Do you want to be like them? Do you want your customer service to be just as lovable as theirs? Do you want to be on top of your niche with both awesome products and a stellar customer service? Do you want to change the current state of your customer service?
Take these valuable customer service lessons drawn from the most successful customer service cases and also the big fails of other companies to transform your own customer service team.
1. Be it a good or bad customer service, they know it
Most of the time when shopping on an eCommerce website, we see the beautiful words like “dedicated support”, “fast and wholehearted customer support”. Nothing is wrong with promising your customers with a safe and sound future with your company like that, but whether your customer service is good or not, it will be seen through the eyes of customers themselves, not yours.
Last year, there’s a viral case from Comcast where Ryan Block wanted to cancel his Comcast package, and the company’s rep just made it overly oppressive to do so. 
Ryan had over 20-minute conversation with the support rep and this rep just basically tried to argue with Ryan about why he would want to cancel. Oh why would you make a customer happy to sign up for your service and when they don’t need it anymore, you make it so worn-out for them to cancel it? Red flag!
So, the lesson here is that, whether you have it tagged on your site or not, just make your customers happy and its sparkle will shine through, without having you to polish it. And one more thing: be it a good or a bad customer service, you can’t hide it from your customers.
2. Adding humor to customer service makes it irresistible
I love it when support agents know how to talk with me – their customer – like a real friend. And I love it more when they’re funny people. Who doesn’t love being served with such refreshing mood? You do like it if you have gracefully funny people in your customer service team, don’t you?
Amazon’s support rep broke the ice with their customer with a very humorous live chat support. Here’s the chat transcript to prove it:
Amazon is sure lucky to have such support rep. This case was when a customer – who took the role as Odin, Thor’s father – asked about his undelivered parcel. And the support rep who played the role as Thor, not only had the problem solved smoothly via a hilarious conversation but also spiced up a meant-to-be-boring-case into an interesting one.
Being asked for refund is not a good customer experience. However, if your support agents know how to deal with it with a sense of humor, like how Amazon’s support agent did, the bad experience can turn into a better one. Not to mention that this kind of smart reaction to customer’s request can build even stronger belief in the brand for customers.
3. Never put the blame on customers
Besides the perfectly delivered customer service cases, there are also many blunder cases that make us feel embarrassed even just by reading them on the news. And in many cases, the reason for a big customer service fail is due to customers themselves – they said.
Let me tell you, even it’s not your staff’s fault, or customers are not always right, putting the blame on customers doesn’t help make things better.
Kevin Smith knew about it. He booked a ticket to fly with Southwest Airline and guess what the captain told him when kicking him out of his flight? They told Kevin he was too fat to fly on that plane and considered he is a “safety risk”. Eww. It’s very unreasonable:
Though the airline company issued an apology for this incident, the passengers will reconsider their choice of using this flight service. A bad customer experience.
The similar case happened to Emma Townsend – who couldn’t afford to pay her Orange phone bill. Instead of finding another way to resolve the bill issue with Emma, Orange’s employee sent her an abusive text and called her “pathetic” for not being able to pay the bill. I wonder why in the world an employee from such a huge company treated customers openly agressive like this.
Lesson learnt: make sure your support reps are doing their job properly with regular training and motivate them to do it well with rewards for excellent support reps. Plus, your company must react immediately with customer service crisis – don’t be like Orange who failed to send a formal apology to customer after waiting for weeks.
4. Turn customers to loyal fans with exceptional service
To make an end for this case study series, let’s brighten it up with a successful customer service case from a local barbershop!
Meredith Sain’s father is the owner of a local barber shop. It’s a family business and an inherited shop from her grandfather to her father, but the customer’s satisfaction is always the same. And she shared that the keys of his successful career here is delivering exceptional customer service with extremely care to customers. This is how her father made his service very special to anyone who comes to cut their hair here: “To my dad, his barbershop is more than a place for a good shave and a trim. It’s about relationships.”
And the lessons drawn from her father’s work are the principles that any other company can follow to be successful with customer service:
“Provide a unique customer experience: Be it a wicked fast response or a personal note, a unique experience goes a long way in customer attraction and retention
Remember customer preferences: Offer a seamless experience by tracking past activity, what they like and what they don’t like so you can always personalize the experience you are providing
Cultivate the relationship: Support the customer through every phase of consumption. Get involved before the transaction, post sales, and be there to help with life-cycle maintenance”
What’s your story?
You’ve gone far down to this line and I’m pretty sure that you do want to add more value into your customer service. Those lessons and cases above might help you go further in improving better experience with your customers.
Do you have any lessons or case study to share with me? Let’s write down here and discuss what made you go nuts with customer services.
