Don’t fall in love with your product, fall in love with your client.
Your company has a certain customer service DNA and it is based on the hierarchy of what’s most important to you, the emotional stake in your product or your client. If you love your product first and foremost, you might become contentious, argumentative and confrontational with a client while defending your product. What the client will hear is “I don’t care about your problems, my product is more important”. Instead the client wants to hear “all I care about is fixing your problems, nothing else matters”.
Customer service challenges are the biggest opportunities we have as a company to show what we’re truly made of. We can shine in those moments and give our clients something to write home about. When they hear that we are willing to sacrifice our own egos on the alter of customer service, their hearts will melt.
Remember the old saying “the customer is always right”? Well this is not correct. The customer is quite often wrong, but if you make the customer wrong, then they will find a provider that makes them right. So the saying is really “the customer is never wrong”. Harry Beckwith (Selling the Invisible) had a single line in one of his books that was worth the entire price of the book alone. I have heard many a business owner argue that they didn’t want to “spoil” their clients by giving them too much of what they wanted. Harry said it best “Find out what your customers would love and then….give it to them”. How could anybody compete with a company with this type of service ethic.
Your customer service DNA is formed around the water cooler and in company meetings. The language you use to describe customers in those settings and what they deserve to get, ALWAYS carries over to the next customer service call. Employees can tell the difference between “lip service” and real respect for customers. They can always tell what is more important to management, protecting clients, or protecting the product.
So to repeat…fall in love with your client and not your product. Remember only one of these gives you money.