Service Untitled

OK, so your company is going to have to make a service call to a customer’s house. How do you make the experience personal?

Read up on the customer.
Read up on the customer a little bit before going to their house. Check out their file and see how long they have been a customer, where they live, and any other notes. Maybe even do a quick Google search and see if they have been in the newspaper lately, etc

Bribe.
This may be slightly debated, but you can bribe some people to like at least tolerate the service call experience. Bribe them. Not cash, but thoughtful little gifts. Here are some good ways to bribe without it being too tacky:

• When the customer is making the service call appointment, ask if they have any pets. If they have a dog, bring the dog a little bag of treats. If they have a cat, bring a little toy mouse. Make sure there is enough quantity so at least all of the pets can get something.
• If they don’t have any pets or if the item needing fixing/maintenance is expensive, ask if they have any small children. Bring a little toy for the children or a little coloring book with some crayons. Keep things simple. If the item is expensive, bring both pet and children gifts.
• If they have older kids, consider getting them a small gift card ($5 or so) to a local music store or the local mall (you may be able to get the gift cards for free since you are send the store customers – just ask them).

Get and use names.
Just don’t give out random gifts – put the kid or pet’s name on the items. To Bob from your friends at The Air Conditioning Store. This makes the experience quite personal and the customer will feel less like just another service calls. When the customer answers the door, address them by name. Try and address the customer by name throughout the entire service call.

If you are going to an office.
If you are going to office you can do one or all of these things. Consider getting a little flower arrangement for the break room, a pen for your client, or something thoughtful and creative along those lines.

Also.
Also consider giving out things that your business offers that may help customers. It should be a tangible item that the customer gets for free (i. e. not discounted).
It’s not that complicated to make a service call personal. It takes a little bit of effort, a little bit of money, and that’s it.

Update: At 11:30 AM, I called the company that was supposed to be coming to my house to fix my television. The service call was setup incorrectly and they couldn’t come. No call or anything. They gave me a credit on my month’s bill (it was about 20% of the month’s bill) and I have re-scheduled the appointment for a couple of weeks from now.

A lot of businesses have to go to their customers’ homes or offices for some things – whether it be sales or service. Whatever, the reason, the experience better be good or you risk losing a customer, which as everyone knows, is certainly not a good thing.

This will be a series on how to do home and office service calls. We’ll even touch briefly on how to do home and office sales calls.

1. Today: Introduction and Series Overview
2. Tomorrow: Make it Personal
3. Friday: Etiquette of Service Calls (including Time Slots)
4. Monday: Unrelated Content (an Interview or Guest Writer)
5. Tuesday: Time Slots
6. Wednesday: Conclusion (and Overflow Day – in case I think of anything else that should be mentioned

There is a new category for service calls. There is also a new category for guest writers. Within the next few weeks, there will be at least one guest writer posting here about a topic they specialize in or about an experience they had.

A note
Just a note to the Service Untitled readers who own tech businesses or other businesses that don’t require physically going to a customer’s home or office – I would suggest reading this as it is something that you will likely have to do at some point, and you can apply it in other situations (such as going to meetings at say, a bank or a potential partner’s office).

Introduction
A service call is a difficult part of the customer service experience. Depending on why the service call is taking place, it could be something as serious as something being broken (like air conditioning, electrical circuits, etc.) or something as minor as routine maintenance. Despite the reason, the customer is rarely happy that the service call is occurring.

Like most customer service experiences, you have to think of the service call from the customer’s viewpoint. They have to wait at their home for someone to show up, the person shows up (sometimes late) and likely gets their house dirty or their landscaping messed up, and to top it all off, the person doing the service call (who I’m calling the representative even though I’m pretty sure they have a special name – feel free to post it as a comment) may not even be able to fix the problem and there is always the risk that the representative could steal or break something.

Lots of things to go wrong with the customer service experience and very few things to make the customer happy. If something is broken, the best case scenario is that the customer thinks “OK, this broke, but they need the fixing as painlessly as possible.” That’s not terrible, but again, the customer would prefer that whatever it is did not break or require maintenance. So, as a business owner, you should try and make the normally bad experience a great one and that’ll help set you apart from your competition.
I think this should be an interesting series. I actually have someone expected to come to my house to fix my television today (between 8 AM and 12 PM), so I’ll pay attention to what the representative does and does not do to make the customer service experience either bad, acceptable, or great.