An article in the Business Mirror today talks about the growing backlash toward outsourced customer service. It discusses Dell’s new service that provides North American based customer service, for an extra fee.

Dell finally gets the message that their customer want support staff who can actually help them, rather than read from a script, and their solution is to charge for it. To me this is like the airlines charging customers to buy a ticket through a real person rather than the Internet.

By now we all know President-elect Barack Obama has stormed the American political scene like a hurricane, a tornado, a typhoon and a tsunami all rolled into one. In a few short years, he has gone from “Obama who?” to the President-elect of the USA and a hugely popular man both in the US and abroad.

For many, this begs the question “How does he do it?”

I won’t try to answer every aspect of this question. But I will offer one explanation. My answer comes with a little help from Nicole Bacharan, a political scientist in Paris who focuses on French-American relations. I heard her interviewed this morning on National Public Radio and she offered this observation

Yesterday a massive fire engulfed a large apartment complex in my city. While fire fighters from 6 communities fought the blaze, residents shivered in sub-zero temperatures. It was three days before Christmas and everything they owned was going up in smoke.

It was a miracle nobody was injured. But the tragedy is still monumental for the people who lost their homes. And, for a business, it’s hard to imagine a more difficult situation to be in.

Kevin Stirtz’s Amazing Service Rule #25

Remember your customer’s name.

Years ago I heard a quote that goes something like: “Nothing is sweeter than the sound of a person’s own name.” I don’t know who first said this but I agree with them. When we hear someone say our name, it brings us closer to that person. It suggests they are a friend. At the very least it says they care enough to know and use our name.

When you use a customer’s name,

On a recent YouTube jaunt, I found this “customer service” video. It’s funny because of the setup. The “caller” is Jack Nicholson, or rather select audio clips of big Jack from his movies. The clips are inserted into the phone call skillfully enough that two employees at this pizza place believed it was a real person calling.

But beyond funny, it’s also instructional. The employees in this call are very good. They never get upset or rude with “Jack”. They never hang up. They stay with him and try to accommodate his requests. But they’re also consistent in what they ask of him – so they can help him.

From Freep.com comes this bit of news: “Credit card crackdown hits in 2010″ but the subtitle tells the real story:

“Federal regulators approve new rules to help consumers”.

From the article:

“The new rules come after years and years of complaints from angry consumers who had been dinged and zinged by higher rates, late fees and everything imaginable. The Federal Reserve received more than 60,000 comments.”

I can’t speak for anyone else but I know what it’s like to get “dinged” by a credit card company because I

Yesterday while listening to NPR I heard a discussion about tipping trends for service people. A part of the discussion focused on tipping in restaurants and how many people tip less during a recession and some (a precious few) actually tip more.

As a part of the program they had listeners call in to share their thoughts. I was surprised at how many people who called in were servers who had this advice for the dining public:

“If you can’t afford to tip your server well, please do not dine out.”

At first I could not believe what I was hearing. That’s like someone saying,

In my work, I spend a fair amount of time helping people bring change to their companies. That’s what improving customer service is all about. The companies that make a substantial and permanent improvement in how they serve their customers have discovered how to change their organizations.

Seth Godin has some useful things to say about this. Here’s a great example  from his latest book, Tribes:

Slogans are worthless as a marketing tool. It’s not their fault. It’s because we’re asking them to do something they’re not built to do. It’s like trying to win the Daytona 500 with a Yugo. The poor thing just doesn’t have the horsepower (or any other capabilities) to do the job. The same is true with slogans.

You are much better off if you scrap the whole idea of a slogan and replace it with a Unified Message. Here’s why.

While surfing YouTube, I found this video about customer service at Lowes. It shows how Lowes sees customer service” as an asset and a high priority. In this video, a Lowes customer tells how their new refrigerator (bought from and installed by Lowes) leaked all over their kitchen floor, ruining it. Rather than argue with the customer or try to minimize their exposure, Lowes simply replaced the floor.

Here’s an interesting note from MarketWatch. They report that almost two-thirds of telcommunications companies in North America fail to respond to customer requests within 24 hours. 

In a recent survey released by eGain Communications Corp., they found that 20% of communications companies (cable, telcos, satellite TV/radio and mobile phone) failed to offer any response to inquires from customers. Another 45% did not respond within 24 hours.

This survey was done using email communications.

New years are wonderful because they give us the ability to improve, to learn from our experience and then start over and do better. It’s like shaking the Etch A Sketch and being rewarded with a blank canvas to create another work of art. But in this case, the work of art is our business. Use this opportunity to plan how you will improve your business in 2009.

One of the ways to improve your business is to improve customer service. In a recent report, Accenture found that more customers than ever are abandoning companies because of bad service. Now is the time to create (or beef up) your customer service improvement plans. And to help you, here are five Amazing Service Resolutions to get you started.