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The time for this free webinar has passed. If you are interested in having this webinar presented to your group or organization, please contact us here. If you want to learn more about the 7 Service Triggers, pick up a copy of Be Your Customer’s Hero. The 7 Service Triggers are covered in depth in section 3 of the book.
Let’s face it every one of our customers has been burned before. Somewhere, somehow, sometime, an organization gave them a terrible customer experience — one where they felt abused, disrespected, and even taken advantage of.
Most likely, it’s happened more than once.
The challenge for us as customer facing professionals is that these experiences do not disappear from the customer’s mind when the experience is over; they leave a lasting scar that eventually becomes a defense mechanism.
“Won’t get fooled again.”
“Once bitten, twice shy.”
“Fool me once shame on you; fool me twice shame on me.”
As the above phrases demonstrate, no one likes to feel like a fool, and people erect significant defenses to prevent it from happening.
Human beings are wired more simply than you might think: we seek to find pleasure and avoid pain. When we have a bad experience, our defenses rise to try to avoid having the same experience again.
Ironically, these defenses result in customers tending to expect bad treatment and unintentionally receiving more of it as a result.
As customer facing professionals, this lands squarely on our doorstep.
Back in January 2012, I wrote a blog post entitled Why Your Awful Customer Service Sucks for Me. In that post, I addressed a fictional business owner that had provided poor customer service:
I should thank you for setting the bar so low that I barely have to raise my foot to step over it. … You’ve made looking good all too easy. So, maybe I should thank you. Then again, maybe not.
You see, while you would think that we would be able to shine by virtue of comparison to your [terrible] customer experience, looking for better is not the dominant mindset that your customers walk away with. When your customers come to me, they are usually not thinking anything is better than that last place, when they come to me they are thinking how is this place going to try to screw me. …
You’ve sent me a customer who is jaded, tired, defensive and ready to find conspiracies and malicious intent at the first sign of something going wrong.
Actually, you haven’t sent me a customer; you’ve sent me a victim of Post-Traumatic Shopping Disorder. It will take me months, maybe years, to gain this person’s trust and to turn them into a profitable customer that does not need hand holding and reassurance at every step of the customer experience.
Customers do not come to us as a blank canvas. Most have been burned before, and most have setup varying ways to avoid being burned again.
I call these Service Triggers, and I have identified seven of them that you must understand to be able to work successfully with the modern consumer.
The 7 Service Triggers that are likely to create an automatic reaction in customers are as follows:
Over the many years I’ve studied customer interactions, I’ve found the service triggers above to be the most common. While each customer will have individual triggers, you will find that most customers possess a combination of the various triggers.
You will also find that some customers that have none of the triggers and others that have all of them. Those extremes would represent your easiest and most difficult customers.
The majority of customers, however, have some of these triggers in varying degrees of intensity.
On Thursday January 9 at 1:00pm EDT, we are offering a free webinar that will explore each of the 7 service triggers and give you real world techniques you can use to address them. You will be able to take these techniques back to your team or, better yet, have your team sign up for the webinar.
One of the reasons we decided to focus our first webinar on the 7 service triggers is that the information contained in the service triggers is foundational.
Hero-Class® Customer Service begins with a basic understanding of the customer mindset. Here are some of the takeaways you will receive in Mastering the 7 Service Triggers.
Mastering the 7 Service Triggers will provide you a better understanding of your customers as well as better skills for communicating with them.
Click here to sign up for the webinar.
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If you set your goals low enough, you will never be disappointed, huh?….:).
My business (insurance) seems to have more bad customer experiences than good. Being a glass half-full kind of guy, this is what creates opportunity; sometimes for you, sometimes against you.
Whether it costs you an account or not, I try to at least communicate and if you want to beat me up verbally then go at it; but I’m here and I didn’t go ‘silent’ on you.
In my world, most bad customer experiences is a financial one and sometimes you just can’t make it better. That’s why I try to do a better job on the front end of educating so at least they know what to expect if certain events happen…and I’m there to help walk them through it.
I’m interested in the Webinar and would like to pass this through to our IT/social person and get our service team on board. They are usually so busy putting out fires they don’t have the opportunity to see things like this.
Ready to pop a cap to two? The weather is getting right….
It’s interesting Bill. When I was writing about the service trigger “being powerless,” I thought a lot about how many people can feel with insurance. They don’t know they are with a company with bad service until there is a claim or a problem, then it is too late and they feel completely powerless.
You make a terrific point about not going silent — it’s that abandonment thing, and it gets customers riled up quickly.
Would love to have as many LU people as possible on the webinar. Thanks for passing it along!
I responded to you over at Kaarina’s place earlier. Let’s make it happen sometime in Dec.