3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature

There was once a man who called himself “The Professor,” though those in the know knew him better as Craig Antonucci, BPA Quality's chief customer officer. Such work requires frequent travel, and recently, afforded Antonucci the unique opportunity to note how one beer at an airport bar turned into a groundbreaking lesson in customer service, which he subsequently related on the BPA Quality Blog.

The beer at an airport, Antonucci noted, is often new to the drinker, and may well be that first taste of a particular brand. So too are many customers often talking to a company for the first time via a call into a contact center. First impressions are always important, so taking the opportunity to make the first encounter a good one from the start has a great potential to turn into long-term business.

With this being the first impression, it's also the best opportunity to not only make promises, but also delivery on these. While there are those who believe it's better to under-promise and over-deliver—this makes it much easier to look like a miracle worker—making enough promises to make an impact and then delivering on these promises really makes the business in question look good.

It's also vitally important to actually ask for the sale; it's impossible to buy a beer, Antonucci relates, that isn't available for sale. A lot of agents don't make the offer at all, and that's a huge potential loss. While sales reps have heard for years “make the customer sell to you” and insist on the product in question, most of those targets don't even know about the product in the first place to ask about it.

Finally, there's a difference between contact and effect. A beer, even drunk slowly and savored, may last a half hour, but the impact can be felt even hours later. That sales call may only last eight to 10 minutes, but if done right, it's going to shake up thinking. It's going to get people wondering about a possible new item or service; will it really work? Will buying Widget X actually increase my profit margins?

It's crazy to think that an airport beer might be a teachable moment about the nature of customer service, but there it is. Actually making offers, offers that are felt after the sales call ends, making and delivering on promises, remembering the value of the first impression . . . these things together aren't some kind of drunken joke. These are the underpinnings of a great customer experience, and start even as far back as the marketing involved, the label on that bottle of customer service beer, so to speak. Coming from a chief customer officer—perhaps the highest expression of customer service in a business that only 6 percent of government agencies can aspire to—it's got a particular logic to it.

It may sound crazy to reduce the customer experience to a bottle of beer, but there's too much commonality between the two to let it go out of hand. Antonucci's look at that airport beer has a lot more wisdom in it than some might expect, and in the end, the simple lessons taught by fermented grain might be among the most powerful there are.