As business leaders, we all want to believe that we provide outstandingly great customer service.  More importantly, we want our customers to believe it as well.  But sometimes delivering fantastic customer service eludes us.  In her book, I Love You More Than My Dog: Five Decisions That Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad, Jeanne Bliss provides great case studies of wonderful companies we would love to mimic.  The book covers seven chapters in just 224 pages and is a must-read for every business leader.  Bliss is a good writer with a vast experience in customer service having worked at Symantec, AAA, and Costco.  You won’t be disappointed adding this one to your office library. photo credit: visualpanic via photopin cc Bliss titles each chapter of her book with a decision, such as Decide to Believe, and Decide to Be There.  These principles are based on Bliss’ examination of exceptional companies such as Zappos, The Container Store, Harley Davidson, Netflix, Rackspace, Southwest Airlines, and Trader Joe’s.  As good as every chapter is, I won’t cover all seven, but I will leave you with three nuggets to chew on for improving your own company’s customer service record.

I. Be a Believer

In the chapter, Decide to Believe, Bliss stresses the importance of believing in the process before you begin to make changes to your customer service strategy.  She emphasizes that you believe in the good judgment of the people that you hire; in the truth of your customer’s words; in more trust than rules; in more training than policies; and believe that trusted and prepared employees provide exceptional customer service. Bliss gives the example of Zane’s Cycles, a $13 million in sales per year Connecticut bicycle retailer.  The company encourages customers to test ride their bicycles with no questions asked.  These are bicycles costing up to $6,000 each.  Out of the 4,000 bikes sold each year, only five were stolen.  Now that is truly trusting the customer and explains the company’s high sales volume. Key Point: Believing in the creation of extreme customer loyalty is the first step to making change to your current system.  Begin today to believe in your hiring process (or change it), and trust your team, vendors, and customers.

II. Be There and Be Real

Two chapters in the book, Decide to Be Real, and Decide to Be There, offer great advice for us to  implement as we strive to generate better customer loyalty.  Being real means to make decisions based from the customer’s perspective.  It means to communicate personally and without all the formality we typically put up first when dealing with customers.  It also means to encourage your team members to have a personality and let it shine through during customers interactions. To be there means to look deep to see if your customer’s lives inform the behavior and actions of your operation of business.  In other words, do you cater to them or set the pace for them to follow.  Can your customers easily tell the story of the experience that you and your team deliver? Key Point: Bliss gives the example of Zara, a trendy fashion store that invests money into getting the latest fashion in the store within 15 days instead of investing heavily into advertising.  Think of how you can provide for what your customers want rather than what you think they should have.  Learn to really listen.

III. Creating Customer Loyalty Means Having to Say, “I’m Sorry”

Chapter six of I Love You More Than My Dog is titled, Decide to Say Sorry and is a study that reveals how a company reacts to adversity truly reflects the human side of the business.  Companies that are most admired are those that have learned to repair the emotional connection between the company and the customer.  Honoring those impacted by a bad experience and doing it swiftly and with humility restores confidence in clients. One of the examples that Bliss cites is when in 2008, Netflix decided to notify all its customers about a glitch that might have caused shipments to arrive late.  Most of the company’s customers never noticed the glitch, but all remembered the apology. Key Point: When you receive a legitimate customer complaint, don’t make excuses right out of the gate.  First, offer an apology for any inconvenience and then make it right.  Never follow an apology with a “but.” A thorough read of I Love You More Than I Love My Dog will save you years of headaches and loss business down the road.  Pick up a copy today and enjoy.  In the meantime, start applying these three key points to begin paving a way for greater customer loyalty.

Johnny Duncan, President of Duncan Consulting, Inc., is a business writer and consultant partnering with business leaders to provide workforce management solutions including leadership coaching, customer service training, people-to-job matches, copywriting, and conflict resolution.  He can be reached at johnny@duncanconsult.com or by calling 407-739-0718.