Authors: Bridget Brennan
Why She Buys (29 page)
It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it
The age-old irony is that the people entrusted to deliver the brand in its most intimate form—through one-on-one communication in customer call centers—are usually the lowest paid and least respected in a corporation. They don’t live in the same neighborhoods as middle management, and you can bet they don’t go to the same parties. Hiring better-educated people is going to become increasingly important as e-mail becomes a more popular vehicle for customer service, making good grammar skills necessary.
The elephant in the room is the reality of offshoring customer service. Opinion Research Corporation, a market research
firm, conducts a regular series of studies on “ouch points” that impact customer service. What was the number one “ouch point” in a recent study? Representatives who are hard to understand because of a thick accent. This data is underscored by the Yankelovich study, which shows that 48 percent of people are outraged by the fact that companies try to keep the prices of their products down by moving customer-service call centers overseas.
With or without the language barrier, offshoring can generate ill will because it says to your customers,
We are trying to deal with you as cheaply as possible, no matter how much money you have spent with us
. It can feel like a slap in the face when the companies that spend so much time chasing us, interrupting our days with nonstop marketing messages in elevators, buses, and even toilet stalls, would actually prefer not to speak to us when we try to initiate contact, or would attempt to do so in the cheapest way possible.
Southwest Airlines: Customer Service with LUV
I
SN’T
it ironic that the most profitable airline in the industry also has the best customer service?
Since 1987, Southwest Airlines has consistently received the fewest overall customer complaints of any U.S. airline.
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When someone calls Southwest Airlines’ customer service line, the phone rolls right over to a real human being. The company doesn’t outsource its customer service department, and its people are empowered to deal with complex issues right over the phone. Strangely enough for corporate
America, the customer service representatives are not only nice, they’re funny. It’s disarming.
I suppose when you have a founder (Herb Kelleher) who doesn’t hesitate to dress in drag or settle lawsuits with arm wrestling, the culture trickles down to customer service. “We hire on personality,” says Jim Ruppel, the understated guy who runs the customer relations department for Southwest. “We train our employees to use common sense and good judgment, and ask them to have fun—and to encourage our customers to have fun, too.” If you’ve ever flown Southwest, you’re aware the same philosophy is clearly encouraged with their flight attendants, who are known to sing during announcements and tell salty jokes as they hand out the nuts. The airline also has the best profitability record, on-time record, and safety record in the industry. Southwest staffs its call centers with employees who’ve been indoctrinated in the company’s empowering-yet-laid-back culture. “We don’t offshore customer service because we have the philosophy that no one will treat our customers as well as Southwest’s own employees will,” says Ruppel.
And treat them well they do. Southwest doesn’t suffer from the traditionally high turnover rates of most customer service centers. Ruppel credits this to the fact that employees are given latitude to use their own good judgment in resolving customer issues. “Essentially, they have the same authority I do,” he says. “We have a quality assurance process, but we give them the opportunity to formulate what they think is the best customer response, and this is what keeps their job satisfaction a little bit higher,” he explains. “When I lose people, I usually lose them to other departments at Southwest, who love hiring these people because they are willing to make decisions.”
I interviewed Melissa, a customer of Southwest Airlines who is a mother of two and a native of St. Louis. Southwest showed her exemplary customer service on what turned out to be the worst day of her life. This is her story.
I fly Southwest all the time with my two young daughters, because my husband is in a medical residency program, so it’s either fly by myself with the kids to see the grandparents or don’t fly at all
.
When my daughter Megan was a young toddler, I was flying to St. Louis on Southwest when she had a seizure on the airplane. She had never had one before, and was shaking uncontrollably, completely unresponsive. I was a terrified new mother traveling alone. We were about thirty minutes from St. Louis, flying over cornfields, and there was no place to land the plane. We had to wait to get to the St. Louis airport. The Southwest flight attendant was incredible to me. He kept telling me, “She’s breathing, she’s going to be okay,” and helped calm me down. He called 911 to order paramedics to meet us at the gate, and he had my parents paged inside the airport. He held my child a lot and kept informing me of what was going on. He never left my side
.
Sure enough, when we landed, everyone let me off the plane first, and there were paramedics standing at the gate ready for me. They took one look at my daughter and knew instantly that she’d had a febrile seizure, caused by a quick spike in temperature, and that there would be no residual damage. My story has a happy ending, but it doesn’t end there. It wasn’t just the individual
Southwest flight attendant that was so special, it was the company itself
.
Before we had taken off that day, my daughter had made friends with another little girl she met at the gate. During Megan’s seizure on the plane, I could see this young girl watching the whole episode from a nearby row. Her eyes were like saucers, and I knew she was terrified that her new little friend was going to die. I wrote Southwest after the incident to praise them for their service, and to let them know that Megan was fine. I also mentioned my concern for the other little girl, who I was afraid would be too terrified to ever step on an airplane again. I knew the little girl’s first name, but I didn’t know her last name, and I was hoping Southwest could find her and let her know that her little friend had made it
.
Soon afterward, Southwest wrote to let me know that they had indeed identified the little girl and written to her family on my behalf. They gave me a copy of the letter they had sent to the family. Southwest also sent me a personalized letter saying they were happy to hear that Megan was all right, along with a gift of a stuffed toy airplane for her. The company and its people were amazing on what was, without a doubt, the worst day of my life, and their customer service afterward was just as incredible. As long as I have a choice, I will always fly Southwest, and I have told this story about their wonderful service to more people than I can remember
.
Southwest Airlines’ customer service mirrors its marketing as well as its corporate culture. With a profitability
record unmatched by any other airline, the folks at Southwest have demonstrated that when you take care of your customers, the business takes care of itself.
Lessons for your business
Takeaways from Southwest Airlines include:
•
Customer service policies are a reflection of your brand
.
If what you do in customer service isn’t reinforcing your brand, it’s probably hurting it, as well as decreasing the effectiveness of your marketing budget.
•
To consumers, customer service is just another aspect of marketing
.
The personality people see in commercials and advertisements is what they expect when they contact your company. Take the time to call or e-mail your company yourself, to see whether there’s a disconnect between your marketing and your customer service messaging.
•
Great customer service drives word-of-mouth publicity
.
When women have an exceptional personal experience with a brand, they are apt to tell everyone they know. In a highly commoditized world, it can be a powerful differentiator for your business.
Customer Service Is Marketing
A
S
this chapter comes to a close, it bears repeating:
customer service is marketing
, especially to your women customers. The next time you gather your team together to strategize about marketing plans, consider the back end of the process, not just the front end. All the things that happen
after
you acquire your customer are part of the marketing process, too.
Checklist for Customer Service with Female Gender Appeal
Offer as many different customer-service contact methods as possible