Empowering frontline employees is absolutely vital to providing exceptional customer service and memorable customer experiences, according to Rachel Honig – a principal in Shankman|Honig, a customer service consultancy company.
“At the end of the day service is human,” Honig told Loyalty 360. “Brands are really excelling. The big thing is how a brand empowers its frontline service employees on the phone or in person to solve problems. We can identify hundreds of companies doing it right and hundreds of companies doing it wrong.”
Honig said one of her greatest frustrations is having a weekly call with a client, inquiring about how that company is serving its customers better, and then not receiving any insight regarding that crucial brand component.
“Now with social media, every customer complaint is aired publically,” Honig said. “We realized that customer service is a marketing problem and also an opportunity, now more than it’s ever been. For many companies the past 10 years have been about identifying a social media platform. The next 20 years will be about finding out what’s behind the curtain together and solving problems before they happen.”
Honig offered an example of an exceptional and memorable customer experience.
“At Morton’s, when you call there to make a reservation, they ask if you’re celebrating anything,” Honig said. “If you’re celebrating your wife’s birthday, they ask what her name is. Then when you arrive, at the top of the menu it says, ‘Happy Birthday Carol!’ The power of this is exponential if that person takes a picture of the menu and sends it to their friends. She’ll be talking about it for weeks and months.’’’
Honig emphasized that exceptional customer service has to begin internally.
“It’s really about creating a culture and empowering employees to surprise and delight customers,” she said. “We look at personality types in a sales force that will best appreciate your culture, exude it, spread your culture, and drive the results you want. As more businesses are technologically-focused, many have technology or engineering folks as their customer service people. These might not always be the best people to be on the frontline to serve customers. From a customer service standpoint, with your unique customer base, do they want technology answers first and fast? Or do they need more hand-holding and more relationship management?”
Understanding personality types is critical to creating an attractive company culture, Honig said.
“Organizations measure customer service on efficiency,” Honig said. “When is your customer service person able to shred the script and act on their own to help solve a problem?”
Regarding social media, Honig believes it should not be used as a customer service strategy.
“Too often we’re seeing social media as a vent for or plea or cry to resolve something that wasn’t resolved satisfactorily on the frontline,” she said. “Social media has the propensity to excel and expand a positive customer service culture."
Having someone monitor social media all day is fine, Honig said, but too many brands are adopting that as their strategy.
“Social media is a great place for customers to tell good stories about brands, and it’s a great way for brands to listen to their customers and employees,” she said. “But just watching social media for a brand is not a strategy.”
Tracking customer sentiment on social media can be incredibly helpful to a brand, Honig said, and it’s also a way to “track your competitors.”
Honig said her company audits customers and employees before it makes any recommendations regarding customer service and creating a cohesive, across-the-board culture.
“For every brand it will be different,” she said. “Different brands need different things. But universally, it will not work if there is not empowerment to allow employees to do what they need to do to solve problems. People are inherently good and they want to solve your problem. If brands aren’t empowering their employees to be inherently good and are standing in their way, it’s never going to work. There’s money in being nice.
Honig also weighed in on retaining your best and most loyal customers versus acquiring new customers. For brands, it shouldn’t always be based on which customers spend the most on a yearly basis.
“Your best customers aren’t always the ones out there evangelizing your brand,” she said. “If you’re ignoring the guys in the middle, who are out there evangelizing on behalf of your brand, then you’re not recognizing this whole segment that has the propensity to grab you that much more.”