So there I was in McDonalds (shhhh, don’t tell) and I’m waiting in line and, honestly, I’m starting to get a tad cranky because well, if it’s called “fast food” shouldn’t it be FAST!

Well, on this particular occasion it wasn’t all that fast and my hunger pangs, magnified by the seductive smell of the fries, got me into a hyper critical state and I’m thinking all sorts of negative thoughts until I start to observe what’s going on around me.

Heck, from what I saw, those counter folks were doing things right. You might have some issues with the food itself, but the service and the sales techniques…those were right on target.

Here’s what we should learn from McD’s:

Do You Want Fries With That?

When you order a burger and the counter person asks “Would you like fries with that,” you’ve experienced a marketing tactic called cross-selling. This strategy encourages customers to purchase additional products and services that are related to the item they are already buying. Cross-selling doesn’t just work with fast food; it’s also a highly effective technique for any type of sales. Here are a few ideas to help you achieve cross-selling success in your business:

Service with a Smile

The success of cross-selling depends not only on the quality and value of the product, but also the customer service provided. Customer service begins with the very first encounter, either in person, through email, or on the phone. It’s true that you only get one chance to make a first impression. Every customer should always be greeted with enthusiasm and respect.

Listen to the Customer

Many sales opportunities arise by just listening to the customer. The simple skill of listening demonstrates that you are helpful and approachable. A good salesperson should be able to take information from the customer and inform them of all the products and services that would be benefit their needs. Customers appreciate being informed of additional products and services that could provide an added benefit to the item they already intend on purchasing.

How Well Do You Know Your Product?

Product knowledge is the key to successful sales. Successful salespeople know every detail of their products from how they work to when to use them. It’s essential that this knowledge be relayed to the customer to help them understand why they can benefit from your product. The product you are cross-selling should either be related or complementary to the original item the customer purchased. It’s unlikely to sell an add-on product or service that offers no additional value to the original product.

Don’t Forget to Ask

Many customers walk out the door without ever being asked whether they could benefit from related products. It should go without saying, but it is necessary to ask the customer whether they are interested. Even the best products and services won’t sell themselves. Sales must be initiated.

Follow-up

Numerous cross-selling opportunities are lost because the salesperson didn’t take the initiative to contact the customer regarding their original purchase. A quick follow-up call shows the customer that you truly care about their needs and not just the initial sale. This is a perfect time to find out whether they could benefit from related products or services. This simple act will open the door to a long-term sales relationship.

Serving your customers comes down to keeping your promises. You honour your word. You honour your commitment.

This isn’t about contracts and terms. It’s not about performance reviews. It’s not about call centre metrics and wait times and phone queues. It’s definitely not about policies.

Customer service is all about — only about, exclusively about — keeping your promises. Honouring your word, your bond, your commitment.

Promises don’t start with your customers

You haven’t seen me add “to your customers” at the end of these sentences yet, have you? I didn’t write, “you honour your word to your customers,” or “you honour your commitment to your customers.”

Because that’s not where it starts. That’s where it ends. That’s the goal. That’s the end of the journey.

Customer service starts with keeping your promises with your co-workers, your colleagues, your staff, and your friends at your company. And they with you.

These are promises big and small. They’re promises in writing. And they’re unwritten promises that sustain a company, enabling it to thrive in good times and survive at others. These promises form the little threads that bind each member to the desired outcome: happy, well-served customers.

Recognize the importance of your staff

IT Guy makes sure everyone has the best, fastest, most dependable IT resources necessary to do the job, at all times. And he promises to listen.

The “customer service” staff — and I quote the term because really, everyone in a company is in customer service, some companies just haven’t bothered to communicate that — they commit specifically to making the customer happy. They answer the customers’ calls, and communicate to everyone else in the company what’s needed to keep the customer happy.

Billing Guy makes sure the invoices are absolutely correct, all the time, keeping customer service free for other needs; and IT Guy’s promises keep Billing Guy happy with correct, timely invoices.

Then there’s Sales Guy. Sales Guy is very happy when all this happens. Why? He’s the direct beneficiary of referrals from happy customers. His conversion ratio continues to rise as he sells with the confidence brought by his promises kept with his colleagues, and theirs with him.

My role then becomes like that of an insurance agent. I ensure everyone communicates openly, including myself, on all that’s needed to grow our company. The bond is maintained as we grow and change — very important. Many companies forget this in their rush to change, and then wonder why, at the end of the day, it all fails.

Happy staff make happy customers

Promises to a customer are the simple end result of the promises kept with each other. The good habits of listening and accountability, honouring our promises, and helping each other — and therefore ourselves — becomes the norm in all interactions. Doing the right thing really does come naturally. You just have to ensure no one gets in the way; create a few meaningful extrinsic rewards; and sometimes undo the mental habits of previous jobs.

At that point, there’s simply no way a promise to a customer could be broken. What would be the point? It would be like those Visa commercials, where a community’s smooth and happy operation comes to a halt with the use of cash. Only here, our community with our customers would come to a halt with the breaking of promises to each other. What would be the point — adding a little dash of agony? We can get our share of that from any number of other companies.

But those companies known for providing great customer service are “merely” (!?!) filled with members busy each day keeping their promises to each other.

Customer service: it begins with keeping your promises.

Credit for this meme should be given to Mike Wagner, CEO of White Rabbit Group, along with Steve and Andrew MacGill from Peersight Online, who recently joined our company for lunch at our offices.

Our service philosophy involves opening the floodgates via phone, forum and email. We listen to what our users are saying, see their point of view, feel the pain they’re feeling. It’s an essential way of giving us the perspective we need in building two great things: the product itself, and our relationship with the people who use it.

Our new support rotation program

With over 300,000 users and growing, and with new team members on board, our support processes needed some attention to make sure we were always on top of providing great service. We wanted to find a way to scale our support efforts as demand continued to grow.

Quick turnaround time in support is a top priority here at FreshBooks, so a support rotation program was devised. Each employee does email, phone and forum replies once a week to stay in touch with our users; every one of us becomes what I call a “support lead,” to make sure all support queries are taken care of. Two or three support leads collaborate to form a support team for the day.

What we’ve seen so far

While some support calls take a bit longer as our “new recruits” get familiar with every nook and cranny about FreshBooks, everyone understands the reason we’re doing it and our customers are being super supportive of their obvious efforts. We expect the program to last as we double our user base, and by that time we’ll have weaned a few staff members off support, with the aim of building a dedicated support team with the help of the experience we gather from this program.

Since starting over a month ago, we have benefited from the rotation in a few ways:

• The whole team is more aware of the current set of feature requests and necessary enhancements.
• Exposure to support means everyone has a better understanding of our users’ most common issues, and a deeper knowledge of the functionality of the product.
• Better understanding of the most common support questions builds up our collection of workarounds and solutions.
• Support time allows us to exercise team effectiveness in communication, coordination, and cooperation.
• The stigma of doing support has vanished because everyone in the company is doing it.
• The rotation brings structure to our weekly schedule, allowing us to focus on both support and our individual superpowers.

Support builds a humble person

In addition to being current and up-to-date with the rotation program, the team also benefits from this humbling support role. As one of our customers, Zane Safrit, says, “putting others’ needs first builds a humble person.”

It takes quite a bit of patience from every single one of us, and creates a staff with rock star skills.

There are certain things I expect from my telephone company. The first is that they know my phone number.

Apparently, even this is too much to expect from Bell Canada, as I discovered in my still-ongoing quest to get the FreshBooks phones working the way we’d like.

“Hi, this is FreshBooks”

A few months ago we started calling our users on a regular basis, to find out how we could serve them even better. We found an inordinate number of people just plain ignored our calls.

That’s when it dawned on us: if “2NDSITE INC” showed up on your caller ID in the middle of the day, would you know that’s our corporate name, or figure it was a telemarketer?

We also had a long-standing issue where incoming calls to our main number weren’t rolling over to one of our secondary lines. With our call volume increasing daily, it was high time to resolve both issues.

This should be quick, right?

I called 310-BELL. After navigating obnoxious voice menus and enduring a couple transfers, I struggled to explain things to the service representative. Seemed simple enough to me: change our caller ID listing and fix up our rollover service. Unfortunately, communicating this proved tough.

Finally I broke through the language barrier, and she submitted two work orders to two different departments. It would be completed in a few days, I wrote down two confirmation numbers, and I hung up thinking, “all done!”

This would become a familiar routine.

A comedy of errors

At one point our rollover service started working correctly, only to stop a few weeks later. On another occasion they updated our caller ID listing for some of our outgoing lines, but not all. And, of course, there were all those times my calls led to no changes whatsoever. Nothing went right.

But the “winner,” without a doubt, is best explained with an image. What you see on the right was our caller ID for lines one through five a few weeks ago.

Now, in spite of everything that went wrong previously, a typo might still be understandable; people make mistakes. But look carefully at line 5.

Yes, that’s right. Bell Canada got our Bell Canada phone number wrong.

Another fifteen-minute call led to another apology, another due date and another confirmation number. Three days later our name was spelled right; our phone number was still wrong. It still is.

I can’t bring myself to call 310-BELL a seventh time. My will to fix this is fading. Maybe this is as good as it gets?

I’ve seen tales of poor customer service with far worse consequences, but this one might take the cake for sheer ineptitude.

When you’re in customer service, you’re in a life of service. Your day is focused on those customers’ needs: listening for them, anticipating them, identifying them, and then finding solutions and meeting, maybe even exceeding, their needs.

This insight was so obvious I’d overlooked it. Steve Rucinski reminded me of it after he interviewed me, along with Anita Campbell, at Small Business Trends Radio. He called after the show. We got to talking and he said something very simple, very honest, very illuminating: Customer service is a life of service.

It’s as unglamourous, overlooked and unappreciated a position as all positions of service can offer. It’s a life of servitude, even devotion, of putting their needs in front of yours. By its very nature it’s a humbling role. Putting others’ needs first builds a humble person. Maybe that’s why those in customer service are often such good listeners.

And maybe the nature of customer service, putting your customers’ needs in front of your own, reinforces the tendencies of others less humble to overlook or dismiss the importance of this function. How important can you be if others are always more important? Right? In customer service everyone’s more important than you, right?

Funny. Funny as in sadly ironic that so-o-o many companies communicate those upside-down values; in terms of their priorities, customer service comes last. They’ve got meetings to attend and reports to complete. The meetings are a chance to share their ideas. And the reports shout their success… and tally their incentives. No customers allowed.

A company’s mere existence is based on how well it serves the needs of its customers and staff. What’s more important than serving your customers? What better way to communicate a customer’s importance than putting their needs first?

Those needs start with their phone call or e-mail. Drop what you’re doing and answer it. It’s a simple act communicating that your work takes a back seat to their needs, even if you’re in a meeting or totalling your incentives. It’s an act of service. If done well, with genuine enthusiasm — and we’re not talking perfection, because we’re in the business of making profits, not saints — you repeat this day in and day out, and you live a life of service. And you have a sustainable business.

It can be that simple — and profitable. Lives of service always are.

My friend and I were recently at a business event. And conversation came around to talking about business models. And after rolling around the business models with Web 2.0 startups and innovations and trolling through the buzzword-friendly marketing arenas of word-of-mouth and customer experience marketing, my friend looked at me and said, “you’re just customer service.”

I laughed. I had to agree: yep. We’re “just” customer service.

That’s the point, isn’t it?

Serving the customer? Meeting their needs, solving their problems, making them happy, making them want to call you again, seeing you as a trusted advisor, having them smile at the thought of calling your company? That’s the point, right?

Customer challenges, when met, are the ones we brag about to our family and peers and leaders. Helping customers is the source for our sense of accomplishment, our sense of well-being, our intrinsic rewards and sense of worth.

Serving the customer. Meeting their needs.

It’s “just” customer service.

It’s just customer service for those companies who are growing, self-sustaining, exceptional in their fields, looked to as leaders.

Fred Reichheld in his book, The Ultimate Question, talks about how companies are addicted to bad profits — profits that come at the customer’s expense and drain the value out of customer relationships. They burn out employees and alienate customers.

Companies whose business model is “just” customer service are filled with staff who are inspired and motivated. They’ve connected their passion to serve with the needs of their customers. Internal or external customers. It doesn’t matter. It’s just customer service.

Customers are the ones that pay our salaries.

For those that forget, customers pay salaries. They provide the cash that exceeds expenses in cash-flow statements and net income statements. Bonuses are derived from customer payments — well, they are in the better-run companies.

You sometimes wonder if the company you’re calling, or working for, forgets that. It’s a crass motivator, I agree. But it’s useful. There may be readers too jaded to embrace a life of service in the business world.

If you can’t serve the customer, remember they pay your salary.

When you serve the customer, you no longer need to serve others.

Others like banks for loans, or ad agencies to drive your message. Ad agencies and their expenses aren’t needed when your customers are served. Customers carry your message. And that message is their experience with your company: It’s wonderful they tell their friends and colleagues and neighbors. Their ad for you is convincing. Not so with your ad agencies.

It’s “just” customer service that can free you to control your destiny, your mission, your customers, your business, your day. It’s just serving your customer that gives you the freedom to build your day, run your business, innovate and change the way you want to, the way your customers want to.

Oh. And make a little money.

You’re just customer service. At the end of the day, you can do a lot worse.

A while back I wrote a post about Triscuits, and Jonathan — who lives in Fiji — commented here on the Fresh Thinking blog to say:

I’d like to request removal from all future posting which reference food items I’m unable to purchase in this country.
I am right now dying to try cracked pepper and olive oil Triscuits.

I am seriously considering canceling my FreshBooks account because of this irresponsible posting. Have a heart.

jonathan

We felt for Jonathon, so we took the liberty of sending him a couple boxes of Triscuits. He was pretty excited when he received them. So excited in fact that this weekend Jonathan wrote a feature article in the Fiji Times titled “Separating the good buzz from the bad” about FreshBooks and a handful of other businesses whose outstanding service has touched Jonathan.

I gotta say, it’s pretty neat to be in a newspaper, especially one in Fiji. Thanks Jonathan, and we’re glad you liked the crackers.

If you read our blog often, you might get the impression we’ve got something against PayPal; well, as of today, I for one officially do.

First: a FreshBooks support story

Today one of our clients’ staff members called in with a problem she was experiencing: some reporting features weren’t working the way she expected.

First I took the time to go through exactly what she was doing, step by step. This always works far better than the usual “describe your problem” you’ll often get elsewhere, because instead of trying to interpret their words, you can just hit that stumbling block right there with the user; it’s like the mechanic hopping in your passenger’s seat. Nobody does that anymore, but it’s still the only way to be sure.

While I was looking at their FreshBooks system, though, I noticed last month’s payment hadn’t gone through.

A glitch in the matrix

We use PayPal’s Payflow Pro product for charging our users. Logging into their system, it appeared the regular monthly transaction had simply declined.

This happens all the time, and it’s often a bank issue; heck, the same user successfully made a separate purchase hours later, so obviously this was just a hiccup. Normally our system resolves these “hiccups” a day later. But for some reason that hadn’t happened here, so the account was past-due—but the user hadn’t done anything wrong!

Since their next regular monthly payment is due tomorrow, I wasn’t just going to retry the payment—the problem wasn’t their fault, so it wouldn’t be very polite to charge them twice within a few hours. So I called the client, explained, and apologized for what happened. Thankfully he was very gracious about the situation, and said it would be fine to charge his card twice.

So after thanking him and hanging up, I clicked the button to retry the payment. That was when I got a very odd error message (which seems to be PayPal’s specialty):

Error: Error in forcing the recurring profile payment: Cannot force a future payment

Admittedly, I did not invent the Gregorian calendar. But to my knowledge, September 13, 2007 is not in the future.

Next: a PayPal support nightmare

I phoned PayPal. After a few minutes navigating their automated system, I waited ten minutes before I had a service representative on the other end. It quickly became clear neither her, nor her technician’s manual, had ever used Payflow Pro before.

I explained my situation, and she seemed very confused. Since there was no number accompanying the error message, she said she couldn’t look it up. So she decided the error message didn’t matter; instead she just spent the next five minutes repeating, “you can’t re-process if the card failed with response code 12.”

For those of you who don’t speak technical gobbledygook, she was saying it isn’t possible to retry a declined payment. (Yeah, it must have been one of those single-use credit cards.)

Trying not to get frustrated, I asked why there was a retry button, why I was receiving an error I’d never received before, why the error message was complaining about the transaction being in the future, why she was calling something impossible that I do multiple times every single day.

So she put me on hold while she went to talk to her supervisor… for ten minutes.

From bad to worse

When she finally returned, her first words were, “are you still there?”

(Folks: if you put somebody on hold long enough that you have to ask if they bothered to stay on the line, that’s a bad thing.)

I replied with a “yes,” only to have her repeat what I’m guessing is PayPal’s new mantra: “you can’t re-process if the card failed with response code 12.”

Apparently those ten minutes were spent fixing a sandwich.

There were no higher-level support folks I could talk to, she said; she’d already talked to her supervisor, and that was all she could do. The error was because I was trying to do the impossible. If there was anything wrong with the gateway, it already would have been fixed. Up is down, the sun revolves around the earth, there are five lights. Thank you and goodbye.

Dejected, angry, yet not the least bit surprised, I hung up, having re-affirmed everything I ever believed about PayPal.

In conclusion

For what it’s worth, before VeriSign sold Payflow Pro to PayPal, the interface and support for this service were amazing. So VeriSign, if you’re listening… could you buy Payflow back?

And to the rest of you, could you share some of your horror stories? I could use a little consolation here.

You can have the best customer support staff in the world, but they’ll be terrible at their jobs if you don’t empower them.

A few months ago I had ordered a pair of Klipsch B-3 speakers from BestBuy at 20% off from their online sale.  I had selected the online option to pick them up from my local BestBuy.  Sadly, a few days later I got an automated email that told me that they were out of stock and I would have to re-order them online.

Since the sale had already ended, I could no longer re-order the speakers at 20% off.  I called their customer support and they said that they could process the order again, but they only had control over online orders and could not arrange a pick-up.  This would require me to pay extra shipping fee for a mistake on their part.  I cancelled my order.

Apparently, their support representatives had no jurisdiction over local pick-ups even though their website allows it.  Furthermore they weren’t able to budge on the extra shipping fee they would require me to pay.

Too often then not, I end up calling customer support from company whose support staff can’t help me with my problem.  It’s easy to get mad at the customer support representative when you are frustrated, but many times I find that it’s not their fault.  Those companies failed to provide them the right tools and empower their staff to actually solve client problems.

Facebook has become a monster. The popular social networking website has millions of users worldwide, including over 500k in Toronto alone, and grows roughly 3% a week. Our own FreshBooks User Group, hosted on Facebook, already has 80+ members – okay, not as impressive, but we’re still pretty excited about it.

Several weeks ago, the Facebook team launched the Facebook Platform, a way for developers and companies to create their own applications inside the Facebook mega-verse. As an avid Facebook user with too much time on my hands, I thought I’d fool around and create my own Facebook app. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing – here’s some thoughts on my experience.

Where’s the “Dummies” guide?

When the Facebook Platform was first released, documentation was sparse. The best source of information was the sample application provided, which didn’t work (for me) straight out of the box. All I wanted was “Hello, World”, but after a full night of debugging with no success, I had lost interest and was ready to call it quits. It wasn’t until they added a step-by-step walkthrough and a developer Wiki before I tried my hand again.

Is anybody listening?

Facebook has a developer forum for platform-related questions, and it’s generally pretty busy. When I posted a new thread on some difficulties I’d been having, I was pleasantly surprised to see so many follow up posts by fellow Facebook users trying to lend a hand. Unfortunately, none of their suggestions worked, and 12 thread replies and a week later, I still didn’t have an answer.

It turns out I’m not alone – there are a number of long forum threads like mine to which no one has an answer, and it feels like the Facebook developers have been totally absent. With an estimated 50+ developers on staff, can’t a few take some time to reply to threads and throw out some life preservers? (Yeah, I totally made up that number.)

What I’ve learned

As the lead FreshBooks API developer, I realize I’m playing with fire here. We’re weeks away from releasing our new-and-improved FreshBooks API, and someone could be writing the very same about us shortly.

Still, I think this experience has taught me a few things, and I think the team and I have put together a better product as a result. Keep an eye out for a brand new API documentation page, “getting started” sample code, and a developer forum where we’ll be actively answering questions. Our goal isn’t just to add new features and functions; we want to get you up and building apps as painlessly as possible.