Micah Solomon's Customer Service Lessons

Micah Solomon’s new book, High-tech, High-touch Customer Service, is all about how to inspire timeless loyalty in the demanding new world of social commerce -- one where businesses today face the increasingly challenging world of customer interactions, both online and off.

The book is a must-read for any business leader. And, fortunately, the content is grounded in decades of experience and proven methodology.

Some key lessons I learned from the book include:

If you can anticipate, you can differentiate.
If your customers feel at home. They’re unlikely to roam.
If things go wrong for a customer initially, do a grand job of getting to the other side of that challenge and you may create a positive memory that literally supplants the initial unpleasantness.

Also, Solomon states that the four components to solid value that creates customer satisfaction are:

A perfect product or service
Delivery in a caring, friendly manner
Timeliness
The backing of an effective problem-resolution process

And, even more takeaways:

If your service truly anticipates customers’ desires and wishes, it will put customers well on their way to feeling that they can’t live without you.
Strong company cultures are overwhelmingly knockoff resistant.
Without a culture that has yes as its default, your customers will, well, start to say no.
With a great company culture, employees will be motivated, regardless of management presence or absence.
A secret of companies with strong cultures and great hiring practices is awareness of the positive peer pressure great employees can exert of each other.
Customers need to be able to shift channels no matter how they initially enter your company (via email, online, in-store, etc.), without it being jarring.
The predominant way businesses add to customer burdens is by wasting their time.
Social media is most dangerous to your company when your organizational structure and culture are set up in a way that keeps you from providing one-on-one service and responses to issues in real time with great flexibility.
One secret of dealing with social media feedback is to reduce the need for it by making sure your customers know, as directly as possible, how to reach you 24/7, whether that’s via email, the phone, or a feedback form on your website.

Thanks to the book publisher for sending me an advance copy of this book.

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