Surface Ripples

Keep your Promises - Effective Customer Management

A number of authors and speakers have referred me to the "Emotional Bank Account”. This is like a regular bank account, but deposits and withdrawals have disproportionate effects on it.

Your emotional bank account is opened by family, friends, colleagues and customers for you, but without your knowledge. You may not be aware of it, but it’s a part of your personal and corporate “brand”. According to Stephen Covey (author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People), keeping a commitment or a promise is a major deposit into the Emotional Bank Account; breaking one is a major withdrawal. Equally, our most constant relationships require our most constant deposits into the Emotional Bank Account.

Put this into a family or business context and you see what he means. Every day I read complaints on various blogs, websites and Facebook about people waiting for a delivery man, plumber, electrician or other to turn up, but that person never does turn up. It’s happened to me, and I’ve been guilty of it as well.

When you promise to do something, the person to whom you make that promise has an expectation that you will do it, and builds an emotional anticipation around that promise. If you keep it, what happens? Answer: you earn trust, respect and credibility. These are major “deposits” into other people’s or customers’ emotional bank accounts. You create a positive feeling towards you or your business, and a “good brand”. You get more business – often without any advertising. If things go wrong, you are given more room to manoeuvre because you have huge “credit” balances in the emotional bank account.

Equally, if you don’t turn up when you say you will, or don’t carry out the action that you promised, what happens? Someone in a call centre once referred me to the “small print” as an excuse not to provide a service. I told them that I wasn’t interested in small print, but in the spirit of our agreement - they lost my trust.

There’s no excuse not to warn those waiting for you that you will be delayed or may not even arrive. Almost everyone has a mobile phone these days, and a quick call can be made in seconds.

The bond of trust takes a long time to build, but only moments to break and do irreparable damage to a company’s reputation. This then takes more management time to repair. One statistic says that for every example of great service, a customer will tell three others. For every example of bad service, they will tell nine others. In other words, sorting things out well could earn you three new customers, whilst sorting them out badly (or not at all) could lose you at least nine. It is cheaper to retain an existing customer than find a new one.

A friend who wanted to buy two new trucks recently complained on Facebook that a particular truck company had promised to call him back within 30 minutes with a price, but as at midday on the following, day they had not done so. That friend has 150 friends on Facebook. All 150 will have seen the same story (which named the company) and at least five commented…

Your business can stand out simply by understanding the “emotional bank account” and its importance.

I have spent more than half my life working in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With more than 20 years in the world financial services industry running different service, operations and lending businesses, I started my own Performance Management Consultancy and work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email . My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services.

Labels: Customer Care, Selling, Strategy

posted by William Martin @ 20:50