Are you spending money on your marketing? PPC, Facebook ads, signs, and flyers. These can all be great things, but before you spend another dime, I have a question for you … is your house in order? Are you able to use customer service as a marketing tool, or is your customer experience the ball and chain that is holding you back?

Before you go spending a lot of money driving people to your website, or through the doors of your bricks and mortar business, you had better be sure that they will have an outstanding experience once they arrive.

This is not one of those situations where you can fake it until you make it. If your customer service is not locked down, the rest of your marketing is doomed to fail.

There’s an old saying (sometimes attributed to Abraham Lincoln) …

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

A great customer experience is your very sharp axe, and that’s why I want you to think of customer service as a marketing tool.

Customers will overlook a lot of problems if they receive great customer service, but no matter how great your product, poor customer service will doom your business.

Five steps to using customer service as a marketing tool

Step 1: Customer Experience Audit

Before you can get to where you’re going, you have to know where you are. So start your journey to an improved customer experience by evaluating how your business is doing right now.

If you are mostly internet based, you can just set up a gmail account and submit a lead. If you’re customers come in through phone calls or in person, you will probably need to recruit a friend to mystery shop. If you receive customer leads through multiple channels, be sure to mystery shop all of them. This will help you identify breakdowns in each of the channels and give you a better picture of where you stand.

Step 2: Make a plan

“Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.”
– Pablo Picasso

Next, you will want to evaluate the results of your mystery shops and identify the weaknesses and the strengths of your current system. Then put together a plan to build on your strengths and improve on your weaknesses.

Did you find that some employees are better at handling some tasks and others are better at other tasks? Did anyone stand out as a rockstar?

Take every piece of data that you were able to collect, analyse it, and determine if it is useful.

Finally, assemble your thoughts into a document, a memo, a manifesto, a powerpoint, or any other format that will help you communicate your vision.

As you fill out your plan, don’t forget to add specific details, not just broad concepts. For example, the concept, “we will reply to every customer inquiry,” is much less useful than this statement: “We will reply to every customer inquiry with thoroughly researched and complete answers to all customer questions, and we will do so in fifteen minutes or less.”

Step 3: Invest in training

“You are your greatest asset. Put your time, effort and money into training, grooming, and encouraging your greatest asset.”
– Tom Hopkins

That word invest doesn’t have to mean a cash outlay. If you, or one of the rockstars on your team, have the ability to train the other members of the team, by all means tackle your training in-house. You and your rockstar employees will have a much better handle on the unique demands of your customers than any trainer from the outside.

But if this is your plan, You will still need to invest the time and attention, as well as the training materials, necessary to have a successful training campaign.

If you need a lot of help, and you don’t think your customer experience issues can be effectively handled in-house, it is time to call in an expert, or at least seek out some professional advice. Obviously, professional trainers or consultants won’t be cheap, but you have to ask yourself, “how much money am I wasting marketing to customers who contact my business and are turned away by sub-standard customer experience?”

Step 4: Insist on consistency

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
– Will Durant

Have you ever eaten at Chick-fil-a? Did you notice how the person taking your order replied when you said, “Thank you”? I’ll bet they replied, “My pleasure”. They always reply, “My pleasure”. Every. Single. Time. That consistency comes from training and a focus on customer experience.

Now, I’m not necessarily saying that your team should behave like a bunch of automatons when dealing with your customers, but I am saying that there should be a set of expectations they are expected to meet with every customer. Every. Single. Time.

Every internet lead should flow through the same series of steps. A phone lead would follow a slightly different process. And a walk-in would have a different process again. But every customer interaction should be held to a very high standard, and should yield some expected results – customer name, contact info, product/service they are interested in, follow-up expectations, etc.

Step 5: Track your progress

“What gets measured gets improved.”
– Peter Drucker

After implementing your plan, it may take some time to really see visible progress, in terms of sales and positive reviews. It will be helpful to set up some milestones to ensure that your business is on the right track. Perhaps break your training into a series of modules and track your employees’ progress through the modules. Also, plan out a series of mystery shops at regular intervals and keep score – not necessarily to single out individuals, but to keep track of overall progress. Customer Experience is a team effort and you will succeed or fail as a team.

The payoff

As your team improves, you will start to see improvement in terms of lead to sale conversions and post sale reviews. This will be followed by improved customer retention and customer referrals. That is the ultimate payoff for your Customer Experience campaign … a steady stream of repeat customers that are more than happy to refer you to their friends.

Have you started using customer service as a marketing tool? If so, what strategies did you use to get there? If not, what’s holding you back.

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Photo courtesy Todd Quackenbush / Unsplash