Operational excellence leads to great marketing, not vice versa.
Saying that your company has the best customer service is a lofty claim. While you very well might have great customer service, can you ensure that it will always be great? How big is your company? Are you a chain? Can you say, with 100 percent certainty, that your customer service is always superb, always better than your competition’s customer service? If you can, my hats off to you. If you can’t and you’re including this as part of your marketing tactics, you need to go back to the drawing board. You’ve probably heard this before, but it’s better to under promise and over deliver.
Customer service is a risky thing to focus your marketing efforts on. Have you seen the various cellular company commercials that claim they are the best, with the best customer service and best coverage? But then you end up in the store for three hours trying to maneuver the wacky policies. This is why customer service should be a byproduct of your marketing tactics, rather than the focus.
Instead, focus on things like your people or the value you add to your customers’ lives/businesses. If you add value — value they didn’t have prior to you — then they are more likely to be satisfied with your business. In turn, they may even leave you reviews online and talk about how great you were to their friends, family and coworkers. That’s how you get good customer service ratings.
Another key is making sure your marketing strategy isn’t too cumbersome. Focus on what you’re good at and what your company has the bandwidth to properly deliver. Pass this down to the rest of the company aka the people implementing the strategy. They need to be on the same page. If you’re promising things in your marketing tactics that your company doesn’t have the bandwidth to deliver, then you’re in worse position now than you were before. Chances are your customer service will tank as well. In order to be good at your job, you must play up the actual, quantifiable strengths of your company.
We started this article off by saying operational excellence comes before great marketing. Hopefully, you have a better grasp on why, now. Don’t promise something you can’t do. If you can’t say that your customer service is always the best, don’t say it will be. Make sure your strategy is rock solid and focus on what you can do, what you can be the best at and what value you’re adding to your customers’ live. By doing that, great customer service will follow, but that doesn’t mean it has to be talked about. Your customers will do it for you — on blogs, on Yelp and hopefully not on the bad customer service graveyard, Facebook.