When Customers Call You
After Chris Finken’s post last week about call tracking, I wanted to follow up with a post by Seth Godin about not only tracking but call quality. Godin is one of my favorite marketers - entertaining as well as enlightening. He just posted on how important a phone call is to your business.
More than a call, it’s a chance to build your brand, and learn from a customer. “The most valuable marketing event is almost always an inbound phone call…The customer or prospect is taking the time to call you. She’s focused, interested, paying attention and willing to trust you.”
Normally a phone call and especially an email takes low priority, but as Godin points out, it’s an opportunity. He asks:
- Shouldn’t every single inbound call be answered in one ring?
- Shouldn’t there be as much spent on self-service customer support as is spent on the design of the selling part of your website?
- Shouldn’t you be tracking in the finest detail what people have to say when they call in?
- Shouldn’t you be rewarding call center operators by how long they keep people on the phone, not how many calls they can handle a minute?
- Shouldn’t there be an easy, fast and happy way for an operator to instantly upgrade a call to management (not a supervisor, I hate supervisors) who can actually learn something from the caller, not just make them go away?”
He concludes: the goal of every single interaction should be to upgrade the brand’s value in the eye of the caller and to learn something about how to do better, not to get the caller to just go away.
2 Comments, Comment or Ping
Zach Katkin
I just got done reading Seth’s post! Every contact is an opportunity. We recently “down-graded” from an automated call system to physical operators and the response has been overwhelmingly positive.
Apr 9th, 2008
Roland Smith
That typical call center behavior also allows me (the unhappy customer) a unique opportunity … refuse to get off the phone, keep pushing to be sent up the chain, and eventually they’ll give me more than I would have asked for if treated decently from the start (they’re usually prohibited from hanging up on a customer unless foul or abusive language is used). I once patiently spent almost an hour on the phone with a Sony service center that had refused, on a technicality, to do a warranty repair. In the end, rather than repair, they sent me as a replacement a brand new, newer model of the camera to get me off the phone.
Thanks for the opportunity to comment on your new blog and new venture in life!
Thanks!
Roland
http://techmatters.rnsmith.com/
Apr 9th, 2008
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