On a recent business trip to Dusseldorf I had the pleasure of flying with British Airways. I say the pleasure, because the flight was quick, painless and the service if nothing else was rapid. However, I have to also comment on the experience off the airplane to give you the rounded picture. For anyone following the UK news, you’ll now that last week two things of interest happened at London Heathrow:

1. a lunatic ran on to one of the runways carrying a suitcase which he left on the runway

2. the Queen officially opened the brand new Terminal 5 building

So what you might ask has this got to do with British Airways and customer service?

First of all both occurrences delayed my flight - on the outbound and inbound journey. To be fair, I can’t really complain about this what so ever, BA after all had no control over the lunatic running onto the airport which resulted in additional security for Her Majesty’s visit the following day.

However, what I can complain about is the complete lack of information from BA. While waiting at Heathrow for over two hours all I was told by the information desk was to have patience. When I enquired in the BA lounge at Heathrow, they actually had a little more information, but not much. On the return journey, it was the same story - no information at all from the staff at the gate, even though we were kept waiting for about an hour.

All this got me to thinking about how negative I was feeling towards BA.

Not knowing why there were delays I naturally assumed it was the airline’s fault, particularly as they were unwilling to talk about it. Has this done some damage to BA’s brand, yes quite possibly. I shared my experience with my colleagues in Dusseldorf (several others of whom got caught in the delays also) and of course I’m writing about it now. Will I fly with BA again? Probably, but not until I’ve checked out the alternatives. Strange isn’t it, after all, BA are not to blame at all. It was just a lack of communications that left me feeling disappointed.

What’s the lesson then. I think it is clearly that when things are going a little pear shaped, keep the customer informed. Whether that’s a announcement at an airport, a phone call, or a quick email. All of these small steps will help to keep the customer informed and a little happier. We all know that happiness has a direct correlation with repeat business and making recommendations to friends, family and other potential customers.

For more ideas on customer communications, visit the excellent return customer blog from Joe Rawlinson. Joe talks a lot about keeping customers properly informed, whether that’s to reinforce negativity in the sales process, or simply getting the basics right in answering the phones.

Don’t forget, keep communicating with your customers!

I’m not often one to sing Google’s praises too much, but credit where credit is due, they do seem to be smartening up their act with the AdWords support programme. Perhaps this is in response to Microsoft adCentre’s excellent telephone support line.

Well anyway, just a short post to say well done Google. The recent problems I’ve been experiencing with My Client Centre and Analytics are being handled by a very polite and responsive lady by the name of Niamh (pronounced Neve for those non-Gaelic readers). I will let you all know how quickly the problem is resolved, but for now I’m happy in the assurances that Niamh is on the case.

It’s fairly unusual living in Britain to receive good, let alone great, customer service from a call centre. Recently lots of large service based companies have been moving call centres to remote parts of the world in an attempt to cut costs and increase profits, not really thinking too much about the customer experience. HSBC and Midland Mainline (a railway operator) are great examples of this and I’m frequently frustrated when I’m trying to book a train journey with someone who barely speaks English.

Such is the state of British call centres that I feel it is entirely necessary to report two cases of excellent customer service I received just this week.

Microsoft adCenter

I run a handful of Payperclick campaigns for my clients, one of whom was recently sent a £50 voucher from their host to spend with adCenter. Unfortunately this was only for new customers and not those with existing accounts. I called the adCenter helpline and the gentleman on the other end was fantastic. He listened to what I wanted to achieve, talked me through how to set it up and even emailed me the next day to make sure everything was OK.

Now that is fantastic service. Compare that to working with Google AdWords where there isn’t even a help line phone number to call in the first place. Well done Microsoft and come on Google pull your socks up, you’re making enough money to look after your customers properly.

The AA & Royal & Sun Alliance

I recently had my bicycle stolen (again) from outside my apartment in South West London. The process of speaking to the two companies that I buy insurance from (the AA and R&SA) has been incredibly straight forward. The call centre staff were helpful and even compassionate - it felt like I’d lost a dear member of my family, not a push bike. When it was necessary for them to take my query offline, they did so and called back within the 30 minutes as promised.

Excellent service and a big MacDonald’s style gold star to you both.

Of course, good customer service is essential and should play a big part in your online or offline marketing strategy. Even if you want to sell information products or small web scripts / plugins, think about how you will manage customers after the sale. What if they need support or a refund should your product not be what they wanted, or if they can’t get it to work.

If you need an incentive as to why you should consider after sales service, remember it’s ten times* more expensive to sell to a new customer than one who has already bought from you.

* OK so I can’t back that statistic up with hard evidence but I’ve heard it quoted many times and also it’s fairly logical.

If you want more advice on how to build customer relations I suggest you head over to Return Customer where you’ll find some interesting ideas - particularly the post on the ethical obligations of customer care.

I had the great privilege yesterday of meeting the Chief Executive Officer of Xerox, Anne Mulcahy. Speaking to a packed auditorium at the London Business School, Anne talked about how Xerox has been transformed from a company with serious debt and health issues, into a streamlined, debt free, profitable company, with exciting long term prospects.

Obviously Xerox is not a small business, with a revenues of around $19bn in the last reporting period it is far from that in fact. But, some of the lessons Anne has learned could easily be applied to any business, large or small. So with that in mind, I want to summarise some of the key points Ann highlighted as being vital to Xerox’s success:

1) It is important for leaders to listen to advice and to understand the issues facing the business

Get to know your business, your market, micro and macro factors and more. You can get to grips with all of this with a good marketing audit, including SWOT, PEST and a host of other analytical excurses.

2) Leaders need leadership intuition, experience and accountability.

To get the most from your business and team, develop your leadership skills through a mixture of training and experience. The chances are if you’re already running a successful small business you will have some inherent intuition to use anyway.

3) Develop a clear vision and direction for employees, a story.

Anne’s team at Xerox wrote a dummy Wall Street Journal article about the company in four years time. This was distributed throughout the company to give everyone an idea of what they wanted to achieve. There’s no reason why you can’t develop a story like this for your business, no matter how large or small you are.

4) Invest in your business, even in the tough times.

Often when times are hard, companies cut back on some of the activities that are essential for long term success. This was a mistake Xerox wanted to avoid and whilst they did cut back on advertising, they continued to invest over $1 billion in research and development. When it comes to marketing Anne’s opinion is that “building the brand and investing in marketing excellence is very important”.

5) Work on communications.

This is both internal and external communications. Conduct a stakeholder analysis first to identify who you need to talk to and set about doing so in a planned and measured way. Anne considers face to face communications to be essential, especially with key customers.

6) Surround yourself with truthful critics.

Constructive criticism is a good thing, the last thing you want is to be surrounded by a bunch of yes men. Try to ensure the criticism you receive is complemented with advice for how to resolve any problems i.e. that it is actually helpful.

7) Ensure you have good calibre of people in your business.

This is a no brainer, although an enormous challenge especially for small business who often do not have the pulling power of larger enterprises. You can work around this by ensuring you have a programme for investing in and developing all of your staff, from the bottom up.

I like David Ogilvy’s thoughts here also as he only ever hired people smarter than he. That takes a great leader.

8 ) Success is based on the value you bring to customers - “they have to be the centre of your universe”.

This seems a fairly obvious point, but I can tell you from experience it’s very easy to lose sight of your customers wants and needs when you are hell bent on getting new business, or making the VAT return, or paying your staff. You need to keep in mind that satisfying the customer is the only way you will ultimately get paid.

I was extremely impressed by Anne’s presentation. A great business woman (and interestingly also voted the 5th most powerful woman in the world) and an inspiration. Thanks Anne, I’ll be trying to take some of this on board.