Predictive Customer Service is the Future of Shock and Awe

Customer service is the new marketing, and being good at it requires knowing how to hug your haters. This new model, like most things, costs time, money, and energy—and—having the right game plan. Right now, hugging your haters makes customers who complain feel heard and cared about. But in the future, will that be enough to wow your audience?

Consider Legitimately Improving Your Customer Service

Perhaps the best way to invest your resources is to legitimately improve your customer experience so that fewer people have any reason to complain.

If you‘re paying attention to the insights your haters provide in every complaint, you probably know the weak parts of your business. You know where and when customer satisfaction is likely to dip.

So instead of waiting for people to complain, find a way to proactively head them off at the pass. The best way to handle complaints is to eliminate them.
 This doesn‘t mean that you make it harder to complain. It means using what you know and what consumers tell you to improve your business, and reaching out proactively in circumstances where a complaint may be forthcoming.

Nowhere is it written that the customer has to make the first move. Contact them before they contact you, and watch their customer advocacy soar!

“Better communication along the customer journey is a major missed opportunity,” claims Michael Allense, Senior Strategic Consulting Director at MaritzCX. “It is not just about fixing problems or being there when the customer expresses a need, but it is also being proactive throughout the customer journey. This requires companies to get away from a transactional customer service and customer experience mentality that is more inwardly focused on operations and shift to a customer journey-focused mentality that is centered on the customers‘ needs and the relationship as a whole.”

Debbie Goldberg at Fresh Brothers Pizza lives this proactive principle. “Sometimes, we look at our delivery times, and if we are delivering five to ten minutes later than what we quoted the customer, we automatically send gift certificates to those people. It might be a coupon code for 15% off next time, or it might be a $10 gift certificate,” she says. “It really surprises people. Because sometimes they didn‘t even think there was an issue, but we know it was going to be an issue.”

Better Communication Is a Major Missed Opportunity

The ability to predict a complaint or problem and solve it before patrons notice it is customer experience sorcery of the very best kind. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines has mastered this magic, and in a very complex and fast-moving environment at Amsterdam‘s Schiphol International Airport.

A Company to Model: KLM Royal Dutch Airlines

“People lose stuff on planes,” says Karlijn Vogel-Meijer, Global Director of Social Media at KLM. “Usually, they put their iPads in a seat pocket or something like that. They forget about it, they run off the plane, and then suddenly, their iPad is lost. What they usually do is they tweet or post and they say ‘Okay, my iPad was in seat pocket 2-D on this flight, going to this destination. Have you found it?’”

According to Vogel-Meijer, the airline‘s procedure used to be that fliers had to visit the company website, and submit a lost items form. Then, after five days, customers could call KLM to see if the item has been found. 

It‘s a common, albeit clunky, process used by many airlines.
 Most of the items lost on a plane are quickly found by the flight attendant and cleaning crews as they prepare for the next flight. They used to take found items to the KLM transfer desk with a note that said “this was found in seat 2D” and hopefully the airline could match it up with the online forms a few days later. Amsterdam, however, is a major stopover on trans-Europe and other flight paths, and many fliers who forget personal belongings on the plane are still in the airport, waiting for their connecting flights, when their items are found by the crew.

A member of Vogel-Meijer‘s social media team who works at the airport found a better way to reconnect customers with their lost items. Armed with only a tablet computer and a smartphone, she completely changed customer service from reactive to proactive.

Without a committee meeting or official policy change—the KLM culture emphasizes employee initiatives—she asked flight crews to call her instead of taking found items to a transfer desk. On her tablet, she could then look up the customer‘s itinerary and discover that their next flight is leaving from gate 37, to Paris, in 45 minutes.

“She rushes immediately to the gate, looks for Mr. Jensen, and tells him ‘Could it be that you lost something?' Mostly, they don‘t even know they have lost it yet, and suddenly they have their iPad back,” explains Vogel-Meijer.

Proactive Customer Service Works

This proactive program has been so successful it‘s expanded to an entire team at Schiphol airport, staffed mostly by flight crew members who are unable to fly due to pregnancy or other factors. They work temporarily in this real-time lost and found center, connecting items with their owners.

Today, this predictive approach is remarkable and extraordinary. But your customers will expect it from you, in as few as five years. According to research from Walker, “The customer of 2020 will be more informed and in charge of the experience they receive. They will expect companies to know their individual needs and personalize the experience. Immediate resolution will not be fast enough as customers will expect companies to proactively address their current and future needs.”

Drawn from Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers, about which Guy Kawasaki says: "This is a landmark book in the history of customer service.” Written by Jay Baer, Hug Your Haters is the first customer service and customer experience book written for the modern, mobile era and is based on proprietary research and more than 70 exclusive interviews. 

Jay will be speaking at the Modern Marketing Experience on Wednesday, April 27th in the Grand Garden Arena. There is still time to sign up.  

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