Ever since Covid first arrived, customer service has taken a nosedive.

Especially when it comes to large companies and public service providers. Strikes, travel delays, long NHS waiting lists, organised chaos at airport security, chatbots powered by artificial “intelligence” that can’t understand your question, long waits on the phone to “customer service”. The list goes on. You now have a better chance of your builder turning up on time than your airline.

As a consumer, battling through all of this is really frustrating.

But there’s some upside in all this for smaller businesses. There’s an opportunity to fill this customer service gap and deliver the kind of individual, reliable, empathetic service — from someone who knows what they’re talking about — that consumers are craving.

We’ve got a real life example to share with you.

We recently worked with a sportswear retailer in North Wales and as part of the project, we asked the retailer’s customers what they liked about the store.

The single biggest answer was: excellent or helpful customer service, at 26%.

“Friendly staff” came in at 17% and “going over-and-above” at 5%. The combined total of these three comes to 48%. That’s huge.

And they’re all customer service related. For these customers, what sprung to mind — the thing they remembered — when thinking about the store, was the service they received.

The full results looked like this:

For the sportswear retailer, exceptional customer service, tailored to the individual needs of the customer and delivered in a no hard-sell way, is the norm.

Not only does this mean their customers leave glowing reviews on Google for the world to see but also spread positive word-of-mouth to their friends and family. It sets you up for repeat-purchase.

For example, while I was waiting outside the retailer’s store, a customer came up to me after having made a purchase in-store, raving about how good his experience was and what a great guy the owner was. He came back a couple of hours later with his sister, who made another purchase. That’s one small example of the power of delivering exceptional service and positive word-of-mouth.

Have a look at the table from the sportswear retailer (above) again and see where the answer “Great prices” is. Not exactly “top of mind” for customers. In fact, it came in at 3%.

You may think, “Yeah, but maybe the prices weren’t very good, that’s why no one mention it.” This is not really the case: all in-store customers were given 10% off the usual retail price of the sportswear. And without even asking.

We saw a similar story with a fitness instructor we worked with, who runs yoga, Pilates and body conditioning classes. When we asked her customers a similar question, namely, “What do you like about the fitness instructor’s classes?”, the only mention of price was way down the list, at 2%. Precisely at the bottom. And in this situation, we know the fitness instructor’s classes are very reasonably priced. (A little under-priced, if you ask us).

(See Females, Fitness & the Power of Positive Emotion for more).

In fact, mental and emotional enjoyment and well-being were the most important factors. Even above the achievement of physical goals. Price was barely mentioned. Same for the sportswear retailer we looked at before.

The point we’re driving at is: you don’t have to discount your prices, or put on free classes or give free stuff away, to make customers happy. Price is usually secondary, at best.

You have to deliver truly a service and experience that truly caters to the individual needs of the customer, from a position of expertise and with empathy. And you have to do this every time. This will help avoid having to lower prices and eat into your profit.

We received some really complimentary comments about the sportswear retailer too, which give a good indication of what we’re talking about:

Listening to customers is a fundamental requirement of exceptional customer service. Not making a bunch of assumptions that held true before the pandemic, but really listening to them now.

There are two aspects on this issue to contend with:

1. each individual customer is different, with their own needs and habits;
2. and at the same time, there are clear shifts in the habits and expectations from consumers.

You have to contend with both as a business owner, and assess the opportunities and threats. Then ensure the business is adapting to them.

You also have to battle against the inevitable as a business owner: viewing your business as you wish it to be, not how your customers see it.

Objectivity is difficult, but necessary. You have to ask, listen and learn. And come to conclusions on the basis of what you actually see and hear, not rely your assumptions.

When you go over-and-above expectations, customers love it. And like we said earlier, the customer service bar is set low these days.

If you can turn up on time, keep your promises, keep customers informed of what’s going on, listen to the customer — and do it all in a helpful and empathetic spirit — you’re winning against your competitors already, especially the large organisations.

None of this typically costs much money. The cost is mainly your time and commitment.

Large organisations struggle to run customer service departments cost-effectively. It’s treated as an overhead and often as a burden. Like marketing, it can be one of the first areas to get cut when times get tough.

To add to their woes, organisations are suffering from a shortage of skilled labour in the market. Especially those willing to work in an office, store or factory.

The good news is that, as a small or medium sized business (SMB), you may already have all the skilled labour you need, and are already able to deliver truly one-to-one customer service. For most SMBs, one-to-one relationships, and interacting with and servicing individual customers in real-time is just part of the job. No big deal. But large organisations don’t do this very well. Not quickly, or reliably. Customer service is just difficult to scale.

The same organisations are often pressured to deliver a set of financial results every three months to shareholders. It’s a tough gig. And it can lead to doing the wrong thing by the customer, or cutting prices (and margins).

But as a small business, you can take advantage of this weakness in your competitors. So while larger organisations get themselves hooked on discounting, or force themselves to reduce customer service headcount, or offload telephone support to India, you can sweep these concerns aside and spend your time listening to, engaging with, and understanding your customers. And then delivering a truly one-to-one service.

Many issues in business are interrelated. And in this case, exceptional customer service results in more positive word-of-mouth for your business, both online (e.g. on Google, Trustpilot, Yelp or Tripadvisor) and in person.

For the sportswear retailer we’ve been talking about, 32% of their customers heard about the business through positive word-of-mouth. You can’t achieve this without really good service. Similarly, for the fitness instructor, word-of-mouth came up even higher, at 52%.

Small businesses often operate in smaller pools of people, and reputation — good or bad — can travel fast. So, good customer service is essential to keep positive word-of-mouth circulating, in order for you to gain more customers (for a grand total £0).

1. First, never start discounting or dropping any of your prices as a first port-of-call. You may be surprised how little price matters. Instead, first focus your efforts on delivering exceptional service to each individual customer.
2. You need to ensure you have a really good understanding of the needs and motivations of your customers. A refresh may be needed. Build up data on your customers (document it, so you have a record you can analyse) and then identify any patterns that emerge. Consider running a survey. Ask similar questions of non-customers too (people that could become your customers).
3. Read — and reread — all of your customer testimonials and reviews that are available. Observe the themes and note them down.
4. Read the testimonials and reviews of your competitors (e.g. on Google, Feefo, Trustpilot, etc). Again, observe the trends and note them down
5. You can now put all of this data together. Themes should begin to become clear. These themes should give you a great starting point to come up with potential ideas on changes you can make to your business, including the way your service customers.
6. Think exceptional. We say “exceptional customer service” because, ideally, it has to be just that, and not something they can find everywhere else. Don’t have the mentality of barely doing more than your competitors. Think about how you can use all of the expertise you’ve gained.
7. Some of the ideas may be unusual, and involve a lot of manual work until you build a process. If you’re unsure, run the idea past a few customers. If it involves a significant investment in time or money, run a trial with customers and prospects first, and keep quiet about it until you are confident it works.
8. Ensuring you are delivering the basics of customer service. It’s surprising how the basics of customer service can set you apart from the competition – keeping customers informed, turning up on time, keeping your promises, selling the customer what they actually need not what you can get away with in the moment.
9. Avoid any temptation of the “hard sell” — forcing customers down a route that is not in their interest. They sense this a mile off and hate it.
10. Make sure you keep listening and talking with your customers. There will be ways to adjust and improve on a frequent basis, to ensure you are exceeding their expectations.