Customer Service That Astonishes

We’ve all heard this expression, but I was reminded recently how important this adage is by an experience I had when I was a young Account Executive with one of Canada’s largest advertising agencies.

A large international client from Boston was in Toronto for a day of meetings and I was responsible for making sure that lunch was available.

In a trip to their office months earlier, the client had mentioned that he disliked chicken with bones — he preferred chicken breast and remarked that he always purchased boneless breast for his barbecue. The single exception was St-Hubert Bar-B-Q Chicken with dipping sauce which he had discovered on a trip to Montreal. He was so enamoured by their dipping sauce that he wished it was available in Boston where he would gladly picked it off the bones.

Based on this personal insight I ordered St-Hubert chicken for our lunch.

My agency President was aghast.

We were effectively serving a large international client a fast food meal rather than a traditional catered meal. He felt that we had lost an opportunity to impress this important client with our hospitality and even feared that we would be perceived as second rate versus our international cousins.

He quietly took me aside to give me some “constructive” feedback.

Fortunately, the client overhead his whispered comments.

The client indicated that he was thrilled that I had taken the time to arrange this special lunch for him and proceeded to sing my praises for remembering this small fact that he had shared with me months earlier.

He continued that this was a further demonstration of the care and attention that I applied to every aspect of his business and went so far as to state that he saw no need to replace the recently departed Account Supervisor on his business — voicing his confidence that I was ready to step into this role (a promotion that was wisely swift in coming after the meeting ).

My Perspective: Paying attention to our clients specific needs/desires allow us to tailor our products/service to their needs and build trust and confidence.

The client felt more important by the personalization of the meal choice than he would have ever felt regardless of the expense of a generic meal that may have been served to any client.

What might have been disaster for another client was pure magic for him. Are you looking for the opportunities to create a moment of magic for your clients — or just providing the same generic service o everyone?

Here in Toronto, our public transit system — the TTC (Toronto Transit Commission) is currently the focus of considerable negative attention by the public. The public is lashing out at the union as well as management — pointing fingers and making suggestions about how they should each do things differently.

General discontentment was smouldering because of a fare increase earlier this year, but their outrage escalated when a picture was posted on Twitter which showed a ticket agent sleeping in their ticket booth.

The public was rightly outraged.

The senior union official chastised the public for assuming the person was sleeping and not having medical difficulties (he was sleeping). His focus is on protecting his members — regardless of the issue.

Management is focused on having trains running on time, on budget. Noble objectives — but only part of delivering customer service.

No one seems to be focused on understanding or delivering good, consistent customer service.

The issues here are complex, but one fundamental truth is at work. People within the organization are not aligned with a focus on the customer.

The problem isn’t with either the unions or the management. This organization needs a complete change in culture and no one seems to be willing to work together and make the hard decisions to change the current culture.

They need to start by getting aligned around a common goal — defining and delivering an exceptional customer experience.

Once that happens, the various combative elements can begin to start focusing on the common goal instead of their individual goals.

My Perspective: Regardless of our business, we too often get caught up focusing on our department goals and forgetting the overall organizational goal which is serving customers.

By creating this common focus we break down our silos and start working together towards a common goal.

It’s the holidays and many of us are thinking about sending to gifts to friends and family. I thought it would be nice to send a selection of cookies to some friends in the US.

I went online t0 Mrs Fields Cookies to place an order. However, after placing the order, providing the shipping address and credit card information, at the very last step, I discovered I was not able to place the order because the billing address for the credit card was in Canada.

I called the Mrs. Fields phone number and was told the only way around this was to set up an account. Not Interested. Total waste of my time.

So I went online to www.giftbaskets.comand placed exactly the same order for Mrs Fields Cookies without any issues with my credit card billing address being from outside the US. Within 5 minutes I had placed my order and received a confirmation email. Woo Hoo!

Now here’s the interesting part. At Gift Baskets I paid a premium of $2.00 v.s Mrs Fields on the initial purchase price. However, I received FREE ground shipping versus paying $14.95 through Mrs. Fields. Resultant my purchase was less to use a third party supplier than directly from Mrs Fields.

Mrs. Fields placed a barrier to me purchasing directly from them. This time I simply purchased the same product, so they still received a sale — but would probably need to sell it to Gift Baskets at a reduced price resulting in less profit on the sale.

More importantly, I now have been introduced to another company that offers a broader range of products — so in addition to not ever returning to Mrs. Fields, I will potentially choose different offerings from Gift Baskets in the future versus Mrs Fields cookies.

My Perspective: Are you putting barriers up that push your customers away because “that’s the way we do things”?

Mrs. Fields effectively turned me from a customer, to a dis-satisfied customer, to a non-customer in one easy step. Simply because they made it hard for me to buy from them. I was standing in line with my purchase and money in hand and they set up a barrier to purchase.

Review your processes. Are you looking at these processes from your organizational perspective — or are you looking at them through the eyes of your customer?

During some recent client research, one of the staff made the comment “All our clients work very hard to earn their money — they don’t want to work hard to spend it”.

Words worth remembering!

Last week I was in the US presenting at a client conference when one of the attendees shared an experience with the hotel we were staying at.

When she checked into her room, she noticed what looked like blood on her bed comforter. She phoned down to the front desk to request that it be changed.

The person at the desk indicated that they could not just change the comforter, but would come up and strip the entire bed. The guest indicated this was not necessary, she only wanted the comforter changed.

However, the front desk was insistent, and began to argue with the guest until finally a a Manager was consulted. Eventually the comforter was changed as requested by the guest.

My Perspective: There were actually 2 lessons here.

1. Often, in our rush to recovery, we fail to ask what would satisfy the customer. It seems obvious, but before charging ahead with a solution, be sure to ask what the guest wants.  We often impose our values on what we think the customer may value, when in fact they often already have a satisfactory solution in mind.
2. Create guidelines not rules. Obviously, this hotel had a procedure about what to do when a guest complained about bed linen. However, they didn’t allow the employee the flexibility to use their common sense to respond to the customer request. They needed Manager approval to deviate from the standards. This creates issues with the guest and doesn’t inspire the employee to use their judgement.

Both issues could have been resolved simply by empowering the employee to use their common sense after apologizing to the guest and simply asking them what would make them happy.

As it was, even though the guest finally got the solution they requested, they had to argue to get it — and was left with a bad feeling.

Yesterday I experienced one of the most common missteps of good customer service — ignoring customers to attend to “organizational” priorities.

I was waiting in line to pay for my purchases, but as my turn arrived, the Manager showed up to make sure the cashier has enough change. Of course this is a good thing because it ensures that the cashier does not hold up customers because they don’t have correct change.

The issue was that I was ignored while they attended to the task.

When I stepped up to the counter, rather than the cashier acknowledging me before turning her attention to the task, she immediately turned to the Manager to discuss her needs. They quickly shuffled through the dollars and cents to decide what she needed.

It was only 30-45 seconds, and then the cashier rang up my purchases and sent me on my way with a cheery “Have a nice day!”

However, it let me know the priorities in this organization.

My Perspective: To be clear, I don’t hold the young girl responsible for this misstep — but the manager/management.

Management needs to ensure that tasks of good customer service don’t interfere with delivering good customer service.

When tasks need to be performed in full view of the customer, a simple acknowledgement of the customer would let them know they were seen and appreciated. Then you can address the organizational task. This could be getting change or restocking a shelf, but the customer needs to be the first priority.

The simple steps of viewing these types of tasks through the eyes of the customer will give you a quick clue on how to handle them.