Guest Post: Consistency in Customer Service – 3 Areas Where It’s a Must

This week, we feature an article by Josh Centers, Business Journalist at TextExpander. It is a platform that helps teams save time and eliminate repetitive typing with just a few keystrokes. He writes about how successful brands have built consistency and reliability into their customer service.

Consistency in customer service is key. Imagine pulling up to a McDonald’s drive-through, and instead of hearing, “Hi, welcome to McDonald’s, may I take your order,” you were greeted with a gruff: “McDonald’s. What do ya want?”

You’d probably think twice before placing an order! You might even drive to another restaurant instead. Your customers are no different.

Top brands are built on consistent and reliable customer service. Your customers have to know what they can expect from your business, know they can rely on the information you provide, and know that you will follow through on what you promise. In short, consistent and reliable customer service is about trust.

Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose.

Let’s define exactly what it means to provide consistent and reliable customer service and explore how to maintain customer satisfaction.

Consistent and reliable customer service definition

Just what do we mean when we say “consistency in customer service?” McKinsey & Company provides a three-step comprehensive definition, which includes:

1. Customer-journey consistency: Simply put: are your rules and procedures consistent? No matter how many Google accounts you sign up for, the process is the same every time. If you pay FedEx for overnight shipping, you know that package will be there the next day.
2. Emotional consistency: Research has consistently shown that positive emotional experiences are key to maintaining customer satisfaction. Every interaction a customer has with your brand needs to have the same emotional tone. It’s why you’d probably drive away from a McDonald’s where you were greeted by, “McDonald’s. What do ya want?”
3. Communication consistency: Staying on brand is key. Dollar Tree shoppers would be offended if they spotted a $300 handbag in the store. Likewise, Versace shoppers would be equally insulted by a dollar bin. Once your customers have an idea of what to expect, you need to continue feeding their expectations.

The late comedian Mitch Hedberg had a joke that perfectly encapsulates the consistency issue:

The idea of a contrarian McDonald’s that only serves spaghetti and blankets is funny, but it wouldn’t be as funny if you were on a long road trip and had to console cranky children who just wanted a Happy Meal. Consistency in customer service matters.

Consistency in customer service is boring…and that’s good!

If consistency seems boring, that’s not a bad thing. Customer service guru Shep Hyken points out that boring can be good:

That boring predictability builds something money can’t buy: brand loyalty. And if you can provide a quality product, above-average customer service, and consistency, you can build a loyal customer base that keeps coming back. It’s hip to be square.

As Hyken says, “Consistency isn’t part-time. It’s all of the time.”

Maintain customer satisfaction in text-based communications

It’s fairly easy to stay consistent with text-based customer service teams—like email, online chat, and social media. You can give your team a script that they either memorize or copy and paste.

But that can be problematic for a couple of reasons:

• Memory is a thorny thing. It’s easy to forget or get things mixed up, and then out goes consistency.
• Juggling multiple documents and windows is cumbersome and inefficient.

Let’s talk about how TextExpander can solve for consistency and help your team maintain customer satisfaction. TextExpander lets you type a short thing to get a longer thing. We call that a Snippet.

Say you want to ensure that your customers are always greeted the exact same way. You can create a Snippet for that so that every time your team types sup.greet, the exact same greeting is expanded on the screen. Likewise, you can do the same for hold messages and farewells.

Try it for yourself.

Josh Centers is a tech journalist and book author. You can read his work in USA Today, Macworld, Wirecutter, and The Washington Post.

Read Shep’s latest Forbes article: How AI And ChatGPT Can Crush Customer Service