It seems to occur when companies oversell goods and services and then are unable to adequately service their accounts. The people whose job it is to interface with the customer tend to be harried, overworked, and somewhat confused.

But the message to the customer is clear. “Go away, get off the phone. I don’t have time for you, you’re lucky to get me at all. Accept my excuses and empty promises or you’ll get even less.”

Any startup or buildup company would certainly go out of business if their representatives sent this message by their words, actions, or inactions. It seems like this kind of experience is a growing danger in some buildout and enterprise companies that grew too fast, promised ongoing results, and filled their service jobs quickly but not necessarily with well-trained professionals.

Poor Customer Service Examples

Here are some of the behaviors we have witnessed from a customer standpoint:

1. Missed Deadlines

“Don’t worry. I’ll have that for you tomorrow,” is the usual promise, evidently to get you off the phone. But then tomorrow comes, and the day after, and there is no communication whatsoever. You have to call or send emails day after day until you receive what they promised. The implication is that it’s up to you as the customer to oversee them as the service provider.

This sends an “I don’t care, you’re not important to me” message. This frustrates the customer and makes them wonder why they did business with the company in the first place. But they’ve already bought the service, and now they’re locked in. The representative knows this and so there is no sense of urgency. They’ve got us over the barrel!

2. Blaming Others

“It’s not my fault, the tech people didn’t get back to me.” Or “Well, that’s what I was told.” These same representatives force the customer to go only through them for all interactions with their company. The customer is at the mercy of the representative. The representative can say anything to the customer with no accountability. This is because the customer can’t access the right people in the company to get a satisfactory answer.

“They’ve changed the rules,” is another common excuse. In this scenario, the representative blames a third-party for not being able to deliver what they promised. While it’s true that rules change, the representative is under no pressure to identify those changes as soon as they occur. Sometimes the representative only finds out about the rule change when the customer complains about nonperformance. Since the customer can only go through a representative, the customer has no way of knowing when the representative was truly aware of any rule change. But the results usually waste the customer’s precious time. Again, this demonstrates no sense of urgency on the part of the representative.

3. Avoiding Work

“You don’t need that fixed anyway.” “Me and my colleagues have decided it’s not necessary and everything works fine just the way it is.” This is a typical tactic to avoid doing the work the customer requests. Even when it’s the company’s responsibility to provide services without glitches, the representative tells the customer that the glitches are okay and don’t need fixing.

This tactic creates an argument between the customer and the representative as to the true need for the fix. The representative takes the position, “I’m the expert, and I’ll be the judge of that.” This is to mask the fact that the work was not done in a timely manner. It’s like, “It doesn’t matter that we didn’t do the work because it wasn’t needed anyway.” It’s another convenient excuse.

Conclusion

We’ve witnessed other tactics of poorly hired or poorly trained representatives working for large companies that can’t service what they’ve sold. These include emphatically stated outright errors, poor or no preparation for meetings, little or no knowledge of account history, poor coordination, and never acknowledging a mistake or a missed self-imposed deadline.

All of these tactics can occur when representatives believe they are going to get paid no matter what happens to the customer. For them, it’s hours put in and they are overworked. So, their goal is to reduce the work any way possible. We’ve seen this problem occur in top-down companies that view customer service as “complaint resolution.”

These tactics ultimately discourage the customer to the point that they feel obligated to warn others that the company can’t live up to its promises. This reputation hurts the company’s sales. But in the meantime, companies that behave like this suffer a great deal of turnover. This is because they don’t treat their employees much different than they treat their customers. The good ones who want to do a good job, and want to work for a company that lives up to its promises will move on. The turnover hurts the relationship with the customer even further.

It’s only a matter of time before these types of companies will implode from their own policies. We’re shopping, how about you?

Who We Are

Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey co-authored the New York Times bestselling business book, The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle, and Heart Built America’s #1 Wine Brand. The book has been selected as recommended reading in the CEO Library for CEO Forum, the C-Suite Book Club, and numerous university classes on business and entrepreneurship. It chronicles their humble beginnings from the laundry room of a rented Sonoma County farmhouse to the board room of E&J Gallo, who ultimately acquired their brand and engaged them as brand consultants. Barefoot is now the world’s largest wine brand.

Beginning with virtually no money and no wine industry experience, they employed innovative ideas to overcome obstacles, create new markets and forge strategic alliances. They pioneered Worthy Cause Marketing and performance-based compensation. They built an internationally bestselling brand and received their industry’s “Hot Brand” award for several consecutive years.

They offer their Guiding Principles for Success (GPS) to help entrepreneurs become successful. Their book, The Entrepreneurial Culture: 23 Ways To Engage and Empower Your People, helps corporations maximize the value of their human resources.

Currently they travel the world leading workshops, trainings, & keynoting at business schools, corporations, conferences. They are regular media guests and contributors to international publications and professional journals. They are C-Suite Network Advisors & Contributing Editors. Visit their popular brand building site at www.consumerbrandbuilders.com.

To make inquiries for keynote speaking, trainings or consulting, please contact sales@thebarefootspirit.com.

The post 3 Overused Tactics of Poor Customer Service appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

If you want to be disruptive, talk to everybody who touches your product. You will soon discover things that folks who have been in the industry for years, and even generations, have overlooked.

Often times in established industries, the top decision makers are isolated and insulated from their workers. They are more concerned with justifying the way things have been done in the past. Even if the workers have a big problems with those practices, chances are they are never heard them at the C-Suite level. Their complaints, suggestions and insights are usually lost in the top down structure of the company itself. Besides, what do they know? They should stop complaining and just do what they are told, right?

Wrong! Their insights are golden! As naive outsiders, we didn’t know any other way but to approach the wine business from the ground up. We started by asking a Bottling Line Manager what our label should look like. This is a guy in overalls, sporting a heavy tool belt, with grit from a full day of working on a humongous bottling machine that needed repairs and adjustments every 20 minutes!

He said, “Well, I’m no expert, but I can tell you that most of the wines we bottle have labels with lots of white space around their logos. They’re easy to read and they don’t have a bunch of curly cues.”  By using his suggestions, we designed a label that today is the fastest selling in the wine industry!

Later when we got into interstate sales, we would hear our brokers and distributers say, “Your product is just not selling in certain stores!” and, “You can’t expect to be a big hit everywhere.” And then they would always add, “Maybe you should reduce your price and send more marketing materials.”

Eventually we decided to check for ourselves on those stores where our product was “not moving.” One such store was part of big chain where our product was moving well, just not this particular store.

When we got to the store and made friends with the clerk, he showed us it wasn’t even on the shelf and our shelf space was taken by a competitor. But why? We went in the back room and discovered that the wrong type of wine had been delivered. It was ours all right, but not the type they had ordered. And it had just been sitting there – for months!

When we went to our local distributer’s Sales Manager he passed the blame on to the “those warehouse guys.” When we went to the Warehouse Manager, he blamed Eddie the Forklift Operator who picks out the goods for delivery.

We came back at midnight when Eddie’s shift began. “So, what’s up with the wrong product delivery, Eddie?” we asked. “It’s so dark in here and the labels are so small it’s a wonder that anything get delivered right,” he snapped. “Well, should we make our labels bigger?” we asked. “No,” he said, “Just put each type in a different colored box!” We did just that! It reduced our missed deliveries, and increased our sales all over the country. Plus, now the clerks loved to stack “those colorful boxes.”

Our business thrived on the insights of people in “low” places. Yours can too! Learn to make friends in “low” places, and pay close attention to what they have to say.

Who We Are

Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey co-authored the New York Times bestselling business book, The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle, and Heart Built America’s #1 Wine Brand. The book has been selected as recommended reading in the CEO Library for CEO Forum, the C-Suite Book Club, and numerous university classes on business and entrepreneurship. It chronicles their humble beginnings from the laundry room of a rented Sonoma County farmhouse to the board room of E&J Gallo, who ultimately acquired their brand and engaged them as brand consultants. Barefoot is now the world’s largest wine brand.

Beginning with virtually no money and no wine industry experience, they employed innovative ideas to overcome obstacles, create new markets and forge strategic alliances. They pioneered Worthy Cause Marketing and performance-based compensation. They built an internationally bestselling brand and received their industry’s “Hot Brand” award for several consecutive years.

They offer their Guiding Principles for Success (GPS) to help entrepreneurs become successful. Their book, The Entrepreneurial Culture: 23 Ways To Engage and Empower Your People, helps corporations maximize the value of their human resources.

Currently they travel the world leading workshops, trainings, & keynoting at business schools, corporations, conferences. They are regular media guests and contributors to international publications and professional journals. They are C-Suite Network Advisors & Contributing Editors. Visit their popular brand building site at www.consumerbrandbuilders.com.

To make inquiries for keynote speaking, trainings or consulting, please contact sales@thebarefootspirit.com.

The post Get Some Diamonds from the People Doing the Actual Work appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

For the most part, great employees are not found, they’re made. In order to delegate and allow your company to grow, you really have no choice.

All this takes time, energy, preparation and lots of patience, but by working together in concert, you can see wonders.

1. Good Seed. Start with people who demonstrate a high degree of integrity, take responsibility for their own behavior and have a history of long-term commitment. They should be willing to learn and extrapolate conceptual ideas and apply them to new situations. A good way to test this is to give the applicant a verbal run down of the job, the company’s challenges and your expectations for the position. Then, have them send you a one-page summary on a deadline. This will tell you volumes.

2. Good Ground. Make sure their job is clearly defined in writing and explains how your products and services produce the income to pay their salary, bonus and benefits. We used to give our people a “Money Map”. It started with the consumer and worked its way back through distribution, production, and all the payables to finally get to their check. This gave them respect for how and where the money came from – the customer, of course.

3. Care. You must inspect what you expect, especially in the first year. Once you are convinced you have “good seed” it’s worth your while to regularly spend time with them answering questions and mentoring. Listen to what’s behind their questions to discover what they really need to excel in their new position.

4. Light and Space. Give them permission to make mistakes. That’s what allows them to develop into the independent decision makers you need to confidently delegate. To “make those mistakes right,” have them write down what needs to be done to prevent those mistakes in the future. Have them make new polices, procedures, checklists, sign-offs, or whatever, but they have to document everything. Consider rewriting their job description to fit their real skill set.

5. Nutrients. Give them the training they need, in person and in writing. If a document doesn’t exist, have them write it. Create a mini manual for every job with the growing list of frequently asked questions and as many charts and graphs as are necessary to depict processes, relationships and decisions. Provide outside training with conferences, or field time with sales or production staff. The more they understand your total operation, the faster they will become invaluable.

6. Time. How much time you give them before they “get it” really depends on the position, their ability to learn, and how much faith you have in them personally. Some folks take longer but “get it” at a core level. Others may learn a specific process quickly, but miss the big picture. So it’s a judgment call based on your assessment of their progress and conceptual understandings, and the preparation, time and energy you have put in.

Even if you do these essentials, there’s no guarantee of success, but you will be much more likely to succeed. To grow those new hires into fruitful producers it takes preparation, permission and patience.

Who We Are

Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey co-authored the New York Times bestselling business book, The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle, and Heart Built America’s #1 Wine Brand. The book has been selected as recommended reading in the CEO Library for CEO Forum, the C-Suite Book Club, and numerous university classes on business and entrepreneurship. It chronicles their humble beginnings from the laundry room of a rented Sonoma County farmhouse to the board room of E&J Gallo, who ultimately acquired their brand and engaged them as brand consultants. Barefoot is now the world’s largest wine brand.

Beginning with virtually no money and no wine industry experience, they employed innovative ideas to overcome obstacles, create new markets and forge strategic alliances. They pioneered Worthy Cause Marketing and performance-based compensation. They built an internationally bestselling brand and received their industry’s “Hot Brand” award for several consecutive years.

They offer their Guiding Principles for Success (GPS) to help entrepreneurs become successful. Their book, The Entrepreneurial Culture: 23 Ways To Engage and Empower Your People, helps corporations maximize the value of their human resources.

Currently they travel the world leading workshops, trainings, & keynoting at business schools, corporations, conferences. They are regular media guests and contributors to international publications and professional journals. They are C-Suite Network Advisors & Contributing Editors. Visit their popular brand building site at www.consumerbrandbuilders.com.

To make inquiries for keynote speaking, trainings or consulting, please contact sales@thebarefootspirit.com.

The post Successful Hiring takes Preparation, Permission and Patience appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.