How to Become Customer Service Oriented

Anyone who is customer facing should be building close, authentic, long lasting relationships with their customers. It pays off in more ways than you can imagine: repeat customers, references, community champions, content ideas, competitive intel and so much more. Here are 5 ways you and your team can start building those relationships: 1. Amplify a customer’s LinkedIn posts - When your customer posts something interesting, don’t just like it yourself but share the link on your internal chat and ask your team to like it as well. It’s amazing how powerful this is. It’s human nature to look at who is liking your content on any social platform and most people get a consistent number of likes. If you drive 50% more for a customer they will notice that. 2. Help find candidates for their team and jobs for them if they’re looking - In your position engaging with a specific persona all day every day you have amazing visibility and connections into relevant candidates for open jobs and companies hiring. If you let your customers know that you can be a resource for them on both sides of the table you will see how quickly you can start playing matchmaker. 3. Share best practices that have nothing to do with your company/product - Everyone is looking to improve in their job. Everyone wants to know what their peers are doing at other companies. When you hear good ideas from other customers or read about a best practice, send it to them. Just show them you’re thinking about them and are invested in them being successful. 4. Make them look good in front of their manager and/or team - It needs to be authentic and relevant but find a reason to give your customer a shoutout when you’re in a meeting with them. It doesn’t even need to be a big thing but something about how they’re the fastest to roll out your product, how their feature request ended up becoming a game changer for a bunch of customers, how they’re the most productive team you’ve seen at one particular thing. 5. Fight for a feature/bug fix/service that they’re asking for - In short, be the squeaky wheel for your customer. When they ask for something, set the expectation that it takes a while to get that thing done but then go fight for it internally. Each company has their own process for this kind of stuff but if you push in the right ways you can usually get their request prioritized. When it’s done make sure the customer knows you fought for them to get that thing done. The best thing is that these are “free”. Of course they will take time and energy but the return on this work is astronomical. I honestly didn’t appreciate the power of these relationships when I started my career but I now have close relationships with so many customers that I’ve worked with over the years. They’re a sounding board for business ideas, they’re working with companies I’m advising and we’ve become each other cheerleaders. What did I miss? What else are you doing to build relationships with your customers?

How can we stay focused on every customer’s experience when we operate at the scale of Chase? 🤔 At the Chase Technology Senior Leadership Conference, I had the opportunity to share my thoughts on a crucial aspect of customer service, and I shared something I find myself thinking about often… we need to stop saying "only." As Head of Chase's Infrastructure and Production Management, I’m concerned about any issue that impacts even a small percentage of our customers. This is because at our scale, 1% can mean hundreds of thousands of customers. Given our scale, there can unfortunately be a tendency to say it “only” affects a small number of customers when we have issues affecting our ability to meet our customer promises. But using "only" can diminish the severity of issues and lead to complacency... and considering our scale, we can't afford to be complacent. Using the word "only" stifles curiosity in improving our business and makes us less empathetic to our customers. Here are my suggestions to remove "only" from our vocabulary: • Solve the "Small" Problems: Give teams the time and resources to address minor issues. This allows them to practice empathy and understand the customer experience more deeply. This allows us to address existing customer friction and helps us build better products for customers in the future. • Engage with Customer Challenges: Visit call centers, listen to complaints, or visit a branch and observe how customers and employees interact. Engaging with front line employees and customers directly brings immediacy and emotion to problem-solving, which makes for better solutions. • Focus on Customer Journeys: Establish "customer journey labs" to review pain points and improve experiences from the customer’s standpoint, not the bank’s. As I shared in Nashville with my peers, every minor hiccup represents a real customer with a genuine experience. Let's commit to "sweating the small stuff" and reward our teams for focusing on every customer problem. #CustomerExperience #Leadership

Please don't show up to your first call with a customer and introduce yourself as their Trusted Advisor. The title Trusted Advisor is earned not given. Just because you're a CSM supporting a customer does not mean they view you as their trusted advisor. I was fortunate enough to have a leader when I first started as a CSM who required that everyone on the team read the book, The Trusted Advisor by David Maister, Charles Green and Robert Galford. While I was never a fan of "required reading" this book helped me better understand how to bring value to my customers and how to earn their trust over time. Too often I see and hear CSMs introduce themselves as their customer's Trusted Advisor, but that's not something you are it's something you aspire to be seen as. So a better way to say this would be, "Hi, my name is XYZ and I am your CSM. My role in the partnership is ABC and hopefully in time you will view me as your Trusted Advisor in the partnership." You've made your aspirations clear to them, but you still need to deliver. So if you want to be achieve this coveted relationship status focus on the following: ▶ Become a product expert; understand the use cases and best practices of your solution. Learn how other customers are creatively using your product and share that with customers. Be able to effectively train and enable your customer to use the product in accordance with their goals - don't just show them features that are irrelevant. ▶ Do what you say you're going to do; make sure your follow up game is strong. Ensure good communication and follow through on tasks and projects with your customer. ▶ Focus on building good relationships with your customer; everyone is different so make sure to get to know what they value as an individual and show up for them appropriately. ▶ Make sure your motives align with their success. If you're a CSM who's responsible for upsell or cross-sell, understand where new products are relevant and going to provide value for your customers. Focus on providing value to customers and not just checking an internal box for activity tracking and you'll start to see that your customers will view you as an extension of their team ... And when they do, you'll know. Happy Monday!