Customer Service Is an Opportunity to Turn Your Customers Into Brand Ambassadors!

The easiest way by which you can turn your customers into your ambassadors is by delivering what you promise to provide them and offering proactive customer service.

Proactive customer service is a catch, as most organizations don’t even think about communicating proactively.

Let me give you an example.

I worked for an IT services company, handling their marketing function. Typically, they keep marketing out of existing customer conversations, as they are managed by account management and delivery.

As a marketing function, we also did not send out regular communication like newsletters to our existing customers. Whatever we create – we send them to the account managers, and they choose to send them out to the existing customers.

This is the context.

During this time, I was pulled into one of the customer meetings at the insistence of the regional sales head when they were visiting India. We have had a long-term relationship with this customer for more than ten years, and the engagement has been growing.

Everything went well, and they had lunch with us. Their flight was only late in the evening, and we were thinking multiple ways to engage them till they had to board the flight.

That’s when they mentioned they had another meeting with a company near our office. I asked them what that meeting was all about, and they said that they work with a company that does all their development while we do their testing.

I persisted and asked them when they started working with this vendor for their development. They mentioned, “about three years ago.”

The most natural reaction from me was, “Why did you choose not to work with us for development and go with another company?”

The customer said that they were not aware that we did development as well. They considered us as a testing company.

No one ever told them about our other capabilities.

That’s the level of account management we were doing, and marketing wasn’t allowed to send out any information to existing customers without the go-ahead from account management.

That meeting changed the organization’s mindset, and since then, all existing customers have been receiving constant updates about our capabilities, offerings, and case studies from marketing.

This was all about proactive customer communication – even that was missing. You can imagine the state of proactive customer service.

Let me give you an example of proactive customer service.

I consulted an organization that was a pioneer in implementing ERP solutions in the manufacturing domain. They worked with a flour mill to implement their ERP system.

They understood all their challenges and stuck to the implementation plan. Everything was delivered on time, and they got paid for the implementation.

Happy ending, right?

But this is where it all began.

By virtue of having implemented multiple ERP solutions for customers in the manufacturing domain, they understood that the biggest impediment to ERP success is the adoption level.

The customer’s biggest challenges were in their inventory management and pilferages.

So, after about six weeks of implementation, this vendor went to the client’s office to check how well they were using the implemented system.

It was an on-premise installation, and when the vendor went through the logs, they understood that people were not even logging into the system, let alone using them effectively.

So, the challenges of inventory management and pilferages remained as they were. The only difference is that the organization invested a hefty sum in the ERP license and implementation, besides the time their SMEs spent with us.

So, the vendor spoke to the management team and decided to run workshops with their users.

Through this workshop, we demonstrated the value of using the system and how it can help them do their job better and faster.

The vendor handheld the customer through a series of workshops till the usage of ERP became second nature to them.

In eight weeks, the organization started seeing the benefits of implementing the ERP and the potential ROI it could deliver.

[Both these examples are anecdotes I have heard from my professional network, and I have written them in first person to make them easier to read]

What About Reactive Customer Service?

Reactive customer service is bread and butter. It involves a bunch of transactional queries, complaints, additional feature requests, and the like.

Most often, organizations make customer service very complex and make it a difficult experience for their customers.

However, there are a few cases where they turn you into their ambassadors.

Let me give you an example of exceptional customer service.

The son of a friend of mine was traveling from Delhi to Chennai. He is studying in Delhi, and his flight was at 8.40 pm. Though he started from his place well in advance, he got caught in a huge traffic jam, and he found it difficult to reach the airport on time.

With Google Maps, they understood that he would reach the airport only by 8 pm, which would make it difficult for him to check in and board the flight.

So, this friend checked if there were any other flights available right after that. There was one at 10.20 pm, and the ticket price was thrice as much as the flight he was taking, as it was a last-minute purchase.

So, he called the airline’s customer care department and explained the situation to see if something could be done. They connected him to the people at the airport, and they said that as long as his son reached the airport by 8.15, they would ensure that he boarded the plane.

His son reached the airport at 8.05 and went to the check-in counter. They checked him in, and someone escorted him through the security clearance, and he was in front of the boarding gate by 8.12 pm.

Everything went so smoothly, and this friend of mine shared this experience with so many people. Since then, he has been booking only on this airline for any of his travels.

In essence, customer service, whether proactive or reactive, is very significant for organizations as it gives them an opportunity to converse and engage with the customers.

Proactive customer service is very important as it allows you to engage your customers, gives you an opportunity to delight them, and also positions your other offerings.

With reactive customer service, the most important aspect is empathy and your acknowledgment of your customer’s problems. That would make your customer happy, and once you resolve their issues, they will start to champion your services.