I’m going to say something now that you might be surprised to hear me or anyone say. I really like my car salesman. You know why? We talk every once in a while, and not every discussion involves him trying to sell me a new car. Nope, sometimes it’s just a small complaint I have or I ask him to circumvent the system just slightly to get my service need handled before I leave town. Sometimes it’s just him reaching to see if everything is going well. In all cases he goes the extra mile. I’ve now bought two or three cars from him and plan to keep doing so. Kudos to you Bill Cochran!
Here at ACUMEN Corporation we focus every day on serving our clients with distinction. We hold our associates to a very high standaed and try to give them the tools that will allow them to provide stellar service to each and every client all over North America.
That said, I have always believed that achieving the highest level of customer service and therefore customer satisfaction depends heavily on frequent two-way communication. We therefor encourage our employees to seek input from our clients on a routine basis. After all, in my book “Points of Productivity; Turning Corporate Pain to Gain” I coined the phrases “No news is Bad news” and “Silence is NOT Golden”. It’s similar to the old adage that “if your customer isn’t talking to you they are talking to someone else”. And you certainly know that means your competitor.
Now I know that email can be a handy tool and I use it routinely myself. In my mind, however, it is really just a tool to document certain discussions and transactions. Often people simply fail to read an email because the subject line just doesn’t indicate that the message is of much importance. That means using email as a primary form of communication with your clients depends heavily on one’s ability to “wordsmith”.
So I think email (nope not tweets….ugh!) has to fall to third choice in communicating with your customers. The formula is simple. Face to face discussions are clearly the most effective means of sharing information, concerns, even voicing “like to have” ideas. It also gives the service or product provider a forum to discuss new offerings as part of a routine briefing process. The second most effective means of keeping the discussion going is via phone call. If your client is generally happy with your product or service they should also be happy to take your call. If not, of course, well…back to “No news is Bad news”.
In this era of high-tech tools, human contact still beats all other forms of information sharing. People still like to think their service or product providers will go the extra mile that my friend Bill does to give them a real forum.
And hey ACUMEN clients, please always feel free to reach out to us. I believe you discover that any one of us would echo the wise words of Frasier Crane, “I’m listening”.
