Astounding Language

I’ll always feel warmly about Conrad’s restaurant, in Glendale, California.

On the morning of the Northridge earthquake, Conrad’s was the only restaurant in town that opened for business, and stayed open until the last customer went home. (For the record, I had a jumbo burger with Swiss cheese, grilled onions, fries, and two chocolate shakes with lots of whipped cream and extra cherries on top.)

The line of hungry patrons shoe-laced down the block, but instead of being grumpy, everyone was smiling, happy to be alive, and bursting with their own quake stories to share with the strangers all around them.

What was truly extraordinary was the fact that Conrad’s did the ordinary, under exceptional circumstances. It opened for business-as-usual.

Undoubtedly, it had a skeleton crew, because freeways were damaged and closed, and some workers couldn’t make it in for their shifts. But enough servers and hosts were there for us, and this very fact exceeded, I’m sure, most people’s expectations.

Which of course, proves a point: You don’t have to provide “legendary” or “heroic” or otherwise spectacular service to succeed. You merely have to exceed people’s expectations as a way to consistently create customer satisfaction.

The problem is most companies do the opposite. They crow about how capable they are at providing top service, citing surveys that they have sponsored and often manipulated to appear better than they really are.

“Your call is important to us” is repeated incessantly on hold. Some service reps are even trained to ask one of the dumbest questions imaginable: “How can I provide you with exceptional service, today?”

In reality, most of us would be thrilled to replace this self-serving rhetoric with the basics. We really want service folks to:

Be there for us when we need them.

Be competent and well trained.

Be quick to address our problems and to solve them.

Be upbeat, and grateful for the opportunity to have our patronage, and

Be done!

To elevate our customers’ hopes, and then dash them, is utterly self-defeating. It reminds me of what I used to hear as a kid-athlete. It’s ok to boast, but you better be really, really good, in every single contest. Otherwise, the first time you screw-up, you’ll be razzed, relentlessly.

Moral: Be modest. Nice and humble does it every time.

If you’re modest, and simply competent, you’ll be appreciated and you’ll win customer loyalty.

That’s the secret to Conrad’s decades-long success.

Dr. Gary S. Goodman is a popular keynote speaker, consultant, and seminar leader and the best-selling author of 12 books. He is the author of the Nightingale-Conant audio program, The Law Of Large Numbers: How To Make Success Inevitable. Gary teaches Entrepreneurship and Consulting at UCLA Extension, and he is President of Customersatisfaction.com and The Goodman Organization. He can be reached at gary@customersatisfaction.com.

When I am referred to the customer service department of a large company I let out a big groan. The dreaded customer service department is often a clearing house for questions and complaints. This is a typical telephone conversation I have had with a one of these departments:

Ring Ring. Recorded message: “We are sorry but all our representatives
are busy right now. You are held in a queue….” you know the rest. Mozart
Jupiter Symphony. The “held in queue” message and Mozart cycle many
times as 2 minutes pass, then 3, 4 until, after 6 minutes a female voice says:

“Thank you for calling customer service. What is you customer
number?”. Now what kind of state will a typical caller be in at this point
in time? I mean what are customers expected to do perched on the end of a
telephone line for 6 minutes. File their nails? Read the paper? We are all
different. Some of us will calmly accept these things and wait. Others build up
a head of steam. A small puff of steam after a couple minutes turns into a sauna
at 4 minutes and into an inferno by 6 minutes. I am in this latter camp.

So by now my original enquiry has taken second place as I object to my life
being wasted in this way.

Me: I would like to complain….
Customer Service [Interrupts]: What is your customer number, sir
Me: I have had to wait on the line for 6 minutes and I would like to complain
about it
Customer Service: I am sorry about that, sir. What is your customer number?

I am now more incensed because I can tell that this person is not sorry at
all. Why should she feel my pain? She doesn’t know me. I am just a number to her
and she is more interested in getting this number than even knowing my name. It
would not be natural for her to feel real sorrow for me. No, she says she is
sorry, but she plainly is not. This would not normally be a big deal, but
remember that my head of steam is starting to spew out of my ears and I am
getting very edgy.

Me: I want you to reimburse the cost of this telephone call. Why have you
left me on hold for so long?
Customer Service: We have been very busy
Me: But why should that be my problem?
Customer Service: We are a very large company with a lot of customers and you
need to wait your turn

And that’s another thing. Customer service staff who tell me what I need to
do all the time. I digress…

Me: If you are so successful, why don’t you take on more staff to answer
the telephone?
Customer Service: Sir, I need your customer number to process your complaint.

Now, the next bit is the body blow, the killer word that stops most customer
service personnel in their tracks. And the word is: WHY.

Me: Why?
[Pause] Customer Service: That is the procedure, sir.
Me: Well that is not MY procedure.
Customer Service: I am sorry sir but I cannot….
Me: [Interrupts]: Who is in charge of writing the procedure?
Customer Service: I cannot tell you that information, sir.
Me: I want to speak with your boss.
Customer Service: My boss is busy right now. You can call back later
Me: Please leave a message with your boss to call me….
Customer Service: You will need to call US, sir.

Here we go…. Me: WHY?
Customer Service: We are not an outbound call operation, sir.
Me: Why?
Customer Service: I am terminating this call sir. Goodbye.

The above is a virtual transcript from a real conversation and represents
many that I have had. I was obviously getting nowhere. In this situation you may
as well end the call. But why not do it in style? Don’t be rude to the customer
service representative. That would surely put you onto their level. Don’t slam
the phone down either. No, in order to maintain your dignity and maintain the
moral high ground you can escape from customer service hell by dropping in the
“why” word a few times. I virtually terminated the call myself by
repeating the WHY word. This is akin to getting a computer to work out the value
of PI. It doesn’t compute.

The bit that really gets to me is where they say they have too many customers
to answer the telephone on time. Are they deliberately trying to lose some of
those customers in order to reduce the customer service workload? Certainly they
will get their wish if they continue in this way. Also, many of these call
centres will not ring out. This is not fair on customers. And why can’t they
take a general complaint without putting the complainant through their
administration machine?

I think that not answering the phone in good time is plain rude. I think that
refusing to return calls is also rude. I think many customer service centres are
centres of rudeness. For that reason I try to avoid such companies. It is very
rare that the staff I speak with are rude. I actually feel sympathy towards them
because it is the system itself that is creates rudeness, not the staff.

Most customer service centres require the customer to do most of the
administration. Most of them require the customer to progress chase. Most
require the customer follow their procedures, even when the very
procedures may be the subject of the complaint.

Just as a little suggestion that might at least start to improve things, why
doesn’t the customer services person start the conversation with: “Hello my
name is ……, can I take your name?” and then spend the rest of the call
referring to the caller by their name. This would set the tone for the rest of
the conversation.

Who are these rude companies anyway? In my experience they tend to be larger
companies. They are companies that see customer service centres as loss centres.
Some try to get their customer service centres to sell add-on products and
services in order to alleviate the cost. Others run these centres on a
shoestring in order to minimise cost to the point that there is little customer
service on offer. Others will do both.

I think that a pattern has emerged over the years. Large companies that were
employing these practices a few years ago are not so large today. I am convinced
that these practices result in a kind of delayed time bomb where each brush with
customer services is another straw placed on the camel’s back. Eventually a
competitor comes along. They treat you like a human being and happily place the
final straw on the unfortunate camel that was your previous supplier.

When will companies realise that customers are the source of their revenue
and must be treated with sincerity and with respect. When will they learn basic
manners such as the common courtesy of answering the telephone or returning a
call?

If you are in the business of stocks and shares, just try this tip: make a
call to a few large companies and see which one treats you with like a human
being …and invest in them!

The truth is that companies that look after their customers and make friends
with them become tomorrow’s winners. Take Arkay Hygiene. They treat their
customers with respect. The same can be said of the excellent staff at
Insect-o-Cutor. These two companies do not put customers on hold and refuse to
return calls. Arkay Hygiene happens to be the most successful UK wholesaler of
Insect-o-Cutor Fly Killers. Oh, and Insect-o-Cutor are the most successful fly
killer manufacturer. Enough said.

If you want the best of the best of the best, how about taking a look at the
most powerful Insectocutor fly killer model there is. That is the IND61
Insectocutor Fly Killer from Arkay Hygiene

A friend in Atlanta sent me a private email directing me to a website he thought I ought to check out. He knew I was disillusioned with affiliate marketing and had all but chucked in the towel.

And with good reason; I had never earned a dime for all my efforts spanning almost three years. But I’d spent money; money I’d accumulated from marketing my own produce, loads of money on this and that piece of software promising to get me out of the rut and into the money.

But it never happened.

That is until I opened my friend’s email, visited the website he suggested, and had my eyes opened to where and how I had been going so wrong for too long.

What I was witnessing is the only genuine training and resource center on affiliate reselling that I have ever come across; no hype, no hard-sell, no rash promises; just a whole raft of workable tools, tips and techniques - and all in bite size chunks that even the newest newbie would have no problem in understanding.

I read the solitary web page from tip to toe, read it all again, and decided to try out just one of the recommended strategies and give it a week or so to produce even a glimmer of a result.

Here’s what happened just a few hours later…

I signed in at ClickBank to check on the returns for my own personally generated products only to discover that small unidentified amounts had been tricking into my account totally $157. These represented my first ever affiliate commissions and by the end of the day had amounted to $210.

Not a bad return on my subscription fee of less than ten dollars for lifetime membership to this remarkable resource center. And now, four days later, and although the daily totals are smaller, the money is still trickling in each time I clock into ClickBank.

I intend to implement the remainder of the strategies one by one in the hope that the bigger bucks start rolling in - but even if they don’t, at least I now know that I can make money from affiliate reselling.

I cannot and will not promise that my treasure trove discovery will work as well for you but if, as I was, you are struggling to make a breakthrough, you could do a lot worse than visit this innovative center. You will find the URL in the resource box below.

Good luck!

Jim Green is an entrepreneur and bestselling author with an ever-growing string of niche non-fiction titles to his credit. You can view the resource center he has just been discussing at this website writing333.secretaff.hop.clickbank.net

As your Internet business grows, your free time will dwindle. Site changes will become time consuming and stressful. Automate your site and you can use your time for better purposes.

Automating

Automating a web site can cut out tedious tasks such as updating HTML, FTPing pages and changing site designs. Advanced automated web sites can send follow-up emails, send out newsletters, manage sales, do invoicing, track users visits and more. There is practically no function that can’t be accomplished.

There are many different types of automated web sites. Typically, the platforms break down into two categories, prepackaged or made to order. Automated web sites can range in complexity from simply using server side includes to full database driven sites. Server side includes are little snippets of code that allow content from one file to show on many pages. A database driven site, on the other hand, pulls content from an online database.

Web site information stored in an online database can be quickly and seamlessly inserted into many different types of templates. This becomes a huge time saver when you need to make a universal change to a web site. Depending on the system, the change can be made as a snippet of code or input directly into the database. Once entered, the regenerated site will carry the changes throughout the pages. In contrast, a non-automated site would require you to make changes to each individual page, a time wasting task. Let’s look at any example.

Assume you have a database driven, automated site. After testing the site, you discover the font appears very small in certain common monitor settings. Making an executive decision, you decide to change it throughout the site. With a manual system, you must pull up each page file for the site and change the html. If your site has 100 pages, you better break out the coffee! If your site is automated, however, you can simply address the font change in the database ONE TIME and generate the changes on all the pages. We are talking about saving days of your time.

If you are creating a site, make sure you use an automated platform. Don’t waste days of your life making manual changes.

Halstatt Pires is with the Internet marketing firm - www.marketingtitan.com - a San Diego Internet marketing and advertising company offering automated web site systems through www.businesscreatorpro.com.