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High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service
Inspire Timeless Loyalty in the Demanding New World of Social Commerce

Author: Micah Solomon
Pub Date: May 2012
Print Edition: $18.95
Print ISBN: 9780814439319
Page Count: 208
Format: Paper or Softback
e-Book ISBN: 9780814417911
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Excerpt
Introduction
Marshall Plympton (not his actual name, although I was tempted) is
the all-too-real proprietor of an ‘‘eclectic American’’ restaurant near
our vacation spot in the central Carolinas. Marshall’s eatery has fortyseven
reviews on Yelp, twelve on Google, and thirteen on TripAdvisor.
The majority of these reviews are actually pretty positive.
Marshall, however, isn’t satisfied with his good reviews and has no
interest in learning from anything constructive in the mixed ones.
Instead, he responds to even the smallest online slight with outrage.
Outrageous outrage. Here’s one example of Marshall responding on Yelp
to a very mild critique:
If any other bleepholes [except Marshall didn’t type ‘‘bleepholes’’]
like ‘‘Jjhamie319’’ are thinking of coming to my restaurant, listen up:
Please DON’T come. Just DON’T. I have enough work serving the
rest of you people without this kind of grief. And Jjhamie319, so
WHAT if your soup was cold. ‘‘Cold’’ is subjective.We are only three
people in the kitchen, sometimes four depending on the season. Can
YOU keep soup hot at YOUR house? Big bleeping deal that it was
quote unquote ‘‘cold’’ twice. Don’t come in again—make your own
soup. Hope you scald your mouth.1
Marshall doesn’t need my book; he needs a new line of work, far away from
customers. But for the rest of you, who’d like to keep your organization
free of what could be termed ‘‘Marshall Lawlessness’’ and learn to get
along with and win over today’s breed of customer, I offer this book.
Social media blundering, even in milder forms than Marshall’s, is
one of the potential pitfalls of engaging with customers today, but it’s
not the only one. And the book you’re reading is not exclusively about
social media, because what an organization needs in order to avoid
responses that evoke our clueless Marshall is much more than nuts-andbolts
training in social media. What’s needed could be more properly
termed training in humanity. Humanity training involves:
> Understanding customers and their desires, unformed and
always-shifting though they may be
> Consciously building an extraordinary company culture
> Understanding, appropriately selecting, and engaging
employees
And, of course, learning the special code of technologically cluedin
commerce, including social media: how to respond, when to
respond, and when, in fact, to keep your mouth (terminal, actually)
shut. All of which I’ll cover as we move through this book.
forearmed is forewarmed
It was behavioral scientist Nicolas Gue´gen who proved the power, literally
speaking, of touch.2 He demonstrated it definitively—and a bit
creepily, I might add. His research experiments showed that giving a
light touch on the arm nearly doubles your chance of getting what you
want: convincing someone to join you in charity work, getting the
phone number of an attractive stranger you’ve spotted on the street,
getting the quiet newcomer in the meeting to take on a thankless
project.
And most relevant to our subject, he proved that this tap can help
convince a stranger to participate in a supermarket taste test and, ultimately,
to buy your product. (Before we get too dependent on Gue´gen’s
work, I feel obliged to note that Gue´gen’s research strays into some
curious territory, such as determining, for female hitchhikers, the ideal
bust size to entice a male driver to stop.3 So I’m not going to be using
the full range of his research in this book.)
Of course, we can’t actually touch our customers on the arm: It’s
not, as far as I know, possible to do over the internet, and it’s prone to
misinterpretation if done in person. Yet, figuratively, we do need to
touch our customers if we’re going to provide memorable customer
service. And touching—reaching—your customers is what this book’s
about.
a light touch at just the right time
I’m going to show you how to succeed at touching customers while
keeping your technological edge, as well as how to make that touch
more effective through your technological edge. You’ll also learn how
to use the right technology, people, and company culture to ensure that
your touch is feather light—not intrusive or more than the customer
wants, and always (and only) when the customer wants it.
The goal in all this is to touch customers in a way that builds true
customer loyalty—loyalty you can bank.
The stakes are high. Since the advent of the internet, and, most
specifically, the broad use of the World Wide Web starting in the
mid-1990s, there’s been a dramatic transformation of the competitive
landscape. The changes wrought by these new communication and distribution
channels are in many ways revolutionary, and they’re causing
disruptions akin to those of past revolutions.
For a parallel, look at the changes of the mid-nineteenth century.
During this period the stability of rural and village life was thrown into
disarray due to a host of technological advances, including those making
it possible to preserve and transport food. Customers could now purchase
edibles from across the country or around the world: The farmer
in New England who had been able to count on a captive local market
for whatever would graze or grow in his stony fields was now competing
against topsoil-rich Illinois and lamb-friendly New Zealand. The
result was a mass abandonment of farms throughout the region. The
transformation was striking: Go for a walk in the woods of New Hampshire
or Vermont and you’ll still see the proliferation of old stone walls
and foundations that attest to the abandoned farms and homesteads of
this era.4 Or just remember your poetry. This New England exodus is
the backstory of Robert Frost’s stuck-in-his-ways neighbor still trying
to mend a fence: He doesn’t realize times have changed and the fence,
at most, is now preventing runaway trees. There are no cattle to contain
anymore.
You can’t afford to be similarly left behind by today’s transformational
technologies. So many things have changed and continue to change in
the world of commerce. For example, our sense of timeliness: What was
plenty fast this time last year feels draggy now to the very same customers
because of changing expectations brought by mobile technology, social
media–induced restlessness, the incredible efficiency of vendors like
Amazon.com, and other factors. It’s crucial to invest brain cells, time, and
money to keep up with what it takes to hold on to your customers, now
that we’re all playing on a global, digitally connected field.
saying your business is ‘‘on the internet’’ is
like saying it’s ‘‘on the power grid’’
And yet, and yet . . . before you go off the technological deep end and
jettison all that is timeless in customer service, take at least a few shallow
breaths: In today’s high-tech world, where people can pay for their
lattes with the wave of a smartphone, saying your business is ‘‘on the
internet’’ is as mundane as saying it’s ‘‘on the power grid.’’ In other
words, doing business in a digitally informed manner should be comfortable
enough for your business that it becomes background information,
just like having ‘‘eleckatricity and all’’ (as long-ago folksinger Woody
Guthrie creatively spelled it out) was for earlier generations. This has
two implications. First, we need to bone up on what is essential and
timeless in customer service and stop being dazzled to the point of distraction
by all this newfangled internet stuff. And, paradoxically, we
need to realize that the internet, mobile technology, social media, and
self-service technologies of various stripes are now, with absolute finality,
integral to what customer service means today—and there is absolutely
no turning back.
This is the tightrope I’ll walk in this book. To put it another way,
I’ll bring you up to speed on everything that has changed in how customers
expect companies to behave, and how to stay at the forefront of
this revolution. Yet this isn’t a book that throws the baby out with
the digital bathwater, written by someone who thinks the Twitterverse
comprises the entire customer service universe. This is a book that realizes
that customers—how they behave and how they prefer to interact
with you—fall along a wide continuum. The breathless generalizations
and thoughtless cliche´s you hear every day in the technology and business
press about ‘‘today’s customers’’ are just that: generalizations and
cliche´s. This book will teach you how to do business in our threedimensional
world—with customers who walk on two legs and type
with ten fingers (or, just as likely today, with two thumbs).
Our idiosyncratic researcher Gue´gen was right: There is one thing
all customers have in common, in this era and any other: If you learn
to emotionally touch them, through a human-friendly website, via a
correctly designed self-service kiosk, in person, or even by mail
(remember mail?), that customer will respond. Learning to leave the
correct imprint on a customer, whether in an initial encounter, when
the customer honors you with a repeat visit to your company, or when
she lets you know that she’s upset, are key skills in this era, as in any
other. Through these abilities, your organization builds crucial brand
equity and avoids the danger of commoditization in the eyes of the
marketplace—a danger that the ever-expanding technological and
global-sourcing arms race has made more and more urgent.
all you need to know in a rhyming nutshell
Your touch will be felt most powerfully, with the longest-lasting aftereffect,
when you keep your customer’s personal, specific needs and
desires in the foreground, ideally without prompting. This is what I
call anticipatory customer service. Here’s what to strive for through people,
systems, and technology, set in an admittedly dopey rhyme for easy
recollection:
If you can anticipate
You can differentiate.
If customers feel at home
They’re unlikely to roam.
That, in a nutshell, is how you turn customer service into a competitive
advantage that will sustain your business year after year. If you can
anticipate what your customers want, before they ask for it, even before
they’re aware of or can express that they desire it, they’ll never feel the
need to go elsewhere. Your service is anticipatory when:
> Your product or service is what your customers are looking
for—specifically what they are looking for—before they have
to look elsewhere or raise their voices to ask you for it
> Your pricing, whether high, low, or in the middle of the marketplace,
fits the model customers hold mentally of what is fair
> You already know details about your specific customers that are
important to them, thus giving them a sense of belonging and
saving them time and the need to explain themselves and you
take the logical but rare next step of using these details to bring
your customers additional value—for example, suggesting
related purchases that suit them to a T.
homeward bound
If you can make your customer feel at home—no, not a home like my
old bachelor pad with a sink full of dishes and garbage that needs to be
taken out, but a magical home, like the one where, ideally speaking,
your customers grew up as kids, where the lightbulbs were automatically
changed and the groceries in the fridge were chosen to fit their
preference, where they were missed when they went to school and
welcomed back when they came home—why would they ever stray?
This homey image won’t be entirely new to my readers. As discussed
in Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit (Inghilleri-Solomon, AMACOM
2010), this was a revelation of the Ritz-Carlton’s founder, Horst Schulze,
who graciously contributed to our book. Schulze, early in the days of
building the Ritz-Carlton brand, working with a highly skilled team of
linguists, parsed survey after survey to find out what his customers meant
when they said they wanted his luxury hotels to be ‘‘just like home.’’
Ultimately, Schulze and these language experts discerned that his guests
were looking for a business that functioned like a home run by a caring
parent. I have yet to find a better archetype for how a business can build
a customer experience that will command true loyalty.
where tech makes loyalty easier
Here’s the great thing: Technology can make anticipation and ‘‘homekeeping’’
much simpler, and much easier to reap dramatic benefits
from. For example, custom-tailored, automated anticipatory messaging (see
Chapter 10) helps you respond in advance (‘‘pre-spond,’’ I suppose)
to customer needs and would have been impossible before the digital
communications revolution. Anticipatory design (see Chapter 4), used so
extraordinarily by companies like Apple and Google, can help simplify
your customer’s life. Well-designed ‘‘My Account’’ and other self-service
technology (see Chapter 8) has made it so many customers are willing,
even eager, to do much of the work for you to keep track of their
preferences and other details—information that, in turn, makes anticipatory
customer service easier to pull off. Customers will let you know
how to improve more directly than before if you keep your ear to
your electronic listening channels (see Chapter 13), thus facilitating a much
quicker feedback loop for future anticipatory service. And, once you
delight your customers with anticipatory customer service, they can
spread the word much more quickly via social media (see Chapters 11–13)
than was ever possible in the past.
Technology, properly directed, is the faithful friend of the
customer-centered company. But technology alone is almost never
enough to bring a company out of the danger zone of being considered
a commodity. Technology needs people—and a culture that supports
those people’s best efforts—to effectively direct technology to the service
of emotionally touching your customers. Providing great customer
service in our technologically altered world isn’t a fundamentally different
proposition than it was a decade ago, but it’s faster. More transparent.
More twitchy. Unforgiving. Viral. Magnified. But still created by,
and for, people.
Since people are central on both sides of the service interaction,
that’s where we go first in this discussion, with a peek at today’s customer.
Care to join me?
how this book is organized
This book is organized into three parts. Part One, ‘‘Timeliness and
Timelessness,’’ addresses the basics of doing customer service right, and
what it looks like when you do it wrong, in any era. Part Two, ‘‘High-
Tech, High-Touch Anticipatory Service,’’ begins to address what it
takes to create a true loyalty-building level of customer service: by
anticipating customer needs through the right people, culture, and
technology. Part Three, ‘‘The Rise of Self-Service and Social Media—
And Other Seismic Shifts,’’ extends the technological focus by covering
in detail the trends of self-service, social media, and electronic customer
input in general—and ways to stay ahead of competitors in these areas.
Within these sections, each chapter is followed by a Cliff ’s Notes–
style cheat sheet for your quick review and as a memory aid (put together
by me, not by those selfless experts at the actual Cliff ’s Notes who got
you through The Iliad). This summary is called, inevitably, ‘‘And Your
Point Is?’’ (If my point is still hard to decipher, shoot me an email at
micah@micahsolomon.com or visit me at customerserviceguru.com
and let me know how I can clarify it for your individual situation.)
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