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.