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No Lines, No Waiting
Bringing service to the fore while conserving your cash
2009
A Key to Customer Service: Listening (and Hearing)
To make a relationship sustainable, vendors and customers need to be decent partners. Customers can’t expect everything to be free, but at the same time, vendors need to hear what customers are saying, and let customers know they’re listening.
Whatever the outcome on any particular incident, you can tell whether someone’s listening or stonewalling. I just ran across a post that illustrates this perfectly. Not surprisingly, it’s Apple.
Advertising / new-media blogger Bhatnaturally (his surname is Bhat – the blog title reads “But naturally”) has been an Apple customer for ten years, and he’s got a problem: the screen on his 2006 MacBook has gone bad. In his post What we can learn from Apple customer service, he writes about the frustration of what it’ll cost him and his experience trying to reach someone who’ll listen to his plea for an exception.
Throughout, he makes clear that he knows it’s out of warranty and that Apple already made an exception for him in the past. What makes all the difference to him is that through persistence he was able to reach a senior level person who listened. And he concludes:
On hard facts, I am not entitled to – I neither have extended warranty nor AppleCare Protection Plan. But simply entertaining a call of this nature speaks volumes about their attitude to customer care. I doubt if other brands in the same category will even bother. I may end up living with a faulty display screen but my image of Apple’s service has not been dented severely.
We at TimeTrade have a live incident underway in which someone had a real problem because a planned feature doesn’t exist yet. More about this in a future post. All I can say is, we believe in listening.
p.s. How not to listen: respond to critics the way Sarah Lacey did at SXSW last year, after her fiasco of an interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. 
Filed under: appointment scheduling
Tagged: customer experience, customer service, retail
One Comment
Ronni Marshak
Posted March 18, 2009 at 9:41 am | Permalink
Excellent point, Dave. Taking the time to hear your customers, even if you aren’t ultimately able to solve their problems, goes a long way to creating a lasting relationship. Patty Seybold taught me (and our clients and readers) that you can’t have a relationship with an organization, but you can have one with the people within that organization. This goes the other way, too. Instead of just recognizing a company as your customer, it is important to get to know the important individuals within that organization who are influencial in whether the company continues spending money on your products and/or services.