Customer Service That Astonishes

In February I wrote a post about a recent service recovery experience with Swiss Chalet.

I thought I would share the subsequent follow up I had with the manager of the particular store I mentioned.

The franchise manager called a couple days later because I had made a comment through their website about my experience. I thought it would be interesting to see how they reacted.

The timing of the return call was pretty quick, but upon connecting, her first concern was to ensure that the issue was with her particular location — and not another  location. I confirmed it was her location.

She then asked what I wanted to make this right — yes those were her exact words. I indicated I wasn’t looking for anything — I had just responded to the feedback form that was made available to me for feedback. They had asked — so I assumed they were interested in what I had to say.

She then indicated that she was calling because “the Franchise owner wanted me to clarity that it was their store”.

She saw I had received a $6.00 credit and said “she would take up with the central organization”. Implying that somehow, someone else had dropped the ball in the total experience.

And that concluded the call. Not even an apology on behalf of her store.

My Perspective: This encounter is part of a much bigger problem I am seeing in the service industry — particularly the auto industry. The follow-up survey for customer satisfaction.

You know the one — where corporate has arranged for a survey company to call customers to gain feedback and then punishes the outlet if they have poor performance.

This results in employees basically asking people to give them a high ranking so the employees/outlet doesn’t get in trouble or even penalized. Talk about a skewed result. Employees start to “game” the system when feedback is used as a stick.

How is this type of information gathering supposed to help businesses improve? They have missed the real opportunity for honest feedback because they have forgotten the purpose of the feedback loop.

 So have a look at your customer feedback programs. Are they focused on improving the experience or punishing the laggards. Are they being implemented simply because you know that you should be measuring customer experience — or are you using this important tool to fine-tune and continuously improve.

There are much more effective ways to deal with the poor performers.

I recently read an article “Consistency Is Far Greater Than Rare Moments of Greatness” by Scott Ginsberg The Nametag Guy.

In it he makes the point “Because ultimately, consistently is greater than rare moments of greatness. And people only give you credit for that which they see you do consistently.”

It brought to mind that even before we become great — we must first become consistent. If you talk to any professional athlete, cook, public speaker, salesperson or customer service representative, they will all tell you that before they became great they first had to learn how to consistently deliver their product.

Only then were they able push to the next level — become faster, stronger or better.

In the book “The Myth of Excellence“, Crawford & Mathews state the key to successful organizations is first becoming consistent across the 5 key attributes (price, service, access, experience, and service) that consumer’s desire — and then achieving dominance in one and differentiation in a second, while remaining at par with the competition across the balance.

In my post Don’t Be A Jack of all Trades, I talked about focusing on your strengths — but only after you have brought your weaknesses up to par.

The consistent message here seems to be that before we ever become great we must first become consistent with customer expectations across all touch points.

Even if you are great in one area of your business — or one department — a single interaction with your customers that is below expectations can render the entire experience as negative. Think about after-sales service. Any issues come to mind personally.

My Perspective: Look at your customer experience map and look for areas where you are below par. Fix them

Then look for areas where you are or can be exceptional. Leverage them.

Don’t try to be great in all things, figure out what you want to be known for and make that the area that you will seek dominance.

In my last post I had been transferred to the Manager because I had been told by the person at the desk that all they could do was pass my complaint on to the department that I had the issue with. You will recall the transfer to the Manager was prompted by my request for the email of the President so I could send them a personal note.

The manager was really quite nice. She empathized with my situation all the while assuring me that my concerns were important to them. However, she did not contradict the assertion by the front desk that the process was simply to send comments to “another department” and pray.

In fact, she assured me that when I returned home, I would receive a survey that solicited my honest feedback and would be read by senior management as part of their ongoing desire to understand their customer expectations. Resultant, there was no need for me to have the email of the President. (Ohh, the red flags are waving now.) So I left without the email address.

The next day, we returned to our room to find a very nice basket of nuts and water with a note from the Manager (but still no email address).

Overall, I thought the Manager handled the issue very well, but clearly they were not empowered to actually do anything.

What seemed crystal clear to me was that someone had tried to implement a customer-focus in this organization, but fundamentally the senior team didn’t buy in. Resultant, the promise was not delivered. In fact, it would have been better not to make such lofty promises and raise expectations to a level that ensured disappointment.

So sometimes, customer focus language can do more harm than good. Be sure that your organization can and will support this initiative across the full organization before communicating these higher expectations to your customers.

Oh, in case you are wondering — I received an email survey for my feedback the day after we arrived home. I will let you know if I get a response.

I just returned from 1 week in Orlando Florida where I was spending time with my wife and youngest daughter on March Break vacation. What a pleasure to sit by the pool, catch up on some reading and not think about business except in broad terms.

Overall we had a great time, but staying at a resort forced me to contemplate what they are doing well, or could be improved on — particularly since they set the bar high with the following promise, “In just 25 years, we’ve exceeded the expectations of more than 110,000 owners worldwide by empowering our team of dedicated individuals who work hard to ensure a wonderful experience.”

So I thought I would use the next few posts to share what I thought went well, what could be improved and some lessons learned.

Let me start by saying that the check-in was very friendly and positive. Short efficient line-up, because they had lots of people on hand to manage the crowds (3:00 pm check-in). Our check-in person was very friendly, asked some questions about where we were from, had we been to Orlando before, etc. that made us feel welcome. They completed the registration by promising that we were going to have a great time and our expectations would be exceeded. (There’s that phrase again — someone has been doing some internal training about consistent messaging).

In very short order we arrived at our room (1 bedroom with pull-out queen size couch) and were pleased with the cleanliness, size, facilities, location relative to pool and parking, etc. Satisfied, but so far nothing exceeded my expectations. After all, this is supposed to a first class resort. Shouldn’t we have a right to expect this?

After dinner and a stop to pick up some groceries, we settled in for the night and discovered that the pull-out bed only came with 1 sheet – no second sheet and no blankets. The rooms are advertised as sleeping up to 4 people, but there was no bedding for the second bed (pull-out). A quick call to housekeeping resulted in a 90 minute wait and a second sheet with 2 thin blankets. Hmmm, things are not quite so exceptional.

The next morning, my wife went in search of a morning coffee (Starbucks is advertised in the brochures) only to disciver that the restaurant in our area of the resort is only open from 11 – 4 and is really a snack bar.

Resultant, to get a coffee, required getting dressed, driving to a separate section of the resort where “Starbucks” consisted of 2 canisters (regular and decaf) that you poured yourself and had the ability to add a couple “shots” in addition to cream or sugar. At this point we are not feeling very “first class”.

But I am encouraged because on the front page of their monthly newsletter provided to all guests at check-in, they have published the following;

Delighting Our Guests
Resort Services has transformed into a “Customer Care” department. All team members are provided with extensive empowerment training, which includes taking ownership of any opportunity to delight our guests. For information, questions, or concerns you may have while staying at the resort or between vacations, call Resort Services at ext. 6100.

So it looks like someone has the right idea, but will the idea come to life?

I’ll talk more about that in my next post, but in the interim, see if you can spot the problem with the communication in the above message, and what seems to be the issue that is beginning to present itself.

Many of you will have heard or read about the new report released by the CMO Council that describes the current role of the voice of the customer in marketing decision-making based on a survey of 480 executives. It is a dismal state of affairs given the sputtering we hear about the importance of customer service.

Reports have already been published in major industry publications such as AdAge and AdWeek, as well as blogs too numerous to mention.

Some key findings include;

• Nearly two-thirds of companies do not have a formal Voice of Customer program in place.
• Only 31 percent highly rate their organization’s commitment to customer listening.
• Only 13 percent of companies have deployed real-time systems to collect, analyze and distribute customer feedback.
• While 74 percent say they receive customer feedback via e-mail, only 23 percent say they track and measure the volume and nature of these messages
• Only 12 percent are using a word-of-mouth marketing platform to drive online customer advocacy.
• 58 percent of them believe the Internet and social media have changed the level of influence and expectations of their customers, but only 14.5 percent track word of mouth on the Internet and only 16 percent regularly monitor online message boards for complaints and feedback
• 37 percent said they gather insights from customer engagement situations
• 56 percent said they have no programs tracking or propagating positive word of mouth among customers
• Only 33 percent of the respondents think their companies are very good at resolving complaints
• 58 percent said their companies do not compensate any employees or executives based on customer loyalty, satisfaction improvements or analytics
• Only 29 percent said their companies rate highly in their ability handle and resolve customer problems or complaints

I think you would agree that this is a dismal state of affairs. From all this data, two things stand out for me.

1. What gets measured gets done: Unless people are being recognized and rewarded for an activity it will not get done.
2. Empowerment: If improving the customer experience is not central to your value system and everyone isn’t empowered to effect change, then change will not happen.

At the end of the day, even though everyone seems to espouse the value of customer service, it still isn’t being effectively leveraged to create a point of difference for organizations. I believe those of us who focus on these two truths will win the day.

Check out the articles (and some of the comments) – they make good reading. You can download the Executive Summary here.