Your customers perception is reality

Posted February 1st, 2009 by Dr James Pratt

I'm going to pick up with the topic of Customer Service Diplomacy that we began a few days ago in your Success Marketing Strategies blog. In fact, let's get right to the third fact uncovered by all our research. This begins to reveal the truth about how to deliver customer satisfaction and how challenging it is.

Here's the big fact ...98% of all dissatisfied customers were not dissatisfied because of a quality problem with the product or service purchased. In 98% of the cases their dissatisfaction was related to their perception of how they were treated by the people they dealt with.

One more time... note that I said their perception of how they were treated not how they were treated. This is very significant. It means that in some, maybe many of those cases, the employees involved actually treated the customers fairly, courteously and tried to do the best they could.

However, what they did is not the issue. It's how the customer perceived what they did that counts.

Customer service diplomacy has to do with controlling the customer's perception. In other words, being right is not as important as winning in the relationship with the customer. This tells us that the #1 reason why businesses lose customers is their perception that they were treated discourteously or unfairly by the company's people with whom they interacted.

This means clearly that if you chose to concentrate on it you can make a big difference in your company's win loss record of keeping customers. Maybe it's not even reasonable but to the customer you are your company.

Let's take the airline industry as an example. The industry's complaints from passengers have skyrocketed. Everyone traveling is experiencing problems with cancelled or delayed flights, lost luggage and an apparently declining quality of service.

One airline gate commenetd, "Imagine how difficult it is coming to work every morning knowing in advance that you are going to have to deal with a lot of people who are angry and frustrated with you." And she went on to say, "Even though it's not our fault to these people... we're the airline."

She's right of course. She, her counterparts and the flight attendants are the airline to the passenger. The executives are so out of reach that they are not real to the customer. Many of these airline employees have become tremendous customer service diplomats. They are saving the airline they work for buying it time to straighten out its problems without losing its customers in the process. It doesn't matter whether we're looking at the airlines or a retail store or a restaurant or even an online business.

The people who answer the phones, respond to emails and deal with the customers person-to-person they actually control the company's destiny. I use the word destiny deliberately.
You see repeat business is absolutely critical to most companies.

There is a substantial cost attached to acquiring each new customer. All of the dollars spent on advertising promotion, publicity, signage and so on to bring the new customer in the door or cause the new customer to call the first time. In many, many businesses companies really lose money on the first sale to a new customer.

The profit that insures the company staying in business and growing its business is in the second, third and fourth sales to that same customer. Without this repeat business most businesses fail and this repeat business has more to do with Customer Service Diplomacy than with anything else even including the goods or services themselves.

This is an important subject for you to grasp and in the next Success Marketing Strategy blog I want to give you an excellent example of an organisation that understands the stresses and upside of Customer Service Diplomacy.


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