Most Tuesday evenings, at 8PM Central, I am tied to Twitter, engulfed in a chat that most would really not want to join.  Nobody sane, anyway!  Why?  It is a Customer Service chat – you can find it on the hash tag #custserv.

Every week there is a new “topic” – put in quotes because the topic is always the same – “How do those of us that love customers get the voice to speak for them, the credibility to do what is right for them, and the respect to represent them to our respective companies?”

In other words, we often bitch when we don’t feel the love and respect we think our customers deserve from our employers. Note – I did NOT say the love and respect WE expect we deserve.  Completely different things.  Which is what makes us people who truly love customers – we put them before us. We actually can’t help it.  It is just who we are.

And we are a widely disperse group – some of us (me, luckily) have a great deal of voice and leverage for my customers.  Others feel very little empowerment.  We come together to try to change it for everyone.  To try to learn enough, and teach enough – to try to just move the bar a little bit.  Every week.  Move the bar.  Just a little.

Over time, I hope the bar moves a lot.

But I don’t expect a lot today.  I do enjoy the company of like-minded people who care about more than a paycheck and to whom a customer is not a 16 digit number.

I love the fucking humanity of it.

I meet a lot of people online and off that profess to “know” social media, and/or how to serve customers.  They often describe themselves as “gurus” or “mavens”.  “Experts”, or “teachers”.

It is amazing to me how seldom many of these people actually practice what they preach. I recently talked to a guy that wrote a book on caring for customers, but beyond the people that buy his book – he has no customers.  And he hasn’t talked to a customer in 15 years, he admitted.

To me he is someone that knows the name of something, but he doesn’t “know something” – he writes about customer service as a “theory”.  Sorry, you cannot know that which you do not practice.

This video kind of makes my point.

Instead of pretending to be an expert in customer service, I hone my skills almost daily – by actually talking to customers.  I’ll never write a book about it, because I will never be done learning about it.  And I’ll never be arrogant enough to think I am a “guru”.

I just care enough to learn more about it than just the name.  And I am open enough to let the real teachers teach me every day – my customers.

And sorry, dude.  I won’t be buying your book.

I have a lot of conversations with customers.  Probably averaging about 7 per day – sometimes many more per day.  I love talking to customers, and I love that I get paid to do so.

This Monday night I talked to a customer that wanted something I could not offer them.  I could get them close, but I just knew I could not make them really happy.  Sure – I could have “sold them”.  Taken their money for a few months until they realized that what I told them was true – they were not a good fit at our company, and we could not truly satisfy them.  And it was good money.

I could let them spend a lot of time and trouble learning that, or I could spend over an hour on the phone talking them into using another service, from another company that was just better suited to the unique way they wanted to build their solution.

Nobody is happy hearing “your money is not welcome here”, so how the message is positioned is important – that is why it took over an hour to say no.

I don’t believe this customer knows I did them a favor (yet).  They will, and soon.  I moved them to the best place for them, and that was a competitor.  And I have no problem with that  - and I know my employer has no problem with that.  First – it is rare that this comes up.  Second, when customers come and go in a short window they create “churn”.

Churn is expensive.  It is not good for us, or for the customer – there is no win with churn.  Churn is caused by selling the right customer the wrong solution, or the right solution to the wrong customer.  And a lot of things can be responsible for this – a customer that won’t listen, the wrong incentive plans for sales teams – and sometimes just a lack of real communication beween the buyer and the seller. Sometimes it is just a matter of the right solution at the right time.  Selling for “fit” is complex – but rewarding – to everyone involved in the transaction.

So I love really being able to spend enough time with customers to really figure out what they need – and if I have to send them to “the store down the street”, well, I am good with that.  As long as the store down the street will treat them well.

Don’t give up next quarter to meet your quotas today.  Sell what you do well that can help your customer well.  Don’t give in to the temptation to “just sell”.  Selling is pretty easy.  Selling the right solution, to the right person at the right time – that is kind of magical.

BTW – clarification – I am NOT in Sales, I am not on commission, and I have no quotas.  For the purposes of this post I think my point applies even if you are in Sales, you do have quotas, and you are paid on commission.  You can’t screw customers over and expect to win.  Not over time.  It is just another Ponzi scheme.