Honey or Vinegar?

The old adage is that “you’ll catch more flies with honey than vinegar!”. In my business, great customer service starts by being a great customer. As you can see from my past blogs, good customer service doesn’t always happen initially. How the customer reacts can make a huge difference on how smoothly the service recovery happens.

Did I yell and scream at the Jet Blue counter agent because the bad weather forced a full flight and delays getting back to Florida? No! These things were out of his control. Yes, I did acknowledge them and the hardship it would cause my family to have four separate seats on the 3-hour flight back but I did so respectively, taking the approach that this was an inconvenience brought about on me by Mother Nature, not him. And I’d like to think that as a result of me being a great customer, I was rewarded with 4 seats all together in the first row!

People often ask me what the secret to our success is in delivering world-class service to our customers. A lot goes into it with making sure we hire the right people, train them well, treat them like adults, set expectations for the job, and reward them handsomely for doing the job well. But there is one other secret to our success.

We’ve got the greatest base of customers!

Our market is the 25M small business owners around the country, living the American dream and helping pull our economy out of the tank. They are deeply passionate about seeing their dream come to fruition and are eager to find ways to stay ahead of the competition. We provide them with a great set of online tools to help them connect, inform, and grow their customer base through email marketing, online survey, and event marketing solutions.

That passion translates into an honest thirst for knowledge on how to best use our products and as such, they regularly tap into our Direct Sales and Support staff to help them uncover new ways to use the tools we provide. That passion makes it easy for our associates to engage with these customers and help them understand how our technology can support their goals. Thousands of times each day we get to experience that “aha” moment when the customer realizes the potential of our product!

Don’t get me wrong, a lot of hard work by a lot of people goes into delivering a highly trained, professional, and empathetic associate to the phone. But talking with customers who love us and love our product sure makes it easier!

I’m mean really, when was the last time you called your cable company when you were happy?