How to Alienate and Please Your Customers

Everyone knows these, has experienced them as customers, yet few organizations are able or willing to change the workplace culture that engenders such issues:


Customer Gripe #1: 
Raising the cost of doing the same business with you. If you're going to raise the cost, I need to see more benefits as a result.


Customer Gripe #2: 
Making me deal with "automated" conveniences that serve your convenience, not mine. (How much do you like repeating the same accountholder info over and over again to a pageantry of employees?)


Customer Gripe #3: 
Having to deal — on an ongoing basis — with your surly, defensive, ill-informed, lackluster employees.


Customer Gripe #4: 
Blaming or arguing with the customer when any customer complains.


Customer Gripe #5: 
Don't insult my intelligence by claiming something's done for my good when clearly it's not. Most of all, don't lie to me (because if it's discovered to be a deliberate lie, I'll walk away and never return).


What gives a customer joy and delight in doing business with you? What engenders loyalty?


Customer Joy #1: 
You resolve my needs, questions, and complaints with courtesy and understanding.


Customer Joy #2: 
You acknowledge my loyalty to you. If I question or complain about a product or service, you see the complaint as an act of loyalty.


Customer Joy #3: 
Your employees are informed, enthusiastic, courteous, and professional. They are well-trained in handling complaints, empowered to provide meaningful service recovery, and they're good listeners (which means they take time to fully understand the problem before attempting to resolve it).


Customer Joy #4: 
If I have complained or raised questions, you follow up to make sure the problem stays resolved, and reiterate you appreciate my business.


Customer Joy #5: 
You give me the choice of dealing with a human being or an automated resource.

Rules, Policies, & Disruption

Every industry needs rules for the greater good. Fond as I am of regulations prohibiting pilots and brain surgeons from drinking on the job, I often ask clients of other service industries:

“Are your policies in place to make life easier for you or your customers?”

Netflix customers may never speak to a service rep, but given Netflix’s customer-centric protocols, it’s easier to get a movie from them than dealing with a clerk at one of their competitors’ outlets, especially if you get one who relishes reciting homegrown policies about late returns or, as in the 1990s, rewind fees.

“When a customer makes an honest mistake and breaks one of your rules, do your employees know how to come up with solutions that will delight rather than punish the customer?”

I have an affection for market innovators, ones who shun the rules put forth as “conventional wisdom,” instead creating protocols that actually make life easier for their customers. Why?

Media futurist Gerd Leonhard advises against “meaningless disruptions” such as advertising a product/service simply to put out the hype but then see it fail to make life easier for consumers. It’s not that “consumers are getting smarter” but that they always were smart—and smart people know how to find alternatives.

Advertising must contain meaningful content. Disrupting consumers’ lives with multi-channel ads and promo offers must result in lasting customer engagement because, more and more, consumers are saying, “I can decide for myself, thank you!”