Jay Baer is the world’s most retweeted person among digital marketers. He is a renowned business strategist, keynote speaker and the New York Times best-selling author of five books who travels the world helping businesspeople get and keep more people. Jay has advised over 700 companies since 1994, including Caterpillar, Nike, Allstate, The United Nations and 32 of the FORTUNE 500. He is the founder of Convince & Convert, a strategy consulting firm that helps prominent companies gain and keep more customers through the smart intersection of technology, social media, and customer service. His Convince & Convert Media division owns the world’s #1 content marketing blog, the world’s top marketing podcast, and many other education resources for business owners and executives.
Jay believes that now more and more of our customer contact is in public, and that changes the dynamics of customer service considerably.
“It changes the value of customer service considerably, but the problem is most businesses haven’t figured it out yet”
He says most businesses are using old customer service playbooks to solve 2016 customer service problems.
“The other thing that’s really useful for executives is to show them how customer service is the new marketing.”
For example, when a customer has a great customer experience they talk about it, when the experience is shared on social media as part of a rating, review or tweet, that is part of your marketing.
“One-third of customer complaints are never answered.”
Most of these complaints are via social media and they go unanswered by the company. These are public complaints that other customers or prospects can see and have access to, yet they remain unsolved.
80% of businesses claim to have exceptional customer service, however only 8% of their customers agree.
“There is this massive difference of opinion between what businesses think is good customer service and what customers think is good customer service.”
Jay adds that customer service is chronically underfunded for almost every business because for generation’s, customer service has primarily been a “necessary evil” and nothing more.
He notes that customer service is public now through social media and has more impact on purchases; companies need to re-evaluate their current focus on customer service.
Jay points out hiring the right people for your customer service front lines are crucial to your business. Recruiting people who have the type of personality that can show empathy for the customer is very important.
“You can learn an awful lot about somebody’s skills as a potential customer service representative just through an exercise.”
Jay shares one online tool that his company could not live without, virtual desktop software called Sococo. While working with people from all over the world, Jay says this is the tool to keep everybody connected.
“The greatest managers in the world understand, find out or determine what motivates each person (employee); they put incentives and programs in place at the individuals personal level to motivate each person instead of trying to motivate everyone together.”
Jays sees the value in developing his people. He started a six-month program for his staff so that they could grow their speaking skills in order to go and speak at conferences all over the world.
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INTERVIEW LINKS:
“Procrastinate on Purpose” by Rory Vaden