s van which clearly displayed the company name and phone number. Finally, I took a wider photo of the carnage that was on our road. It literally looked like Armageddon after days of dumper trucks fouling our cars and houses.

I put those four photographs on a blog, which cost me nothing from blogspot.com, and labelled the blog ‘XYZ company doesn’t care for local residents’.

In just five minutes, I had made available to the world a website which showed that this particular construction company does not care for the community it is building in.

I then emailed the link of the blog to the managing director, and within just two hours, I had a call back from him apologising for the inconvenience his company had caused, and an offer to pay to wash my car and house.

As it happens, the company has not been in touch again, and his offer of sending round a window cleaner and paying for our cars to be washed during the period of the construction has never happened.

The blog still remains online for anybody who does a web search on this particular company.

Currently the blog is on page 2 of Google, but simply by adding a little more text about this construction company, or paying a search engine optimiser in India just $50, I’m confident it could easily become a top three Google entry. Such is the power of the web, and such is the power of customers who want to tell the world about your company, good or bad.

This construction company could have the best salespeople in the world, but if its employees are not thinking about their customers, and about the effect of their actions on customers (and in this case, about the effect of their actions on the wider community), then clearly it is quite possible that negative marketing will spread out in the marketplace; negative marketing which is expensive to overturn.

This however, would never have happened if every employee in the construction company thought like a customer-focused business owner (but not like the business owner in this construction business!). If they had thought about the wider implications of their actions, I would never have been put in a position to create an ‘unhappy customer’ blog in the first place.

If disgruntled customers start to channel their views through a well publicised website, then the momentum which is created, and the message which gets out in the marketplace gets stronger and louder, and all the slick salesmanship in the world will never outsell the true opinions on an independent customer review website.

Dell Hell – the infamous story of Jeff Jarvis’s ‘lemon’

I recently heard the story of Jeff Jarvis, a disgruntled customer of Dell, the computer manufacturer. Jeff, a journalist, had a bad experience with a faulty $1,600 computer from Dell which he famously called a ‘lemon’. Jeff had endless phone calls and emails with Dell customer support, some of which went unanswered. He simply wasn’t getting anywhere and the company turned their back on him, just like the Barman did to me when I asked for a few more potatoes.

However Jeff decided to do something more about it and created a blog to write about his experiences with Dell. Over time momentum gathered and he attracted thousands of readers and fellow bloggers to his site.

The net result of Jeff’s blog, and the power of his fellow disgruntled and frustrated customers, led to Dell spending $100m in improving its staff training and customer relationships, and getting its staff to do the right thing — namely keeping customers happy, just as Paolo the Barber does.

Thanks to technology, customers now have the power to share their experiences (good or bad) with the whole world. If as an organisation you constantly over-deliver for customers, give them only a positive, excellent experience, and if every member of your team thinks, acts and makes decisions like a business owner, then customers will say good things about you, and will also write good things about you. This leaves a permanent trail in the internet of positivity which gives future customers confidence, and faith to buy from you too.

The power of customer feedback at Charles Tyrwhitt

A perfect example of this is Charles Tyrwhitt, the shirt maker. This company was founded, and is still run by Nick Wheeler. He is an entrepreneur I met and interviewed some years ago as part of my research into business owners.

I recently visited Nick again to introduce him to the Enterprise Leader Development Programme. This is a new training course I have created to enable staff to think more like business owners. Before our meeting, I spent time reacquainting myself with his company and clicking through the pages on his website.

On his site he has a section for customer feedback (good and bad), which his company actively gathers from its customers. Charles Tyrwhitt does this by employing a third party company which follows-up with customers and then captures their written comments on the website.

At the time of writing this book, Nick had over 30,000 customers who had responded, with 99% of those happy with the service his company provides, and just 1% dissatisfied.

Each customer had written a web entry anywhere between 10 words and a page of text, mostly praising their products and customer service.

It is these 30,000 happy customers, (plus hordes of other happy customers who have not yet written a web entry) who are the strongest salespeople for Charles Tyrwhitt.

These 30,000 happy customers would certainly help sway your decision if you wanted to buy yourself a new shirt!

Although Nick has 99% happy customers, there are still 1% of customers who are unhappy. But looking at their comments as I did prior to meeting Nick again, it was clear that most of the time it wasn’t the products which the customers were disappointed with, but the customer service.

Those 1% of customers had the same service as everybody else, yet it was their ‘out of the ordinary circumstances’ which failed to make them happy customers.

This is the pivotal ‘moment of truth’ when difficult circumstances arise, just as I had experienced in the pub. It’s these sort of situations which leave an impression in the mind of the customer, and it ultimately comes down to the people on the front-line who are dealing with customers. Whether they are packing and delivering parcels, or taking telephone orders, everyone in the business is responsible for shaping a customer’s experience.

The lasting impression for a customer of Charles Tyrwhitt comes from the delivery of the service and the quality of the product. This is what they will tell their friends about. Seldom will they recommend something to their friends and family if the product and service is not excellent, even if the salesman (or saleswomen) has been ultra persuasive.

In your company you need to be aware of how easy it is for your customers to talk about you and leave lasting reference (either positive or negative) about your products and services, and customer service.

The only way you can protect yourself from negative comments, negative word-of-mouth, and permanent web entries (either videos, audio or text) is for every member of your team to strive for the highest level of excellence and customer delight at all times.

You must constantly strive to thrill, wow, and dazzle your customers. There is only one standard to aim for in business and that is excellence.

If that ambition is not a desire which is felt, lived and breathed by every member of your staff, you will forever struggle and your workforce will simply remain your workforce, and not your salesforce.