There is a short-sited view in business that over servicing customers is bad business. Service is a cost is often the cry from management. Some of the behaviours around optimising customer service even aimed at sending customers away to your competitors that fell below your cost of servicing hurdle. Other strategies included forcing people to self serve as much as possible to the point where humans only got involved if anger was imminent. Even the training of staff in customer service roles was about minimum necessary customer assistance in the hope that less customer service head count would be needed for businesses over all.

I have never believed in that philosophy. My late mother, Robyn Lehmann, taught me the lessons as a teenager about customer service. She ran a bakery/newsagency (interesting business model for another post) and I have a photo which I keep close to me of her in a business suit behind the counter serving customers. She raised the service bar beyond most people I have met in business and that bakery was a screaming success. She spent time with her customers and it was authentic time, not time to get sales. A genuine interest, the sales just followed accordingly. Her influence extends deep into the Saasu service ethic.

1. The net has had a huge leverage effect on the power of word of mouth

In the old world if you upset a customer they might tell a handful of people. This new world can result in them telling 100’s or 1000’s as they post their upset on a forum, blog or comment section of an online article. The reverse good word leverage also applies. Happy customers will tell the world through email, blogs, forums and the old fashioned way in person. In essence they have more leverage to spread the word than ever. Good and bad. They are your new age sales team.

2. Service is a Sales Channel

I have written about this before but in summary service allows you to have conversations. These conversations are an opportunity to learn about your customers experience in dealing with your business, it’s people and it’s products. Companies spend lots of money trying to find this information out through market research, surveys, focus groups and the like. You have the power to turn what is often thought of as a cost into a learning experience and a sales channel.

3. If business is about problem solving where do your find out what problems exist?

Customers will tell you their problems, they hold the keys to your business success. Just one little idea or problem can highlight a big business opportunity that can be used across your customer base. Your customers are smart and savvy. They operate under a commercial survival strategy. They see the world through a different set of glasses, from the other side of the counter. Their problems are often different to what you perceive them to be. Customer service is a channel into ideas and problems that you can solve for one customer which then could be leveraged and used for many.

4. Keeping it fresh

Continual contact keeps your business relationships alive. Much like calling a relative every now and then. People love to be loved. People are more likely to think of you and your products or services when you keep in contact at that next point of referral that comes along.

5. Just because you should

Life isn’t just about the money, it’s also about doing the right thing. Money is a bi-product of doing the right thing. Sometimes it isn’t, but mostly it is.

We reviewed our hosting provider again recently as part of a major upgrade in capacity to handle our growth.

Saasu client data (and our own) sits inside some pretty cool technology infrastructure in an extremely high grade location with world class qualifications including some from financial institutions and government security organisations.

Just some of our technology infrastructure features -

• Guards on the front door
• Hundreds of cameras
• Concrete all round - including the roof
• Biometric security
• Multiple levels of steel access doors and cages
• Multiple levels of redundant power, telecommunications and air conditioning
• Laser smoke particle detection; not to mention
• 24×7 monitoring plus
• Heavy duty protection from ram raids and even plane crashes

That helps us well sleep at night and we think it helps thousands of our users to sleep well at night too.

We also had yet another client with laptop problems recently. This follows a long line of similar client problems with their equipment being lost or stolen from client offices and cars not to mention dropped or broken laptops. All these events mean their business is impacted negatively because of lost data because many people still use software with local data copies on their PC/Mac.

But not if they use SaaS. In every case the saasu.com clients get up and running in minutes with much relief.

No loss of -

• Data (nor any data disclosure risk) - just find another computer with Internet access
• Time just when you need that time the most
• Revenue
• Client Satisfaction

It is unlikely any laptop with a local copy of your financial records will ever offer the same security and peace of mind as SaaS ‘big iron’ technology infrastructure.

Yet another reason why SaaS (Software as a Service) will prevail over Software for most businesses in the long run and why more and more are realising this benefit every single day.

I witnessed a customer service experience that was dear to Saasu’s philosophy. We are very strong on customer service. Even great companies occasionally drop a ball, all great teams do, but the true test is recovery. We keep training, practising and perfecting our customer service game. See our Saasu Satisfaction Guarantee page for the detailed promises. (more…)

Joel on Software: Seven steps to remarkable customer service. The “Fix everything two ways” is something we definitely do.

We keep reminding ourselves that customer service is our best marketing channel we have. Saasu acquires a lot of new business via word of mouth. We make every effort to ensure we don’t get caught in the enterpise level traps of customer service. We attempt to generate a customer service ‘automaton’ approach where we map how the customer wants to interact with us (user story) then we set an automated process in place for dealing with answering questions, logging feedback or bugs and providing the medium of communication they want without forcing them in a direction they don’t like.

Service is a sales channel

A key failure point of many enterprises is to put a price on customer service as an “expense”. This is denying its ability to be one of your best sales channels. It amazes me that companies spend millions of dollars on sales teams while they let the side down on the service side. We know that if you look after the customer they simply tells lots of people about the amazing experience.

Service is a chance for humans to help other humans

Denying your staff the opportunity to really help people because it costs money to do so is a real crime. I mean this in a emotional way. Humans like to help other humans. If you don’t build that within the service culture of your organisation you aren’t creating a giving, compassionate attitude toward customer needs. These values shouldn’t just reside in the realm of relationships at personal, family and community level, they should pervade the business community also.

Service must be Authentic

Much anger and frustration towards larger telco’s and banks exists in the community because of this issue. A lot of banks produce nice looking adds to try and make you like them but fail at customer service. There is no authenticity present around the relationship.

Service needs to be a human approach supported by technology

We have resisted moving to having a computer answering the phone. We expect some day we will split our phone numbers into support, accounts and sales to help manage the incoming calls which are building daily, however we will always strive to have Human involvement in communication. Our view is that if you want to force people to talk to a machine then they would probably be happy to use the net instead. They use the phone because they want human help, the customisation it offers and the speed of interaction. Wasting 5 minutes surfing a phone menu system only to be put on hold really kills your customers perception of your organisation.

Service includes managing customer requests for features and product

We always document customer requests for features and notify them when they have been built. Why? Many enterprises pay huge money so survey customer needs and experience. Customers, even prospective ones will give you this information for free if you simply help them to give it to you via different channels to supply the information. Talking to a human on the phone, a feedback form, a new feature/product email all acquire voluntary feedback.

Good service is often as simple as answering the question asked

We answer the vast majority of email support questions within a couple of hours but we don’t always answer support questions the same day. We tend to open the email or answer the call by following a simple approach of logging what questions were asked and simply working through each with either (a) answers or (b) an action we plan to take to get an answer. I get frustrated a little when we can’t answer the question but sometimes we don’t have the information to answer them or the legal authority to do so (tax questions). Access to the right person who knows the answer isn’t always possible. That said, we are about to implement a new process involving 3rd parties to allow users to treat us as a one stop shop which should improve this.