Word of mouth still matters in business

I missed customer service week this month: not that I much liked the annual flood of jolly SMS texts, emails and posts thanking me for being such a great customer. But the contrast was stark in 2021 as just one solitary text arrived from one (struggling) bank.

So did Covid-19 wipe out customer care? For sure, many of the bright young marketers who once filled our inboxes will have presented as ready cuts once salaries and costs were being slashed 50 percent at a time. And how many companies carried on marketing at full speed as our supply chains and consumer incomes moved into collapse?

Yet with those departments now emptier, where does that leave customer relations? Maybe, I am just an ungracious customer in finding generic, ‘happy’ customer communications almost always irritating.

Definitely, it’s good if a company has something to explain and is fresh and informative about it. But without that, what does really matter when engaging with customers?

For, it seems to me, the basics of a powerful customer connection are incredibly simple, and almost always driven from the top in a tone set by the leadership.

Yes, an organisation needs the capacity to answer customer calls and to respond. It needs to be reachable and to communicate, and job cuts may have sorely impinged on that. But there is also an issue of ‘attitude’ that spills through customer contacts. And how much has that shifted, in this pandemic, with the trials it has presented?

For sure, we always had some markedly ‘sour’ companies and organisations, almost always led by remarkably ‘sour’ leaders. But with depression and anxiety having reached new highs, job security an ancient memory, and most CEOs living in lifeboats most of the last year, how positive, confident and brilliant are our leaders by this October?

In fact, in some places, they still flourish. Last week, the dog my kids grew up with, who has been living in retirement with a friend in Nakuru, became quite ill. Off he went to the vet, and wow, were we lucky with that vet.

He was running the first WhatsApp business account I have used. He was responsive, helpful, went way beyond the remit, had special foods cooked for the dog to get him back to rights, explained things well, and was simply a pleasure to ‘work with’.

Indeed, that’s how he made it feel: he made it feel like we were together in getting the dog back to rights. And we bought a lot extra in that shared endeavour.

But, by dint of some issues the dog was now having, we needed to move him down to another friend at the coast and he was going to need surgery, so we set about contacting the vet there. Oh, dear. There was no website, no customer service. The vet was hard to get by phone, didn’t respond to SMS or WhatsApp, but the worst came when he did pick.

Seemingly irritated we had asked him to contact the vet in Nakuru to discuss the dog, he left us timed out and still not knowing if he actually could pick up the care. Yet, be clear, vet’s fees at that end of the market are severe.

The surgery would have been tens of thousands of shillings for certain, so someone who cannot make one five-minute phone call is a bad place to begin.

However, the real flood-light in such a stark contrast in approaches was the difference it made in the connection and spending.

We are now looking at vets in nearby Malindi instead, and have certainly got off to a notably poor start with that service provider we tried to engage with for six consecutive days without success.

Conversely, we are adding Google reviews on the Nakuru vet and would recommend him wholeheartedly anywhere. And, say studies, it’s that word-of-mouth recommendation, or dissatisfaction, that drives the entire tenor of a business.

Of course, who knows how life has hit any service provider or Covid. But we have all taken our bumps these recent years, yet here we still are. But wherever we lack verve, or interest, be sure we are losing customers, and success.