EFFECT[ive] Marketing…Connecting Real-Life Businesses with their Online Market

You’ve surely been there, and it’s not a good time—face to face with a customer so upset that he’s jabbing his finger in your chest, literally screaming at you, the veins in his forehead ready to jump out and strangle you. He’ll ruin your day—but could he hold the key to building your business?

When you or a member of your staff upsets a customer so much that he can’t contain himself and can’t help but get in your face right away or pick up the phone as soon as he gets in his car, that customer is exhibiting what’s known formally as a “visceral response”—a fancy way of saying a gut–level reaction. Your business has failed that customer to such a high (perceived) degree that he’s so upset he can’t hold it in. He’s got to tell someone…and you’re the first one he’s going to tell.*

There’s a very important lesson hiding in here, though, that very few people ever seem to get. It’s one that can give your business a huge edge over your competition:

Gut reactions like this don’t have to be negative—the opposite of furious is deliriously happy.

Look at it this way: a terrible service experience creates strongly negative emotion. The opposite would be, a terrific service experience creates strongly positive emotion. So if you treat people the opposite of terrible, you can elicit the opposite gut reaction—one that’s overwhelmingly positive. One that customer is going to feel compelled to talk about—with you, and with other people as well.

In fact, this phenomenon forms the heart of a very serviceable mission statement. I used it years ago when I ran a private golf club: “We will provide every member and every guest with remarkable service.” The footnote was: “‘Remarkable service’ is service so outstanding, so uncompromisingly attentive and personalized, that the recipient will feel compelled to remark on it to someone (or everyone).”

Will you get every customer to gush to you and all their friends and coworkers about how great your business is? Not a chance. And even if you could somehow provide perfect service to everyone, some people won’t acknowledge it; it’s just not in their nature. Of course, with flawed people (that is, humans) working for you in a flawed system (that is, one created by humans), there’s just no way you can sustain that remarkably high a level of service without the occasional lapse.

But just setting the bar that high can have quite an uplifting effect on your staff, and even on you—with a lofty service goal staring you in the face every day, you and your people will know you have to bring your best game every day (and you’ll have a standard to measure your successes and failures against, as well as a starting point for analyzing both).

It’s a pretty inexpensive (that is, free) way to develop a standard of service that will wow your customers on a regular basis. And the fringe benefit—a huge one—is that striving to give your customers service way beyond what they’ll get across town is the surest way to turn them into your best advertisement: when your customers feel so strongly about how well you treat them that they feel they have to tell people, they’ll tell people. And ta–da! You’ve created an army of evangelists who can’t wait to spread the good word on your behalf.

There’s no better, more economical, more effective way to advertise your business: take great enough care of people that they’ll bring you more people to take great care of. And your business will grow and grow.

*Unfortunately, if you don’t handle that irate customer properly, he’s going to go on to tell a lot of other people how badly your business treated him—a dangerous negative, yes, but one that can easily be turned around into a positive. We’ll talk more about it in a later post.

No one would quarrel with the common lament that today’s service industry suffers from a stunning lack of concern for customer service. But is it really the fault of a generation of apathetic front-line workers?

[Warning: We're going to reveal a couple of Big Secrets to Outstanding Service after the jump. Naw, really, they're not that big, and they're really not that secret—well, they shouldn't be, anyway.]

Peter Senge, Director of the Center for Organizational Learning at the MIT Sloan School of Management, once said in a magazine interview: “Most Americans have no idea what good customer service is, because they’ve never had it.” That was in 1991. It’s safe to say that eighteen years later, it’s no easier to find.

Sure, pretty much everyone who oversees a customer–service–based business (and isn’t that nearly all of them?) likes to boast in their ads about their “commitment to service.” But knowing it’s a good thing to brag about only means they know it’s important to their customers; it doesn’t mean they have even the slightest clue how to make it happen.

Now, only someone who’s never been to a fast–food drive–through, or stood in line at WalMart, or eaten at a Chilly Ruby Friday’s, or dialed just about any customer support line would argue with the contention that customer service in America is, well, nonexistent. But I don’t buy the traditional explanation for the problem: that “kids today” are to blame, that we’re raising a generation of young people who never learned what a work ethic is (this, by the way, has been a popular complaint in this country at least since the dawn of the Industrial Age). Here’s why:

First, there’s the not–all–that–uncommon exception that disproves the rule: if your eyes are open to it, it’s really not that hard to find individuals who are obviously very devoted to customer care. There are even entire operations (and not just furriers or Bentley dealerships) that are clearly dedicated to taking great care of their customers. Without a doubt, though, it’s fair to say there aren’t nearly enough of them.

Second, if you run a business, this rationale is irrelevant. It doesn’t make any difference how rare excellent customer service is — for your business to be a success, you have to find a way to make it happen anyway. The upside to this is that great service is so rare that if you can even come close to mastering it in your business, it will bring you raving fans aplenty.

We know the exceptions, the ones who get it right, are out there; we just need to figure out how they do it. What’s different about those operations, those people, that makes excellent customer service something they can pull off regularly while those around them can barely spell it?

I slyly hinted at one of the Big Secrets of Outstanding Service a couple of times three paragraphs ago, and it’s really pretty simple:

• It’s the word “care.” People who are good at taking care of their customers care about taking care of their customers.

It’s wired into them, or they learned it from their parents, or they saw it on TV, or they believe in the Golden Rule, or they got a stone tablet on a hill. Don’t know, don’t care. Wherever it comes from, they care. And that makes them a treasure for your business.

The second Big Secret of Outstanding Service is your responsibility as the owner or manager of your business; it’s a simple but reliable management strategy (but only if you can commit to it—truly commit to it for the long haul).

When a business owner or manager appreciates that providing consistently outstanding service is the most efficient marketing tool in their arsenal, they manage their staff in a particular way:

1. They recruit and hire carefully to seek out those customer–service gems, the candidates with that coveted service focus and outlook;
2. They train their staff thoroughly and give them clear expectations of what behaviors are expected and which are out of bounds—and they clearly explain why;
3. They consistently monitor their people’s interactions with customers, intervene when needed, consistently model the behaviors they want, and reinforce them enthusiastically when staff members exhibit them.
4. And when a staff member demonstrates, over time and after retraining, an inability or unwillingness to uphold the operation’s standards of customer service, those owners and managers remove them from the team so as to maintain control over those standards.

I’ve called this strategy “simple”; am I suggesting that it’s easy? Absolutely not. I’ve managed a number of staffs using this approach, and keeping it going over the long haul wore me out. But it was worth it. It yielded a consistently high level of service; it generated continual raves from customers (which is a great measure of loyalty); it even reduced staff turnover and boosted their loyalty and pride in their work—as long as everyone was on board with the approach, including assistant managers and line–level supervisors when I wasn’t in the building. If the game changes when you’re not there, you’re leaving people in charge you shouldn’t trust. And if you leave them there, you’re failing at the fourth point above, and you’ve surrendered control of your operation.

No, it’s not a magic bullet for success in a customer service business. But it’s a pretty simple strategy to implement. It takes time and work to get the people in place that you need, but if you devote yourself to it, you’ll create an operation that runs near its potential and that runs well even when you’re not there.

And you will have done your part to resuscitate customer service.

Marketing is about drawing customers into your business. What will they find when they get there? And what will they tell their friends?

Just about a year ago, I was retained by a local franchisee for a popular national restaurant company to boost catering sales in his operation.

One of the first recommendations I made to the client was that he beef up his on-premise dining and kitchen operations – as a long-term restaurant professional, it didn’t take more than a visit or two to his flagship operation to see that there were some glaring deficiencies in service, cleanliness, food consistency and level of customer service. I offered the client a comprehensive list of recommendations on how I thought he needed to tighten up his operation in preparation for dealing with increased catering sales. He implemented exactly none of my suggestions.

Our marketing strategy was well-organized, and the initial catering push was moderately successful…with an effect that was entirely predictable: catering deliveries were disorganized and late or  incomplete; billing mistakes were common; on-premise service and food quality suffered because staff spent mornings running around trying to figure out how to get catering orders together instead of preparing for the lunch rush; and the operation came across as unprofessional and inept to nearly everyone.

So the initial push worked just well enough to upset not just present catering and on-premise customers but new ones as well, and the franchisee very quickly saw his numbers start falling off again. And, needless to say, our relationship didn’t end on the best of terms; I was frustrated with him, and he thought I hadn’t done my job.

The moral of the story?

Even the best-executed marketing strategy will bite you in the butt if your operation isn’t ready for its impact.

If your operation isn’t running in showcase mode, with every facet sparkling and prepared to impress every customer, all the time and energy you’ve invested in your marketing efforts will simply yield a greater number of customers who will be unimpressed with your operation – and will go out and tell the world what they found.

Step one of your strategic marketing plan has to be internal: look at your operation – from your customers’ point of view - and make some cold, harsh, honest judgments on where it’s lacking and what needs to change for it to be ready to sell itself and create customers who are your best advertisers. And if you can’t trust yourself to look at your business objectively, ask your customers. They’ll be grateful that you thought enough of them to ask, and they will give you their honest input.

A (one-time) major player in the (pre-big-box) midwestern retail grocery industry, Marsh Supermarkets last week launched their very first viral marketing campaign with a $10 coupon for their Facebook fans. It crashed and burned. Badly. What went wrong?

Marsh Supermarkets, based in Indianapolis, Indiana, has a Facebook page with about 3,300 fans. Last week, when they had about 3,100 fans, Marsh posted a message on their wall offering a $10 in-store coupon to their Facebook fans, old and new alike. The offer was posted for one day, only on their Facebook page, and linked to a printable coupon.

What happened? Their fans responded to the offer. Boy, did they ever.

But they didn’t just print the coupon for themselves; many of them forwarded the link to their friends, who forwarded it to their friends, and so on, and so on. No numbers have been released, but it’s probably safe to guess that, on the very low end, more than 10,000 coupons were printed. Sound like a successful viral campaign? I’d say so. Those coupons represent a whole lot of bodies through the doors of Marsh’s stores, each ready to spend money. And nowadays, going head to head with WalMart, SuperTarget and Meijer (an aggressive midwestern big-box chain), Marsh could surely use that money.

So how did Marsh respond? The offer ended on schedule on July 29th. But on July 31st, Marsh panicked. They posted a note on their Facebook page that said, in part:

“Unfortunately this offer has been widely distributed in an unauthorized manner throughout our marketing area. Due to the vast numbers of inappropriately transmitted and replicated copies of this offer, we will no longer be able to accept these coupons in our stores.”

(To their credit, they did include an apology.)

Unauthorized? Inappropriately? It’s the Web. You put up an easily replicable coupon, people are going to jump on it. Times are tough, and people need groceries.

But apparently, it never entered the collective mind of Marsh’s marketing department that people receiving a coupon offer on the Web might not want to hoard it.

The Web is a social medium.

People find things they like, they share them. That’s really not news where I come from (and I come from literally just down the road from Marsh’s corporate headquarters).

[As an aside, I'm currently reading (and enjoying, and learning a tremendous amount from) David Meerman Scott's new "World Wide Rave," which directly and comprehensively addresses viral marketing. I wholeheartedly recommend the book and Scott's blog to anyone considering the jump into online marketing (but most of all to Marsh's marketing department).]

So what went wrong? Did Marsh fail to prepare properly for the promotion? Should they, as many commenters on their Facebook wall and on the Indianapolis Star/News website’s story on the debacle have noted, have prepared better? Without a doubt. A little homework on viral marketing (like reading a good book) wouldn’t have killed them.

But I’d say the real problem with the promotion was that Marsh was utterly unprepared for its success. They apparently thought the math was simple. They’d give up about $31,000 in coupon discounts. That number, for them, had value. That is, they had to believe that redeeming $31,000 in coupons would bring in more than that much in sales. Otherwise, the promotion would never have made it past the bean-counters.

So my question is, if the promotion was expected to yield a positive return for Marsh at the $31,000 mark, what changed at the $100,000, or $250,000, or $500,000 mark? Were the rest of those people expected to walk the aisles with coupon in hand, searching for an item that cost exactly ten dollars? Not likely.

More coupons meant more people in their stores. More people in their stores meant more sales.

But here’s the worst part: Marsh has for years offered a “Marsh Fresh Idea Card” that, like any such store card, has personal information attached to it. Does the technology not exist to tie the use of the coupon to the customer’s card to prevent multiple redemptions? It seems unlikely. And doing so would have motivated coupon-holders who didn’t already have a Fresh Idea to obtain one. Seems like a win-win-win for Marsh. More traffic, more sales, more customer information in their database.

In the end, though, Marsh took a wildly successful “World Wide Rave” and, instead of riding it out and reaping the rewards, deliberately turned it into a crushing customer relations failure. Marsh ended up with a bad taste in their mouth for online promotions, which is tragic, and with tens of thousands of local customers, potential customers and former customers who are furious with the chain – which is beyond tragic. For a company teetering in Marsh’s position, it could just be fatal.

If your service business employs a customer-service staff, even a small one, you’ve probably emphasized to them more than once that the customer is the most important person to your operation. And from their perspective, that’s definitely in your best interest.

But from your strategic standpoint as owner or manager – and contrary to countless customer-service books – your customers are actually only the second most important group in your business.* Here’s why:

Think for a moment: how much time do you actually spend face-to-face with each of your customers? And how much time does each of your customer-service employees spend face-to-face with them? If your business is at least moderately successful, the answers are probably, in order, something like, “Not much” or “As much as I can,” and, “A lot more than I do.”

In any service business where there is a level of employees between the customer and you, the manager or owner – a sales team, a server staff, cashiers, telephone operators – those employees are going to amass a whole lot more “face time” with your customers than you will. Why? It’s what you’re paying them to do. You pay them to provide consistently excellent service to your customers, guests, clients, patrons, or whatever you want to label them. You pay them to do it because, unless your business is very, very slow, you don’t have time to deal with every customer yourself.

Your service staff is absolutely indispensable to the success of your business. Do you treat them accordingly?

Do you make hiring decisions with their importance to your operation in mind? Do you devote enough time and energy to training them to take care of your customers just as you would? Do you monitor them to ensure that they are working at your (and your customers’) standards? Do you show them the respect they deserve and that will make them want to continue to perform well for you? Do you accept, and even solicit, your employees’ insight and input into your operation?

Do you offer your customer service staff all of the tools they need to provide your customers with the superb service you would give them yourself?

* Now, lest you get the uppity notion that just because you’re Top Dog, you are the most important person to the business’s success, try this little exercise (and be honest with yourself): if your customer service staff somehow vanished suddenly, how long could your business keep running? Would your customers continue to, or be able to, do business with you? Now, how long would your business be able to run if you suddenly vanished (after you opened the front door)? Would customers still be able to do business with your operation? The answer is probably yes. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll probably see that your service staff actually is the most important component in your customer-service operation. (Now, don’t feel bad. Your job is executive and administrative – crucial, to be sure, and you’d be missed as soon as your cashier needed change, or the new employee schedule was due, or a delivery person needed a check. But it might be quite a while before one of your customers asked where you were.)

Our local Domino’s Pizza franchises are once again running their five-dollar, no-wait medium pizza promotion – complete with guys on street corners dancing around shamelessly, waving giant signs.

I think it’s a great idea – a medium pizza faster than you can get a prefab cheeseburger, for pretty much the same price.

The last time Domino’s ran the promotion (last summer, I think), we took them up on it at least five or six times – to the tune of two or three pizzas at a time. The first time, I walked up to the counter, placed my order, payed, and walked out, very pleased, with three hot pizzas.

But every time after that first visit, I had to wait for the no-wait pizzas. They always seemed to be “all out of our five-dollar pizzas” – even when I stopped in about ten minutes after the start time for the promo. And I had to sit and wait a long, long time – at least twenty minutes, and on several occasions over half an hour (longer than it takes to have a Domino’s pizza delivered to our house from the same store!).

It became obvious pretty quickly that the local franchisee’s, or store manager’s, or personnel’s interpretation of the promotion was that, sure, they’d sell their medium cheese, pepperoni and sausage pizzas for five bucks – but preparing them in advance, at the risk of having to toss them out if they didn’t sell, was a chance they just weren’t willing to take. Cost-effective? Yes. Good marketing? I’d say no.

It’s a case of what I’ve come to call “WalMart Greeter Syndrome.” A company comes up with an idea, sometimes even a good one, to offer a new service to their customers, only to blow it in the training, or the personnel selection, or the oversight, or the execution. And then, instead of an opportunity to provide a new service, to showcase the business at its best, it becomes a new opportunity to provide poor service.

The Domino’s promotion started back up, I’d say, about a month ago. We’ve had pizza numerous times since then, but we haven’t been back to Domino’s for the no-wait pizza. I just don’t see the value in more aggravation at a lower price.

Is your business better served by your coming up with some novel service that might (or might not) impress your customers, or by your keying in on the basics of service, beating your competitors at the things that matter to your customers?