customer service Archives - Resonant stories

In my work helping businesses large and small with their digital marketing, our work together often ends up helping the business understand their full customer journey. For many businesses this leads to the realisation that they’re trying to serve everyone with a perfect solution, which they invariably fail to manage.

This often manifests itself in the marketing and communications material of such companies. Businesses have a product that can be used in many ways by different people to meet their differing needs. This leads to the desire to tell everyone all the features, so the core message gets lost or becomes so garbled that it appeals to no-one. It might feel counter-intuitive but targeting your message more tightly, so you’ll only appeal to a small section of your audience is the way to begin to engage them. You’ll be talking their language and solving their problems and you’ll be able to be very clear how you do it and what the benefits of your approach are.

In today’s social media, always on environment it’s even more important to remember that this approach needs to be followed. Be focused on who you want to reach out to. Be specific about what you can do for them and why you are the best option.

Every now and then you come across an organisation that’s clearly very customer oriented in many areas but where one part of the business lets them down. One area which people often forget about is that of credit management – the people who send the invoices, collect the money and chase down late payments.

Many would argue that if someone is late paying their bill then they deserve the shouty, grumpy credit controller from hell. Yet, forward thinking companies will view this as an opportunity to continue to offer great customer service. It doesn’t take much and it can even pay dividends, in the form of customers who feel better about your business, are more likely to recommend you and will improve the way they pay in the future.

And it doesn’t take much to improve that function:

A little politeness and charm goes a long way when collecting money from people – you won’t necessarily know the reason for the delay, politeness costs nothing and often helps resolve an issue faster.
Systems and processes that take the grunt work out of the function – clearly structured invoices, automated invoicing and follow up emails, all save you time and help the customer know where they stand.
This frees you up to do the important bit – following up with those that haven’t paid, understanding why not and working out how to help the customer.

Of course in some cases this approach won’t always work and a heavier hand may be called for, but by this point you will be understanding all your customers better and you can then decide whether these are the right kind of customers for you.

If in the unfortunate event, that the customer simply can’t pay and won’t ever be able to pay, then finding that out by having a reasonable conversation will be better for everyone. It will enable you to write down the loss more quickly and enable the customer to move on – let’s face it, they may well be feeling pretty battered and bruised already.

If you have any experiences with credit control letting customer service down in this way, do share in the comments.