You often have read our articles about how customer support is not a department, it is a culture.

A recent article in the Consumerist tells the story of how Best Buy is instilling customer support as a culture as a way of combating the ever-increasingly troubled economy.

A few of the excerpts from the article:

We must find ways to win with the customers who are coming to us today. Serving our customers better than anyone else is the best way to create value for customers, employees and shareholders alike. We need every employee engaged in serving customers better, and more efficiently.

We could let today’s turmoil distract us from serving customers. Other retailers might do that. But we will not. Instead, we will use these circumstances to redouble our efforts and deepen our commitment to each other, to our company, to our strategy and to the customers we serve. In so doing, we will strengthen and fortify ourselves as a team. A winning team. That’s who we are, and that’s Best Buy.

The spirit of this type of customer care is also very evident in one of our portfolio companies, PBwiki. Their customer support culture, which is spearheaded by customer support manager Rachel Pennig, means that they regularly achieve 90%+ satisfaction levels from their user base.  As Rachel recently said to the PBwiki staff:

(M)oving forward we have a battle to fight against our competitors. But if we focus on keeping our users satisfied in every interaction with PBwiki, we will be able to edge out the competition.

If you are successful, customer service is always your best product.  Is it your best product?

“primum non nocere” = first, to not harm

This Latin tidbit actually comes from the Hippocratic Oath (the one doctors swear to).  But there is a lesson in there for all of us.  A business’s first goal every day should be to not cause our customers to feel harmed.   It doesn’t matter what your job or role, your real job is to make customers feel loved.  This manifests itself in many ways, but it should always be the centerpiece of your efforts.

Some people have a great deal of direct customer interaction, and some people have jobs where we rarely directly interact with a customer.  But as a rule, customer interaction should be a few things:

1. Clear and concise (i.e. don’t waste their time or confuse them)
2. Prompt (i.e. if a customer or prospect has to wait more than 24 hours for an initial contact, we failed)
3. Follow-up and Follow-through (i.e. if we don’t have answers yet, at least once per day, tell them we are working on it. And if we say we are going to do something, do it and let them know we did it)

Following these simple steps usually means you have very happy customers.  No matter what your role or job is.  Support is not a department, it is a mentality.

Primum non nocere….

I have traveled a lot.  In some years of my life, I have spent as much as 50% of the nights sleeping in a hotel.  But very few of those evenings have been spent in Hyatt hotels.  So, on a recent trip to Hawaii, I spent 9 nights at two different Hyatt properties - the Grand Hyatt in Kauai and the Hyatt Regency in Maui.  Besides being beautiful and amazingly well designed, the Hyatts also did a great job of showing what it means to deliver excellent customer service.

In one of the brochures for the hotels, the general manager had a note that every staff member was there to make our stay perfect.  And this statement seemed to be true over and over.  Every single staff person we passed during our stay would say “hello” or “aloha”.  They were always smiling.  They were always willing to give some local advice or direction.  In addition, they paid great attention to detail.  Things were constantly being cleaned and straightened.  Things were always in place and always looked fresh.  Customer service was an obvious focus, and it made us feel like we were important.

As entrepreneurs, it is our goal to make our customers feel as if they are important.  This is how you make customers become ambassadors for your business, just like Hyatt has done with us.