The 10 Customer Service Trends for 2010

2010 Trends

December 15, 2009

By Barry Moltz

In 2010, customer service makes a big comeback. It becomes the new marketing. Forget about paying lip service to offering “great customer service”. Let go all of those “the customer is always right” myths. It’s time to offer outstanding customer service only because it makes economic sense for your small business. It is the only truly sustainable competitive advantage.

What to watch in 2010:

1. We Try Harder: With the economy still struggling to recover and unemployment at record highs, all “customer facing employees” actually will try harder this year to attract, satisfy and keep their customers. Job prospects remain slim in 2010 and every employee wants to keep any job they have. This year, effort from everyone will be in plain site.
2. It’s Not Your Product: Zappos’ tag line is “Powered by Customer Service”. With the company being sold to Amazon for almost a billion dollars, there is no denying that customer service can build companies. Zappos proved that it can make money selling shoes over the internet by offering free shipping both ways. Amazon and Zappos are companies that really just don’t sell products, but a customer service channel to sell any product. All things being equal, I buy from Zappos and Amazon because I know I can count on them. This is the year that all companies will see service as the only way to keep customers buying from them.
3. It’s All About You. Technology has allowed companies to personalize my visit when I go to buy from their web site. When I visit Amazon’s site, they welcome me back by name and suggest things I might want to buy based on what I bought in the past. This is the type of personalization I come to expect when I go to any face to face retail establishment. When I check into a hotel, I want them to greet me by name if I have been there before or I am a member of their frequent buyer program. This always happens when I visit the Portland Paramount but at The Nines hotel in the same city, they never remember who I am. With the immediacy and personalization of this fast paced internet world, great customer service is only what the customer says it is at a particular point in time. The difficulty is raised because this standard varies from person to person. This year, more companies will customize your shopping or service experience either online or in person because that is what you want.
4. Tell the World. Tools like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube allow me to tell not seven people but 10,000 my pleasure or dissatisfaction with a company immediately after I interact with them. No more secrets here! Every satisfied customer is now a booster for your company and every dissatisfied customer potentially can hurt your business. Now, there is more of an incentive for every company to get it right for their customer. This year, no bad deed will go unpublished by a dissatisfied customer.
5. The Brands are Listening. You as the customer are talking on Facebook and Twitter, but companies are also beginning to listen. Chances are that if you post a complaint using one of these tools, the company will respond directly to you. I have had this happen with Sears and Lands End. This year, all the major companies will not let any negative comment go by without responding to your concern.
6. Online Service Gets a Face Lift. Forget the lag time of email or waiting for a call back. This year, more and more web sites will allow you to chat directly to customer service people either through chat or video. Want to chat from your phone directly to the company? No problem. Skype them? No problem. Scott Jordan at Scottevest, allows the customer to watch what is going on in his company live on the web every day!
7. Insourcing is In. More and more American companies who outsourced their customer service will bring that function back home either by hiring a domestic company or bringing it in house. The “we can outsource this customer service thing” has hurt companies like Dell and Capital One. This year, look for more of the technology assisted customer service jobs to be transferred back to the US. Companies realize how important it is to their business. Just ask any car dealer the profitability of new car sales to their car maintenance business.
8. That’s Tight. Companies you do business with will want to know everything about you. Tighter relationship with customers will continue as economy remains poor. Companies can’t afford to lose profitable current customers. This goes way beyond frequent flyer programs. Accenture working with Proctor and Gamble has a new technology that tries to predict consumer preferences using optimization engines. This year, companies will continue to track everything about you to make that your relationship as personal as it gets.
9. Fire Them. In 2007, Sprint famously fired 1,000 customers that were clogging up their customer service lines and costing the company loads of money. Not every customer you have is profitable. Look for more companies this year to fire you if you cost them money and recommend you take your business elsewhere.
10. Get Small. All startups used to want to appear big. We bought typewriters and later computers and web sites to make ourselves look the part. Now, everyone company, as Chris Brogan says, wants to be human. I call it getting small. Every company wants to seem like the corner store, but have the global pricing power and distribution of Walmart. Furthermore, big business is now consistently targeting your small business since it is the a sector of the economy that is growing. President Obama will continue to emphasis that small business is the core of American business. You have arrived!

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10 Tips for Saving Your Life From Your Business

by Tim Berry on December 15, 2009

Your business or your life? The nagging question comes up a lot. Recently I saw this startling statement:

Maximizing your chance for success means sacrificing health and family.

That was in this post by Jason Cohen on VentureBeat. He’s serious. He quotes Mark Cuban and one other successful entrepreneur. He says you can’t get it all done otherwise. Build your business first, then build your life. Yeah, right. Like business gets easier at some point? When it grows? Good luck with that.

Logical flaw: for every successful entrepreneur who cites sacrificing health and family as the key to success, there are 10 others who say sacrificing health and family is a tragic mistake. Another logical flaw: millions of people sacrificed health and family and weren’t successful. All their sacrifice did was ruin their lives. Nobody quotes them. They call that survivor bias.

Personally, I don’t buy the passion, obsession, sacrifice all for your business philosophy. Success in life can be something different than purely sales, growth, profits, and celebrity as an entrepreneurial success. Not many of us end up as top-ten world-class entrepreneurs, and, for the rest of us, having a life can be way more important. The sacrifice doesn’t cause success. It’s a rationalization. So I’d like to suggest two sets of rules to help you save your life from your business. The first five are fundamental rules. The second set, five more, are suggestions more than rules; different ways to think about things; reminders.

First, the five fundamentals. I consider these practical, realistic, actionable rules that are good for everybody. For the record, four of the five are rules that I’ve lived with for a long time. Two of them thanks go to my wife and not me; and the fifth, the exercise one, I learned the hard way, by not doing it. I promise you that you can live by all five and not have to sacrifice business success for any of them. These will help you keep your balance:

1. Develop and honor meal times with people you love. For me and my wife, as we built our business, it was about family meals, dinner time, once a day. We made the family dinner a priority. During crunch times, we’d stop, have dinner with our kids, and then go on later (see point 3, below). And you don’t need a marriage and children to make this rule important. Do it your way, not mine. It applies just as well to any relationship that’s important to you.
2. Schedule vacations long in advance. If you like what you do in your business, you’re always going to have trouble getting away. There will always be a good business reason to not go on vacations. If you’re scheduled long in advance, then the vacation is on the calendar. As you talk to clients, schedule business events, and generally work on the business, your vacation shows up, and you naturally work around it.
3. Get used to working at home. So you have a lot of work but you tear yourself away, take your dinner time, spend some time in real life, and then later on, when everybody else is watching dumbing and numbing television, you can get back on the computer and catch up with your obsession. That requires good Internet connection and related tools, like online productivity tools, GoToMyPC, and the like.
4. Don’t obsess; plan. Don’t wander through the rest of life with business thoughts running through your head like a helicopter background noise in your dreams. Take a few deep breaths. To get the business-helicopter-mind out of your head keep the planning realistic. Planning gets a lot of things out of your head and into the plan. When you wake up at night obsessing, go to your planning. Write it down. Relax, and go back to sleep.
5. Get regular exercise. I’ve been there: It’s so easy to put off exercise because you’re worried about the business. “I have too much to do, I don’t have time for exercise,” you tell yourself, and it becomes a rationalization to dive back into that project or those emails. But there’s a trick to exercise: you get more time back, in productivity, than what you put into the exercise. Seriously: put in 45 minutes 3-4 days a week and you’ll get back an hour of productive time for every half hour you spend. It has to do with sleep, stress, and mental health.

And then, after the fundamentals, five fine touches, embellishments, not-so-universal, but maybe still useful:

1. Do something you can believe in. It’s not just finding the best business opportunity; it’s finding one you believe in. There’s quality of work as well as quantity, and high quality makes high quantity easier to live with. Make sure that when you take a step back from it, every so often, you can see how what you do made other lives better.
2. Acknowledge risk. Don’t bet what you can’t afford to lose. Understand the risk you take. Talk about it with the other people in your life, so you don’t feel all alone with the risk. Think about the worst case. Learn to live with it.
3. Don’t clam up. Share carefully. Be able to talk about business problems, safely, with at least one other person in your life. Get out of the let’s solve them mode, and into the let’s just talk about them so creative juices can percolate. People who care about you take silence as being something like walls and barriers. Secrets are stressful. Sharing relieves stress. But be careful, mind the framework and parameters of sharing, people have to know when you don’t want to be told the obvious feedback.
4. Understand that you make mistakes. Acknowledge your mistakes, analyze them, and them package them up in your mind and store them somewhere out of site, somewhere where you can access them occasionally to help avoid making the same mistakes again, but, on the other hand, where they won’t just drive you crazy.
5. Tell the truth. Then you don’t have to keep track of which lies you told to which people. It’s hard enough to manage stress without having to manage complex alternate realities.

None of the above guarantees business success, but none of it is really going to get in the way of your success either, and it may help you stay sane in the meantime. Think about this: my wife taught me, early in our 40-year-marriage, that time is the scarcest resource, way scarcer than money. And some day you’re going to turn 60. Unless you die first.

5 Vicious Lies about Being an Entrepreneur

I grew up working in my parents’ animal hospital. And I vividly remember the day my dad turned to me in frustration and said, “You know, they taught me how to be a terrific doctor in vet school, but didn’t teach me anything about running my own clinic!”

Let’s face it, most entrepreneurs—myself included—start out doing something we know or something we love. But that doesn’t mean we know a thing about running or growing a business.

Worse, much of what we hear about running a business before we start is just plain wrong. Below are five pieces of advice that took me 12 years and four businesses to recognize as the vicious lies they truly are…

Lie # 1 - If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself.

My mom was soooooo wrong about this! Sure, in the beginning you might have more time than money and need to do a lot yourself. But the way to be successful—and have a life—is to outsource strategically, ASAP.

My rule is to outsource:

• Anything important that sits on your to-do list for over three weeks.
• Anything you don’t do well or hate doing.
• Anything someone else can do cheaper.

You may think you can’t afford outsourcing. But if you outsource wisely, and spend your newfound time on tasks that grow your business, you’ll make more money AND work less (woohoo!).

Lie # 2 – You have to give up your life to grow a small business.

Many of us start our businesses with the dream of creating a better life…only to find ourselves chained to the business working 50-60-79 hours a week. If you start out with this mindset, you’ll end up creating a business that requires you to work all the time with no end in sight.

It’s true you may need to work long hours sometimes—especially in the beginning. But working yourself to the bone day in and day out is a recipe for burnout. Instead you need a plan for getting yourself out of that trap ASAP (See Lie # 1 for ideas).

Lie # 3 – Once you have a small business you can never take a vacation.

Again, my mom had this all wrong. Three years into my third business I took my first 10-day, totally unplugged vacation. And I was terrified my business would suffer. Instead I had more client work when I returned than when I’d left. Plus I was reenergized and bursting with new ideas.

Staying in “putting out fires mode” isn’t the way to grow your business. If you truly want to move your business forward you have to step away periodically to regroup and recharge. You NEED to take vacations, get away from it all, gain a fresh perspective and give yourself a chance to think.

Lie # 4 – Your business will always suffer like the cobbler’s shoeless children.

When I owned my copywriting/marketing firm, I almost never had time to do my own marketing. So while I was terrific at helping my clients grow their businesses, mine was stagnating.

Eventually I changed my business model and stopped writing copy for clients so I could focus on growing my business. What a difference that made! Soon I’d doubled my revenues and hired other writers to help me.

You need to treat your business like any other client, and schedule time to work on it each week, or you’ll end up always working in it.

Lie # 5 – Being self-employed is the same as owning a business.

Bull! Owning a business and being self-employed are two entirely different things. When you own a business, you make money even when you’re not working. And you can go on vacation or take sick days without everything grinding to a halt.

When you’re self-employed, if you aren’t working nothing happens and you don’t make a dime. Plus you typically end up trading one or two bosses for a bunch of bosses disguised as clients.

It’s more fun, and more secure, to own a business than it is to be self-employed—even if it does take more planning and effort to get there.

Written by Stacy Karacostas