Welcome to the Rick Astley School of Customer Service

It’s not all bad when a song gets stuck in your head – especially if it provides helpful business lessons. Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” is just that kind of song; in fact, you could build your customer service department around the six lines of its chorus.

Perhaps only those of us who experienced 80’s music in the 80’s can truly appreciate the contributions of musicians that seemed to exit the music scene as quickly as they had arrived, leaving just one memorable hit or two behind. Rick Astley’s best-known hit, “Never Gonna Give You Up” was released in 1987 and quickly worked its way to the top of the U.S. charts, where it remained for five weeks.

As much as the music itself, the words to this blockbuster hit were just what the romantic side of the human spirit wanted to hear. In a world where you can’t count on much, you can count on me, was the message we heard over and over as this Astley tune was played day after day.

With the song stuck in my head earlier this morning, all at once I realized that romance or not, what Astley had to say in this song should be the heart and core of an organization’s customer service strategy.

And I’ve just got to share it with you, because, well, I just wanna tell you how I’m feeling, gotta make you understand – here goes!

6 Things Rick Astley Can Teach You About Great Customer Care

Never gonna give you up

We give up our customers when we forget that they don’t have to choose us. It’s our job to earn their first visit, and every visit afterwards. We give up our customers when we fail to communicate with them on a regular basis. We give up our customers when we take their business for granted.

Never gonna let you down

We let our customers down when we fail to deliver on a customer promise or disappoint them during the customer experience. We let our customers down when they ask us for help and we blow them off, put them off or piss them off – if you’ll excuse my language!

We let our customers down when we don’t make them look good to the friends, family and co-workers they send our way. We let our customers down when we fail to acknowledge complaints, suggestions and reviews.

Never gonna run around or desert you

We desert our customers when we eliminate products or services without notice or eliminate key aspects of what they have come to expect as part of their customer experience.

Never gonna make you cry

Oh man, hopefully we never make our customers cry! We make our customers cry when we make it painful to do business with us, painful to return something, painful to resolve some kind of complaint. We make our customers cry when we give them no choice but to post a negative review online or leave negative feedback about us on social networks. (And business lost as a result might make us cry!)

Never gonna say goodbye

We say goodbye to customers when we make them feel like they aren’t important to us. We say goodbye to customers when we stop engaging them – when we aren’t interesting to them any longer. And though we might not realize it at the time, any time we fail to deliver on a customer’s expectation we run the risk that they will perceive us as relationship-breakers – and thus – goodbye say-ers.

Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you

We tell a lie and hurt our customers when we say one thing (like, “customers are our number one priority”) but our actions say something else, when we lure them in with a false promise, pull a bait and switch, or simply fail to offer what they expected to find when they arrived -- or, as you might say, we tell a lie and hurt our customers by rickrolling (ironic, isn't it?)

You might also like:

• 8 Things Business Leaders Can Learn from Pre-Season Football
• 5 Ways to Get More New Clients Into Bed with Your Business

***

Elizabeth Kraus is the marketing manager for business cash advance and receivables factoring company DB Squared Inc. and the author of From Beginning to End: 2014 Small Business Marketing Calendar, available on amazon.com.