You might have an amazing product or service. You might have done a great job promoting it, everybody knows it, they can see it everywhere and new customers are likely to recommend it. But if the customer service you offer is faulty, say goodbye to repeat customers and to long term deals. Because no matter how good, affordable, innovative, useful your product is, there always are problems! In a perfect world, there wouldn’t be, but in ours, there are. And what happens when your customer has a problem is what turns your relationship with them into a long term one. Yet here’s where most businesses fail!

Customers aren’t always looking for the perfect product or service. They’ve been around long enough to know that problems arising or not is a matter of luck. Smart customers will always prefer the company that makes them feel that if they ever have a problem, it will be solved fast and without them jumping through hoops for it.

Customer service means everything from technical support, to payment and invoicing support, to a good communication between the company and its customers.So don’t think that making sure your solution works is enough to keep customers happy. Cause if they can’t buy it in the first place, it won’t do much.

To make it all clearer, I’ll give you an example. There this bank that has amazing products. When it comes to SMBs, they simply rock; they have great consumer products as well. When you read about their products and services, you just want to sing that contract! And I for one did, on quite a few of their offerings.

But! They have email support that is useless. I’ve been in tech support, so when I have technical issues, I usually send out an email with screen shots, all the solutions I’ve tried, reference to their knowledge base articles I’ve tried, etc. I know lack of information delays the solution, so I’m willing to help get it over with. The lady I was talking to asked me to call their support, as she wasn’t able to help me. What happened to forwarding my email to someone who’s able to? I would have called if I wanted phone support.

They have misplaced a contract I’ve signed and I never got my copy! They promised to call when they found it, but never did. And I can tell you a lot about tired, annoyed and bored employees. Unfortunately, I’m not the only one, a lot of friends who work with this specific bank have had similar issues.

Right now, they handle my business account, I have a credit card from them and a savings account, plus a lot of associated services. Would I recommend them to anyone else? Sure! But I’m a special case: I work with 4 different banks on a monthly basis, I stay informed and I know that their competitors either don’t offer the services I need, or their support is just as bad. So I would recommend them, but I’d also warn everybody that customer service sucks. And that if they’re not willing to put up with it, they might as well go some place else. And trust me, the moment I find out some other bank offers better customer care for similar services, I’ll be running out the door!

The conclusion? If you want to outplay your competitors, make sure your customer service is top notch. It won’t compensate for a bad product or faulty service, nor will it help with the fact no one has ever heard of your product, but it will turn your customers into enthusiastic supporters, you’ll get plenty of word of mouth recommendation and you won’t worry about losing half of your business over simple issues that could have been solved, should you have taked the time to treat your customers as they deserve to be treated.

I know a lot about the pressure in a customer support department! I know about the large number of emails, chats and phones an engineer needs to handle! I know how vague customer requests can be. But under all that stress and all that pressure and in that awful race against time, one rule still needs to be complied with: before starting to write the reply to an email inquiry, stop and read the initial message and make sure you understand it.

If it’s vague, ask for details. If you don’t get it, ask a colleague for help (support teams are usually quite tight and help each other a lot). Whatever you do, do not reply to the email when you don’t fully understand it. Don’t rush into sending a reply, just to tick another email off the target when you think you know what the customer is asking.

This all becomes even more important when it takes 2 weeks to send that reply. After two weeks of waiting, your customer expects a decent answer to their question, if not a real solution. If your answer only shows them you’ve schemed through their 5 line email and picked up some keywords, like a robot, then wrote to them and asked them to call a number for more help, they’ll be pissed.

And remember, if you create a web customer care application encouraging them to send emails to your support team, make sure you:

• take way under 2 weeks to reply
• if your emails are sent to engineers based on the topic, make sure the person getting them is actually an expert
• again, say it with me: READ THE EMAIL and make sure you UNDERSTAND it
• direct them to an alternative means of communication only when you absolutely cannot help them, not to delegate responsibility to someone else.

Customer support is about more than response times, number of emails/phones/chats closed, and other such metrics. It’s about how many customers you’ve actually helped, how many of them feel they no longer have a problem with your product or service. If you don’t have that in mind as a business, no matter how big you are, you will lose them to the competition, as slightly better services and products is not enough to compensate poor customer service for too long.

And if you’re wondering what triggered this, it’s an email reply from one of the two major mobile phone operators in Romania, which came after two weeks and helped with nothing, as they didn’t get anything from what I was writing…Very dissapointing.

Are you wondering why I’ve kind of disappeared? Well, the reasons are two: my not feeling very well and Kayla chewing up my laptop charger. Does the last one sound a bit like the “Dog ate my homework” excuse? Well, at least it is funny! But being without my laptop really reduced my online time. Why? Because I have to get my boyfriend away from his computer and work without most of my tools. Then again I have no saved passwords and it gets into a big hassle very fast.

Bottom line, I want my computer running . At all times if possible. Now the big question comes: why didn’t I buy a new charger. Well, I couldn’t find one. In the big city, capital even, of Bucharest, with its 4 or 5 Sony Centers, there are little to no Sony Vaio chargers.

Why not use a universal charger, you may ask. Well, because Sony Vaios are so great and high-end and pretty, that the normal universal chargers don’t work on them… I’ve tried, about 4 different models! The guy from the place I tried to buy the charger from called a colleague, that’s how I found out they really don’t work on this series of laptops.

How will the problem be solved? Well, they placed an order, I’ll have my charger in two days. It sucks as this is my work computer, with all my files, billing software, etc. So what did Sony do wrong? They were nice enough to look for the charger in all their centers from Romania, found one, ordered it, I’ll go buy it in a few days. Problem solved!

Not exactly: if you provide a laptop that does not like universal chargers, you should make sure that in the largest city of Romania you have a few extras at all time. Otherwise, the next time I buy a new laptop, I might go with a different brand. Sony Vaio is not a cheap brand. It’s designed for business people. The kind that use their laptops intensively and are dead without them. Or they might be alive, but without purpose.

So what happens after your customer buys the product is very important if you want to make sure they buy from you again and again. We all agree that return customers are the greatest. But keeping them happy after the sale isn’t limited to providing amazing customer service. Availability of spare parts and making things move fast is as important. If you have this huge channel targeting new customers, old ones will end up feeling overlooked, unappreciated, upset. And if there’s anything they did not like about your product before, that will become a deal breaker all of the sudden.

Will I buy a Vaio next time? I honestly don’t know. I was pretty sure beofre all this hassle.

In most cases, before buying something, we stop and evaluate our existing offer. From a cart of milk to a computer, car or hosting service, we need to know we’ve made the right choice, that we’ve invested wisely, especially in a time where the economy is forcing us to act smarter. It sometimes happens that a certain buyers is extremely loyal to a brand, but that doesn’t mean he or she has never compared it against its competition. It only means they chose the brand they most like and trust every time they wanted to buy that same item.

When trying to decide what to choose, a potential customer might request offers from several companies. They might also tell you who you are up against and they might even ask for your opinion. And here’s where the tricky part begins!

What is the customer really after?

He/She definitely doesn’t care what you personally think of the competition. He’She might be looking for a better price, but he/she is not looking for getting his choices validated. What they’re really after is a somewhat objective comparison and something to make their choice easier.

How should you reply?

Unless you know one of the names poping our of your prospect’s list is a fraud and you have evidence of some sort to support you, don’t ever attack the competition. If you don’t know them well, it’s best not to start assuming they work out of some garage, aren’t reliable or other statements of sorts. You will hurt your customers feelings and make them feel you’re being condescending. No one wants to hear their choices are not good enough or that they are completely wrong, especially when it’s just someone else’s opinion.

When mentioning others, the potential customer is mainly interested in one thing: finding out what you do better than the others, what specific problems your product or service solves faster and better. Picking on the competition with no valid background will just make you look scared and threatened.

What you should do instead is focus on your solution’s benefits, on the problems it adresses, on its positive effects and on what other customers like most about it. If you have some valid comparatives, you can send them to your prospects, along with independent research and reviews.

Sure, you could just ignore all this, take an allknowing attitude but…

An example for the road

Someone I work with has just told me one of his customers also talked to a large competitor of his, mentioning he was testing the two solutions. The reply he got was quite arrogant, trying to diminish my friend’s service. Guess who the customer chose in the end? Hint: my friend was really excited about this!

The conclusion is, in such cases, you need to keep it sweet and to the point: what you have to do is convince all potential buyers your product is better. Not that you can act smart and joke about the competitors. You have to show them your services are the better choice, the one that works perfectly for them, the one they will feel comfortable enough with to recommend to others.