Hi everyone, it's good to be back. After the family were struck down with swine flu I took on a Florence Nightingale role and nursed my heart out for 10 days.
Anyway, during my time of being housebound; well pretty much quarantined, I took the opportunity to catch up on all of those domestic jobs that just stay on the to do list for ever.
One of those long overdue nagging to do's was the repair of the Hoover.
We purchased said Hoover some years ago, and really, it's never worked very well. It tends to blow out clouds of dust, leaving the house smelling musty and really defeating the object of vacuuming in the first place.
So I called up the Hoover parts line, cringing as someone answered, I was already slightly embarrassed about calling having had this small waste of space for so long.
So I apologetically explained the problem, noting several times that I knew I really should have returned it when we first got it. However, I was stopped in my tracks when the helpful customer service woman replied politely and efficiently 'don't worry madam, let me take your address and we'll send you the replacement parts straight away'.
Are we so, so bad at customer service in this country that we just can't cope with a satisfactory reply? I didn't quite know what to do with myself. And, low and behold, the very next day a courier arrived with the parts, and our Hoover now works like a dream.
I have to apologise for the post about Hoovering, not the most sexy of topics, however it did make me think how important customer service is to our PR strategies.
If you look at your last three customer interactions, what went well? And what didn't go so swimmingly?
Note down a positive and a negative for each and use them in the following ways:
Positives
- Are these in your elevator pitch, USPs, mission statement, on your website?
- Are the positives things that really make your business stand out from the competition and make your business what it is?
- Can you use those qualities/people to improve other areas of your business?
Negatives
- What can you do to avoid this issues arising again?
- Can you compensate those customers for those issues?
- What can you learn from these mistakes and how can you improve your business from what you've learnt?
Customer service, good and bad, generates word of mouth. As a nation we love to moan about poor service, so unfortunately if you get it wrong, it's not just one customer's loyalty that you influence.
On the good side, it is rare to get service that goes above and beyond, so word will spread. And in the age of social media it doesn't just spread over coffee, check out Twitter for mentions of your business, Google your company name and see if anyone has blogged about you. I'll bet that if Hoover are up with their social media strategy they'll pick up on this.
For those that know me well you'll know that I am a complete and utter Waitrose addict; and that's purely down to their customer service. They consistently impress me; double your money back if you return an item you're not happy with or money off vouchers if you didn't get a chance to use yours before they expired and so on. And I regularly rave about them - on and off line.
So if you are making time for some PR or marketing for your business this week, make some time to review your customer service strategy and start thinking of it as part of your overall PR plan.
Posts
