Creating Devoted Customers with Imaginative Service

Imaginative Service: Serving Beyond Six Sigma

Curse words are very inappropriate for a blog.  But, they were wrapped all around a customer’s comment to a call center operator in some foreign land.  “Put your (bleep, bleep) script down and just listen to me!” 

Imaginative service trumps service quality!   Now, before we start the debate, it’s important to know that all customers expect and deserve good service.  However, the headlong pursuit toward service betterment can sometimes lead us to funny places.   “Zero variance” (the hallmark of quality gurus) works magnificently on inanimate objects and robotic processes.  But, applied in the same fashion to the heart and spirit of customer service, it can entice service leaders to focus on control, not on creativity; on bland uniformity, not on rich uniqueness. 

Variance-free service is mechanical.  If we completely buy the “only what gets measured gets done” idea, it can cause us to worry far more about answering the phone in three rings (something we can quantify) and far less about the personality of the answerer (something harder to quantify).  While customers want the core service offering met—the flight to land safely, on time, and in the right city—they only remark to others about the highly variable interaction with the flight crew or the creative management of people and events that deviate from the script. 

 Customers long for a return to service with soul, not just service without errors.  As you ratchet up service quality, are you removing what matters most to your customers?  Are you counting as removable “waste” the service exceptions your customers count as valued service?

Comic Relief: Imaginative Service Heals Customer Gloom

Customers are reacting to a down economy with despair.  We think they need a bit of comic relief!  What if the features of customer service mimicked the elements that made a great joke work?   Examine the construction of two simple jokes:

Comedian Joe Weinstein:  “My dog is worried about the economy because Alpo is up to 99 cents a can.  That’s about $7.00 in dog  money!”

Comedian Larry the Cable Guy:  “Light travels faster than sound. That's why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.”

What makes these lines funny?  First they create a mental pattern and then unexpectedly break the pattern in the last one or two words.  Second, the construction of the humor is simple and easy-to-get.  Finally, both lines have a “tongue-in-check” levity that is playful and joyful.  What if customer service was unexpected, simple and joyful?   

Need an example?  A woman traded in her old car for a new one.  A week after she had her new car she turned on the radio and discovered they had programmed in her radio stations from her trade-in—unexpected, simple and joyful! 

Ask everybody to try it on your customers as well as each other.  They get comic relief for their gloom; you get their devotion!!!

Has Customer Service Really Gotten Worse?

The ‘50’s version of Dilbert was a very popular comic strip called Mutt and Jeff.  The clever “tongue in cheek” style made many a reader chuckle over their eggs and bacon before rushing off to the office.  One strip had Mutt and Jeff enjoying a bit of verbal sparring.   

“If everyone saw like I did,” boasted Jeff, “Everyone would want my wife.”

“If everyone saw like I did,” quipped Mutt, “No one would want your wife.”

It provided a humorous lesson on the “eye of the beholder” side of understanding relationships and experiences.  When someone asks us, “Why has service gotten so bad,” we think of that comic strip.

Remember the scene in the movie Back to the Future when a customer pulled into a gas station and two squeaky clean attendants cheerfully washed the windshield and carefully checked the engine fluids?  Audiences laughed at the obvious spoof.

Was that great service?  We do not remember thinking it was back then.   It was typical neighborly care by loyal employees with time to leisurely serve one customer at a time.  They worked for an enterprise with healthy margins, friendly competition; and without the scrutiny of regulators, the screams of litigious consumers, or the impatience of shareholders.  They served customers with limited choices, relatively low expectations, and plenty of time to wait.

Perhaps the gap between good and bad service is less about how far the bottom has dropped and more about how high the ceiling has been raised.  As customers, we are a lot smarter than we have ever been.  Recall buying your last car?  You probably had more information than the sales person had tactics.  Additionally, as customers we have witnessed great service in pockets of our lives.  When the FedEx or UPS delivery person walks fast, we assume the postal service person should do likewise.  If USAA Insurance’s call center can answer their phone in one ring, why can’t the power company.  Everyone today wants service to always be Disney friendly, Amazon.com easy and Southwest Airlines frugal. 

So, has customer service deteriorated?  It depends on whether you are asking Mutt or Jeff!

Imaginative Service: Keeping the “R” in “CRM”

CRM has been hot for a few years.  But, IT wizardry and the push to cut costs by un-humanizing the service experience has too often removed the “relationship” from “customer relationship management.”    The by-product was aptly characterized by a friend of ours describing her bank. 

“They installed this new customer relationship management system so all my correspondence from them is now tailored––they even knew my son was heading off to college this year.  Now, when I call and give them my account number, they comment on the fact that I have a new Buick, financed by their loan department.  But all that is just mechanized.  When I walk in any branch no one acts like they know me or even wants to get to know me!  Give me back old fashioned personal service, not this customer-ized baloney.  It’s no more genuine than the ATM.” 

Attitude is the fuel of imaginative service and  an attitude that clearly shows the spirit of greatness can provide the energy as well as the magnetism needed to deliver an imaginative service experience. It is a contagious attitude!  Customers love to be served by people whose spirit to serve is unmistakable in its strength and commitment.  And, it is the consistency and sincerity of attitude that causes customers to tell friends about their imaginative service experiences.

Most of us like tailor-made service.  We enjoy a service provider that knows our preferences and caters to our unique needs and expectations.  But, we still want the service provider to treat us like an important and valued person.  We want to know that inside customer service is a human, not a program.

The Business Case for an Imaginative Service Culture

1. Fosters a style of communication and an attitude of consideration that promotes higher employee morale.  Research shows that the number one impact on customer relations is employee relations.

2. Encourages leaders to treat employees in the fashion they expect employees to treat customers thus yielding greater employee commitment (lowering turnover costs), more creativity (increasing breakthroughs) and larger contribution (boosting productivity).

3. Promotes sensitivity to barriers that inhibit customers from getting their needs and expectations met.  This bureaucracy-busting perspective leads to enhanced efficiency in all areas of operation, not just those experienced by customers.

4. Cultivates partnering skills that produce better teamwork, greater synergy and interdependence.

5. Enables employees to anticipate customer needs and requirements thus enabling them to eliminate activities and actions that create limited or no value in supporting customer loyalty.  This lowers overall operating costs.

6. Encourages an open-minded and inquisitive mind-set that advances diversity, learning and creativity.

7. Cultivates assertive employee pride that leads to the attraction of more customers to serve and better talent to employ.

8. Provides the ability to charge a higher price because of greater customer value.  Some industries can charge as much as 15% higher prices if their service is noticeably remarkable. 

9. Saves the world, eliminates hunger, and promotes well-being throughout the planet!

Imaginative Service: Rx for Growing Customers in a Tough Economy

A large brokerage company added a twist to their toll-free telephone cue—“...punch 6 if you’d like to hear a duck quack!”  Word of the playful feature spread and soon millions of people were weekly calling to hear the duck.  The company had to remove the unique feature because it overloaded their phone system and ran up a huge tab!  The story communicates just how bored customers have become. 

Something else has happened to your customers.  They’ve been getting way over-stimulated.  Television has become both high definition and multi-media.  The nightly news shows the weather report, ball scores, stock market numbers and a crawling headline simultaneously on the TV screen.  That steady stream of sensory arousal risks making a trip to your unit or organization seem humdrum and plain vanilla. 

 What’s an organization to do?  Imaginative service!  Want a small taste?  The service techs at Sewell Lexus in Dallas program in the radio stations for a new car buyer from their trade-in and let customers discover it.  Miller Bros. Ltd in Atlanta, an up-scale men’s clothing store, has a large gumball machine in its entrance.  Beside it is a large bowl of shiny pennies.  Guess where junior gets to go while daddy is trying on trousers?

At a time when value-added service has gotten way too pricey maybe it is time try value-unique. Customers recall, return, and refer others to those experiences that engage them emotionally and leave them with a positive memory.  Creating a place of joy can help your unit or organization become the customer’s “oasis of choice.”  And, imaginative service can take their breath away.

Imaginative Service: How is your Attitude?

Welcome! Happy 2010 and thank you for visiting our Imaginative Service blog. 

The mission of this blog is to share information that is helpful in decision making, learning, improving your organization’s ability to create devoted customers through imaginative service and will bring you back again.

In the tough economic times we face today, delivering imaginative service that takes your customers’ breath away is the prescription for providing incredible care to your most important asset – your customers! Great customer service gives us an experience to remember; imaginative service gives us a magical story to tell. 

As we help organizations change their definition of the service experience they choose to provide their customers to the kind of service that takes their breath away, we find ourselves more and more discussing the importance attitude plays as a vital determinant of service success.

Eighty five percent of success in life, according to a well known and often cited Harvard study, is due solely to attitude. An attitude that shows the spirit of greatness provides the energy and magnetism needed to deliver an animated experience for customers and drawing devotion from them. While customers like dealing with employees who are committed, they absolutely love being served by someone whose spirit is unmistakable in its passion, pride and commitment. Occasional demonstrations of a spirit of greatness are not sufficient. It is both the consistency and sincerity of attitude that brings customers back and causes them to tell their friends about their experience.

The most important thing to know about attitude is that it is something one selects. No normal person comes into the world with a particular attitude. It is chosen (or not). The second important thing to know is that a spirit of greatness attitude can be contagious. When we are around happy upbeat people it is much easier for us to join in the spirit – especially if the invitation to join is coming from someone who clearly prefers we enroll. An unbridled spirit has a magnetic power on employees and customers. It draws out their higher self.

The first step is your own Animation—choosing to demonstrate the attitude you seek from others. Remember – people (employees and customers) can hear your smile and they can see as well as feel your attitude very quickly!

Imaginative service is sourced in joy and fun.  It comes from the same part of the soul that plans a prank, organizes a party, or does a favor for a friend.  When that part is used regularly, it raises employee self-esteem, increases their resilience, and improves their morale.  And, high employee morale in challenging economic times makes depressed, gloomy customers want to come back more, spend more, and recommend more.

Please send us your feedback and share with us examples you experience of great connections created through imaginative service.

We hope you will visit again!

Chip & John

Imaginative Service: …and, the Winner is “And”

Seventy-five percent of corporate mergers fail because of conflicts in leader relationships. Over 50% of marriages end in divorce, largely due to communications. Corporate and marriage counselors will tell you, “It’s not that the parties in the union were talking and stopped talking—they stopped listening.”  Conflicts became an arena for a fight rather than an opportunity to creatively problem solve.

Put a microscope on familiar conflicts—labor vs management, Democrats vs Republicans, Korea vs the rest of the world…the list is long.  Close inspection will reveal most are victims of “either-or” thinking—either my side or your side.  “Either-or” has been the crux of conflicts forever.  Even those resolved at the arbitration table or in the counselor’s office are laced with compromise…I will give in some if you give in some…we can meet in middle…a half a loaf is better than no loaf.   But, compromise is just a junior version of either-or thinking. It might make room for temporary compliance with a fix but rarely is a route to long-term commitment to a solution.

A brand new book is now available that offers a transformative pathway to “And” thinking.  The Triangle of Truth by best-selling author and friend Lisa McLeod will change everything you know about conflict resolution.  Buy a copy for all the important relationships in your life---friends, customers, employees, family, and your boss.  It could be a powerful way for you to contribute to world peace.

Happy New Year!

"Should auld acquaintance be forgotten..." has a special meaning to us every year at this time.  As the familiar song ushers in the New Year, it reminds us to reflect on the past 12 months. It is a time to reflect on faith, family, fitness, friends, finances and career.

This time typically starts out as a nostalgic way to retire our 2009 to do list either electronic or old fashioned paper or pencil.  Reviewing each day of the calendar we see time well spent or not. It is a time to ask ourselves if we did an excellent job of expressing our gratitude to all who helped us or will help us. It is also a time to determine if there was a way we could be of better service to all in the coming year. Mostly it is a time that presents amazing opportunity as Edith Lovejoy Pierce stated; “We will open the book.  Its pages are blank.  We are going to put words on them ourselves.  The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day.”

This year we focused on those service experiences that left a sweet after taste.  It generally was closely associated with sales and service people whom we expect to have fond associations with in the coming years.  And, we also examined attributes which fueled our continuous loyalty.  The ones that got our emotional motor revved up the highest focused on a happy experience that was new and remarkable...not just great.  It led us to consider the coming year as a time to focus on "happy", "new” and “remarkable”. 
 
Great customer service makes us smile but remarkable service takes our breath away.  When we get great service we make a mental note to return.  When we get remarkable service we can't wait to share the story with friends and family.  "New" service doesn't take highly creative service people.  It simply takes people who enjoy delivering a surprise and evoking a smile.  Remarkable service is sourced in joy and fun.  It comes from the same part of the soul that plans a prank, organizes a party, or does a favor for a friend.  When that part is used regularly, it raises employee self-esteem, increases their resilience, and improves their morale.  An example of some great resolutions for your customers' experience can be found on the blog "Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog" at  http://tinyurl.com/ydhme43. 

As we begin 2010, we hope you will focus on being remarkable and take the opportunity to create your own future.  Sure, these are challenging times.  Of course, we are in an era of frugality and reduction.   We've been in tough economic times before.  The winners are those who view it as an opportunity to turn lemons into champagne.   As Ms. Pierce stated in the quote above; “…The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day.” Commit now to make 2010 your very best year ever!  

Let this be the year you deliver "happy”, “new" and, most of all, “remarkable” service experiences to everyone you serve so that you take their breath away!

Best wishes for a HAPPY and REMARKABLE New Year!

Chip & John