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    Unconventional Customer Service: How To Break the Rules and Provide Unparalleled Service
    Unconventional Customer Service: How To Break the Rules and Provide Unparalleled Service
    Unconventional Customer Service: How To Break the Rules and Provide Unparalleled Service
    Ebook148 pages1 hour

    Unconventional Customer Service: How To Break the Rules and Provide Unparalleled Service

    By Robert Sollars

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    About this ebook

    Welcome to Unconventional Customer Service: How To Break the Rules and Provide Unparalleled Service. This book was designed to assist you and your company in the pursuit of providing excellent customer service to those who count the most in your business.

    The basic precepts that I present here are as applicable to a salesman selling knickknacks as they are to a security officer walking a patrol in a dark warehouse at 3:00 a.m. Excellent customer service is what customers want above all.

    Over my decades of working in many capacities for many different types of companies, I have personally used all of these ideas, and they’ve all worked extremely well and achieved great client satisfaction. They may need some tweaking to fit your company, but they will work. I guarantee it.

    Knowing Robert for the past 30 years, I’ve seen his unconventional customer service grow in popularity. It simply works! I would not hesitate to recommend that you consider his expertise and his passion for assisting others with this issue.
    —Jerold A. Ramos Sr., CFE, CPP, CRM, CMMR

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRobert Sollars
    Release dateOct 24, 2018
    ISBN9780463800256
    Unconventional Customer Service: How To Break the Rules and Provide Unparalleled Service

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      Book preview

      Unconventional Customer Service - Robert Sollars

      Acknowledgements

      There are numerous people that I need to thank for this book coming to fruition. There are also many I won’t name, simply because… Well, let’s just say that they did things the wrong way and showed me how not to conduct customer service.

      Now to thank those who did help me to refine this path:

      The entire office staff and the security officers I worked with at First Response, Inc. (now defunct), in Mission, Kansas.

      Scott Carmony, President & CEO. He let me do what I was best at and helped along the way. He is what a good boss should be. Rest in peace, my friend.

      Mindy Mitzner, the office manager. A close and dear friend still.

      Jeff Taylor, the Vice President. He helped to rescue me from working as a guard for other security companies.

      How could I leave out the one person who caused this guide to be readable and saleable, my editor, Jen Wolfe of Wolfe Creative? She is an absolute sweetheart.

      Also decidedly assisting in the effort to get this done and published are the final editors and the technical guru I leaned on, Leonore and David Dvorkin of DLD Books (dldbooks.com). I couldn’t have finished it without them.

      Eileen Sollars, my wife, confidante, and everything else I need. If it weren’t for her, I would have quit life after going blind in 2003. Thanks, baby girl. I love you.

      And lastly, there is the advisory board I put together to make sure I didn’t leave anything out of this book for all businesses:

      Darrell Adams, PMP, Engility Corporation, Pearisburg, VA

      Ryan Eldridge, Owner, Eagle Force Security, LLC, Glendale, AZ

      Debbie Fry, Manassas, VA

      Jerry Higginson, Phoenix, AZ

      Julie Jakubek, Agency Owner, Allstate Insurance, Scottsdale, AZ

      Derrick Oldham, IPSA Security Services, Phoenix, AZ

      Introduction

      This was a true shopping experience of a colleague.

      Do you have a rewards card? asked the young lady at the office supply cash register. I searched for a card and then gave up. I blurted out a telephone number. At least she didn’t ask me to type it into the keypad or give a passcode that I would not have remembered.

      I have a coupon, I told her. I showed her two coupons on my phone. She scanned them. Luckily, they weren’t outdated and there were no stipulations against their dual usage. Otherwise, I would have had to figure out how to get both of them to count toward this purchase.

      I didn’t have any returns, but my son brought in three used cartridges. They give you a $2 credit  for each one. Did you take off $6 for the returned cartridges? I asked.

      She explained that she didn’t, but that I’d be emailed a coupon or some points to my rewards card in a few weeks. That’ll probably be the one thing my spam filter holds onto or that I accidentally delete while going through my daily phone gymnastics of deleting clusters of offers and marketing emails.

      Can you price−check this? my son chirped up.

      He had downloaded a price–checking app to my phone that lets you scan a barcode and find a better price. However, like most cool things, it wasn’t perfect. We found something for less than half of their listed price but it was refurbished. We eventually bought a slightly different item online for $10 less. She needed to call her manager over to verify this.

      I kid you not; this is how I spent 30 minutes to buy an ink cartridge. It’s not the exception but the rule, now. The time for a purchase these days is much longer than it used to be. It’s pure torture.

      Maybe stores should worry about stupid and lazy employees teaming up with savvy but frustrated customers. A few days prior to that purchase, I went to buy two items for my kids at the same store. We price–checked one item and saved half the price. On another item, we made up a price, and they didn’t question it or demand proof. What retailed for $18.99 came up via our lie for $1.76. The clerk didn’t question how we got over 90% off the item. He just wanted to go home. And I felt owed for all  the crap they put me through just to process a transaction.

      What I did wasn’t right and shouldn’t be duplicated. I wanted to point out that this is what happens when employees aren’t trained right or lose pride in their work. But it’s also what happens when consumers tire of the rewards–coupons–price−check dance that makes shopping an unpleasant, even torturous, experience.

      Welcome to Unconventional Customer Service: How To Break the Rules and Provide Unparalleled Service. This book was designed to assist you and your company in the pursuit of providing excellent customer service to those who count the most in your business, your customers—providing them the service they deserve.

      Mind you, some customers are simply never satisfied, no matter how many hoops you jump through for them.

      On the other hand, some customers are smart. Maybe they work for a company that has an amazing service plan and they want to ensure that what they get from you is just as good as what they are providing their customers. Maybe they’ve done business with another company for a product or service, and that company has awesome customer service. They’ll expect your company to come up to those same standards.

      In the 2017 Customer Rage Survey (W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University, as reported in several magazines and newspapers), it was shown that cable and satellite companies lead the list of the least customer−friendly companies in the country. The next companies making that list? Telephone and internet providers. You’ll read a couple of my experiences with these later.

      It was also noted that when businesses provide poor customer service, those customers will either not purchase from that company again or not purchase that product/service at all. This means that American business will lose more than $313 billion in 2018 due to poor, inefficient, ineffective, or just plain bad customer service.

      Many articles and books have been written about customer service. Most involve long, drawn−out, detailed flow charts and diagrams in an effort to be thorough and are way too complicated. I’ve seen customer service plans so complicated, I felt as though I had to have a master’s or a doctorate degree to understand them.

      On the flip side, I’ve seen plenty of companies that lack any sort of customer–oriented service program. If there was one, the necessary steps were not in place, or followed, to fully implement, monitor, and adjust the plan as the times and circumstances changed.

      Lack of a customer service plan, or a poorly implemented one, will often cause frontline employees, supervisors, and managers to be unaware of the big picture. If they can’t see the big picture, then they can’t see how their actions affect everyone else.

      I originally wrote this book for security companies I worked for back in the mid–1990s. At that time, it was simply a plan for how to deal with one of our larger clients. They and my employer ignored it, because… Well, read on, and you’ll probably understand why. Since then, I have expanded, refined, and revised many parts to make it simple to read, understand, and implement. Many of my examples specifically target the security industry, but the information works for anyone.

      I have found in my career that every book, no matter how boring, misinformed, or outside the scope of what I need or want, always has a nugget or two of good information that I can use. The nuggets I impart here can be implemented by any company in any sector of the economy. The basic precepts that I preach here are as applicable to a salesman selling knickknacks as they are to a security officer walking a patrol in a dark warehouse at 3:00 a.m. I know that may be hard to believe, but just read through the book, and when you see a reference to a job title, whether it be security officer, salesperson, hourly worker, or counter person, substitute your own job title.

      Excellent customer service is what customers

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