Focus on the wowfactor and the rest will follow
commercials featuring nothing but seasonal weather on a landscape and Al Hunter vocals.
He was also a passionate customersupport advocate, requiring all senior managers to spend their first two weeks staffing a phone in the call centre.
One of his mantras was ‘‘great brands wins customers slowly, bad customer service loses them fast’’. And he challenged every customer support person to give the customer at least three ‘‘wows’’ in each contact. Things that make a person lean back and say ‘‘wow – that was pretty cool’’.
These words came back to me this week as I had an interesting customer support experience.
Wearing my professional director hat, I ama client of Diligent Boardbooks. they tend just to blame everything on Chorus.
However Paul, the bloke who answered the phone, was based in Christchurch. He answered on the second ring and he wasn’t a VOIP telematic machine. That’s the first wow.
Paul was casual but professional, funny but not a ham, and calm as a pool of clear water. I had no account number or code to give; but through a series of four challenge questions he worked out that I was who I said I was. Better yet, he reckoned he could get me live in their web app in two minutes. Second wow.
Being a bit of a geek, my laptop, browser and operating system are all a bit left of field. But Paul walked me through download, setup and navigation in three shakes of a lamb’s back end. Better than all of that, he left me feeling that I was not a complete putz. Third wow.
Then about two hours later I got a net promoter score email from them. Not a particular wow for me, but great for them to be able to track customer engagement.
The ‘‘wow’’ school of thought isn’t restricted to customer service. It’s also a pretty handy rule of thumb for people selling experiences. I recently spent a couple of days with a former chief executive of AJ Hacket Bungie.
She told me they valued every ‘‘wow’’ at $10 so that if a person paid $150 for a jump, they would have had 15 different ‘‘wow’’ experiences, from the first person that greeted them to the great photograph at the end.
That created an end result of walking away feeling they had had full value.
It’s an interesting metric to apply more broadly, be it telco, power company or bank.
How many wows have you had today?
Mike ‘‘MOD’’ O’Donnell is an e-commerce manager and professional director. His Twitter handle is @modsta and he’s now got his iPad back.