One of many extra pleasing actions in my life is taking part in hockey. After I’m on the town – not out talking at conferences – I lace up the skates a number of instances every week to play in a pleasant hockey sport. In shut video games, when my staff is up by one or two targets, I keep in mind my faculty days when our coaches inspired us to proceed taking part in to attain, even after we have been profitable, versus switching to extra defensive play to stop the opposite staff from scoring.
So, what does this need to do with enterprise, particularly customer support and CX? Lots!
In any staff sport, the purpose is to win. Within the customer support world, we must always create a “sport plan” to ship an expertise that’s good, by no means requiring a buyer to achieve out to us due to issues. Take into account what Jeff Bezos of Amazon mentioned a few years in the past: One of the best customer support is that if the shopper doesn’t must name you, doesn’t want to speak to you. It simply works.
That’s an ideal instance of taking part in to win.
However that doesn’t all the time work. Bezos rapidly found that as good as Amazon is likely to be, as soon as the package deal left the warehouse, management was within the palms of supply corporations such because the USPS, FedEx, or UPS. If there was a supply downside, even when it wasn’t Amazon’s fault, the shopper nonetheless known as Amazon.
That’s the place Amazon realized to play nice protection, sometimes managing complaints or points so nicely that the corporate has earned a status for superb customer support. They usually nonetheless play to win. They proceed to open extra distribution websites and develop their fleet of airplanes and automobiles to handle the whole expertise, in order that they don’t need to depend on outdoors distributors as a lot. And as good as they attempt to be, there’ll nonetheless be issues, so a great protection, as in a great customer support expertise, helps the hassle to win.
Whereas we will’t all be Amazon, we will play an identical sport. We’d like protection, which is the flexibility to answer our prospects’ questions, issues, wants, and complaints in a method that renews confidence for them to proceed doing enterprise with us. Nevertheless, we should additionally play to win, which suggests constantly bettering the shopper expertise, together with eliminating or mitigating any of these buyer points.
Within the customer support world, taking part in to win in customer support means eliminating the explanations prospects name us for issues and complaints. Taking part in protection is specializing in being good at dealing with our prospects’ issues or complaints. We must be good at each.
Shep Hyken is a customer support/CX professional, award-winning keynote speaker, and New York Instances bestselling writer. Study extra about Shep’s customer support and buyer expertise keynote speeches and his customer support coaching workshops at www.Hyken.com. Join with Shep on LinkedIn.
