Customer Service: Does it still exist?

John Willcox, owner of Coastal Office Products & Promo

How to Really Show Your Customers You Care

Two companies were interviewed by Inc Magazine and we found their customer service initiatives very powerful and unique to a locally owned company. Below are the key lessons that Tara Hunt of Buyosphere and Lauren Thom of Fleurty Girl shared, It's not all about you; its all about them. At Coastal, you are always a neighbor and never a number.

1. Go far, far out of your way for the customer (it will pay off!).

Thom recounts a family who recently came in to buy the same shirt for 10 people. The store only had nine in the correct sizes. "I drove 30 minutes to another store and back downtown to deliver the last shirt to their hotel. That's the southern hospitality I was raised on," she says.

2. Put your self in the shoes of your customers. Do what they do.

"Be your customer. We are active on our own site. We 'eat our own dogfood,'" Hunt says, using a software industry expression for using a product to see how it works. "We regularly invite people to test the site, look over their shoulder, ask them why they went to certain areas. We use software to capture their clicks and analyze how they use the site. We don't try to capture the customer, or get their information solely for marketing purposes."

Thom adds: "We have friends go in and shop, and recount their experiences. We analyze the checkout process in the store—we have very seasonal variations, but we need to maintain consistency. Sometimes we have a line to the door so we look at past busy influx times to see where we can improve."
3. Make sure your online interactions are just as good as the in-person ones.
Fleurty Girl's friendly and helpful in-person service is replicated online. "We don't just sell, we share socially to be ambassadors of the city. We promote other's events." Thom's employees are all Facebook and Twitter administrators, and they all share the responsibility for answering questions on social media, just as if they were picking up a phone ringing in the store. She hires people who are passionate about the store, the brand, and New Orleans.

4. We all know a great customer experience when we feel it

Hunt recalled an instance of great service: a New Orleans waiter who insisted on sharing other locations in town they had to see, including other restaurants. "I still have the piece of scrap paper in my bag, and it has a list of places to go for everything from a good dinner to bread pudding," she said. Thom added "If you want your customers treated well, love your employees. We regularly do 'rock and bowl' nights or dinner as a team to build camaraderie. I've been in business for more than two years and we have almost no turnover."

5. Let your customers promote you.

What do you do about difficult or cranky Yelp reviews? Is it OK to ask your customers to review you in a positive way? The journalistic answer: Yelp's Terms of Service state you may not "…otherwise attempt to manipulate the Site's search results." So, it's probably not advisable, but you can certainly create experiences good enough to make people want to share.

Both panelists talked about the need to be very responsive to customers in social media. Buyosphere has a private Facebook group where they solicit feedback from some of their top users. Thom's "customer army" was introduced by another New Orleans native who asked about it from the audience. She was selling shirts with the "Who Dat?" phrase popular with fans of the New Orleans Saints football franchise. At one point she pulled them off the shelves and a fan tweeted to ask about it. She tweeted back that the store had received a cease-and-desist from the NFL about their use of the phrase. Within two hours she had national media outside the store. The fans of the store and the city rose up to help her, demanded her shirts and she went back to selling. (While the NFL has backed off, there are still pending legal issues that Thom can't discuss.)

Keeping the customers first is a great strategy, and these two savvy businesswomen have provided some great tips. What are your suggestions? Please share them with us