Tag Archives: Listening

6 great customer success principles to live by

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… and you learnt them all in pre-school. A great article that I read today and well worth a re-post.  Written by Dennis Hennessey – Six Great Customer Success Principles To Live By – and published on the BUSINESS2COMMUNITY.

Customer success

The first blog post I’ve written in 6 months, far too long. Busy with a a new exciting position and opportunity with Appirio in our London head office, helping to drive and build customer engagement and customer success, with some great customers, helping them innovate and transform their businesses with cloud technology.  And working with an amazingly talented and passionate team.

This article really resonated with me and as principles they’re very simple to remember, understand and build into your own customer success and customer engagement teams…

  1. Listening
  2. Empathy
  3. Honesty
  4. Be polite
  5. Keep your promises
  6. Be helpful

Customer success workshop

Not rocket science by any stretch of the imagination but very powerful principles and all key to helping build, improve and take your customer relationships to the next level.

What customer success principles do you use and are any of these missing from your organisation?

Bad service is not far behind…

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Only a day after my good service is everywhere experience and post, I had a day of bad service experiences – mainly across companies in one particular industry/market.  I’ll leave it to the reader to guess where…

Mobile mast

Service doesn’t need to be not good and it can easy to do it properly, but it does require some thinking about and a strategic view on what service is all about.

Bad service

In this day and age, giving bad or poor service is really inexcusable.  It says so much about the person and company giving it.

There are a few simple points to take service to next (and better) level:

(1) Empower the guys providing the service – let them make some of the decisions as they see fit.  They’re the ones sorting out issues and queries on the front line.

(2) Give everyone training in good service – it’s a culture shift and mindset change.  And requires an investment to do it properly and making sure people know what is expected and what good looks like.

(3) Define good service or even better, excellent service.  Reach out to the teams providing the service and find out from them what feedback they’ve had from customers and what changes they suggest.

(4) Listen, listen and listen again, before you say anything.  This is so important.  Too often these days people want to tell their story or their version or side.  Listen first though.  The more you listen, the more you can understand and be better informed to make the right decision.

Decision

And smile – it makes a big difference to the person you’re speaking to.  Again as per the last post, start thinking in all the interactions you have with other people, “How can I help this person?”.