Ten Ways to Make Your Customers Love–No, Really Love–You.

Do your customers love you? Not the ho-hum, lukewarm, check-the- “generally-satisfied”-box-on-the-survey kind of love. (That’s more in the realm of like . . . sort of.) The kind of love that inspires spontaneous thank-you letters and water cooler comments like “My new computer (or car or insurance policy or gym membership) is great–I highly recommend it!” No? If you suspect your customers aren’t feeling the love, Jeanne Bliss says you’ve got work to do . . . lots of it.

Bliss should know. A former “chief customer zealot” for five market leaders–including Land’s End, a company so beloved that insomniacs would regularly call at 3 a.m. not just to buy a turtleneck but to hear a friendly, respectful voice–she excels in helping companies transform their cultures into customer-respecting powerhouses.

The problem with most companies, she says, is that they simply aren’t structured to act collectively on behalf of customers. People are stuck in their silos making independent decisions, taking isolated actions for the purpose of executing their discipline, achieving good numbers, and earning a good review. And of course the customer experience doesn’t happen neatly down each individual silo; she experiences a company horizontally, across the silos.

“This is the breeding ground for the lack of respect customers feel and the discontent they have with us,” says Bliss. “The typical silo structure bumps the customer disjointedly along to deliver the outcome of its experience. It’s only when the silos clang and clash into one another that the total experience comes together. And the customer becomes the grand guinea pig, experiencing each variation of an organization’s ability, or inability, to work together. Not much customer respect or love results.”

So how can you make your customers love you? Well, first you have to respect them. Bliss offers ten tips for getting started. They’re far from easy, she says, but they’re absolutely necessary. Do them for a while and then you can move on to the “L” word:

1. Eliminate the customer obstacle course. If you asked customers they’d say that the obstacle course for figuring out who to talk to and how and when to get service is over-complicated, conflicting, and just plain out of whack. We have forced customers to try to figure out our organization charts in order to do business with us. Instead of seamlessly executing a customer interaction of, let’s say placing their first order from start to finish, we deliver discontinuity in the experience where the organizational breaks exist. Sales sells the product, but Operations is not given the specifics of what the customer needs so what is delivered is a little off. Who does the customer call? Sales? Operations? Customer service? It is in these hand-offs that customer failures occur, in this customer Bermuda triangle that we’ve created. Simplify the roadmap for customers. Make it clear for them how they can do business with you in a way that’s actually beneficial to them.

2. Stop customer hot potato. He who speaks to the customer first should “own” the customer. There’s nothing worse that sends a signal of disrespect faster than an impatient person on the other end of the line trying to pass a customer off to “someone who can better help you with your problem.” Yeah, right.

3. Give customers a choice. Do not bind your customer into the fake choice of letting them “opt out” of something. Let them know up front that they can decide to get emails, offers, or whatever from you and give them the choice. You may initially build a bigger mailing list by binding customers in with the opt-out policy, but I don’t think it’s something your mom would teach you about respect.

4. De-silo your website. Our websites are often the cobbled together parts created separately by each company division. The terminology is different from area to area, as are the menu structures and logic for getting around the site. What’s accessible online is frequently inconsistent, as is the contact information provided. Even appearance may vary as strong silos create their own “look,” which extends into their section of the website. Depending on what link is clicked, customers feel like they’re entering entirely different companies. Figure out collectively what the message is, what the vitals are that you need from customers, and how you will serve them via your website and work to deliver an on-purpose brand experience. Otherwise you’ll continue to deliver the defaulted brand experience that’s the amalgamation of the site your customers are traversing right now.

5. Consolidate phone numbers. Even in this advanced age of telephony, companies still have a labyrinth of numbers customers need to navigate to talk to someone. All of these grew out of the separate operations deciding on their own that they needed a number to “serve” their customers. Get people together to skinny-down this list and then let customers know about it. There’s no big red button to push to make this happen. It requires the gnarly hard work of collaborating and collective decision making–but get it done already! Customers are fed up.

6. FIX (really) the top ten issues bugging customers. We have created a kind of hysterical customer feedback muscle in the marketplace by over-surveying our customers and asking (ever so thoughtfully) “How can we improve?” Customers have told us what to do and we haven’t moved on the information. You can probably recite the biggest issues right now. Do something about them. Customers read the lack of action as lack of caring and certainly lack of respect. We all over-brain what the customer effort should be. Start by striking these top ten things from your companywide to-do list.

7. Help the frontline to listen. The frontline has been programmed to get a certain output. Sometimes this means closing the call within a time frame; often it includes some kind of up-sell or cross-sell goal. It may be to meet with a quota of customers in a certain time period. Because we’ve programmed the frontline, there’s a predetermined flow of the conversation that makes it one-sided to the company’s advantage. Yet, this is what we’ve done. We’ve robotized our frontline to the customer all over the world. Let them be human, give them the skills for listening and understanding and help the frontline deliver to the customers based on their needs. Talk about respect. It is not a myth that if you can solve a customer problem successfully you have built a more profitable customer. Crunch those numbers–maybe it will help you to make your case for the resources, investment, and commitment required.

8. Deliver what you promise. There is a growing case of corporate memory loss that annoys and aggravates customers every day. A customer calls in a product return and is promised a mailing label that never arrives. An appointment is made for home repair and the workman shows up without the right parts. A promise is made for exceptional extended warranty service, yet the process is sloppy and unwieldy. The customer has to strong-arm his/her way through the corporate maze just to get basic things accomplished. They’re exhausted from the wrestling match, they’re annoyed, and they’re telling everyone they know. And, oh, by the way, when they get the chance, they’re walking.

9. When you make a mistake–right the wrong. If you’ve got egg on your face, for whatever the reason, admit it. Then right the wrong. There’s nothing more grossly frustrating to customers than a company that does something wrong then is either clueless about what they did or won’t admit that they faltered.

10. Work to believe. Very little shreds of respect remain, if any, after we’ve put customers through the third degree that many experience when they encounter a glitch in our products and services and actually need to return a product, put in a claim, or use the warranty service. As tempting as it is to debate customers to uphold a policy to the letter of the law, suspend the cynicism and work to believe your customers. Most are going to honestly relay what is happening to them with your product or service. And because of all the “ifs, ands, and buts” in our policies, we’ve conditioned customers to come in with their dukes up when they have a problem. With good reason. We’ve programmed our frontline to be cynical of customers through the creation of policies that protect the corporation from the lack of judgment of the minority. Work to eliminate the question of doubt about your customers’ integrity. It will do wonders for the attitude and actions that your frontline brings to their interactions with customers.

Here’s the bottom line, says Bliss: Companies need to rearrange ourselves to please our customers rather than forcing customers to navigate our organizational chart. Anything else feels like disrespect to customers. Make this your mantra: Customers defect when the silos don’t connect.

“Customers vote with their feet and decide if they will stay or leave based on their perception of how much we value them and how we treat them,” says Bliss. “And more are leaving every day just because of our inability to do the basic blocking and tackling of delivering our products and services to them. Getting customers to love you has got to start with showing them the respect they deserve by making it painless and eventually a joy to do business with you.”

Jeanne Bliss is the managing partner of Customer Bliss.