Wowing customers has been built into the business plan of B2B companies across all industries. It’s the subject of Micah Solomon’s new book “Ignore Your Customers (And They’ll Go Away).” Satisfactory customer service isn’t enough, Solomon says. However, as much as a focus on wowing customers must become part of the corporate culture, managers should emphasize that not every interaction with customer can be a “wow” moment.
“It can be hard for newly energized employees to understand that customers don’t always have time to be wowed,” Solomon states, adding that reps should tone down or cut short their efforts to turn an interaction into a wow moment if they’re getting signals from a customer that they’re under time constraints.
Solomon interviewed Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, who told him that many Middle Eastern and Asian airlines that compete with his Virgin Atlantic international airline “have service standards that are extremely high, but don’t deliver the right style of service for customers today.”
The scripted lines that are delivered by highly scrubbed flight attendants on competitors’ airlines are not what Branson is after. “Consumers today are allergic to anything that strikes them as insincere, including a stilted, overly formal or obviously scripted service style,” Solomon writes. “No matter how caring a service provider’s action may be, if the service style comes off as artificial, it puts a ceiling on how intimate and inviting interactions can be between employees and customers.”
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