Creating Devoted Customers with Imaginative Service

Imaginative Service: Keeping the Light On for Customers

Customers are attracted to spirited people!  And, today’s customers are frustrated with indifferent service---not bad service, just boring, comatose service.  They witness service people sleep walking through the workday. And, as they guard their ever diminishing dollar, employee spirit is one component of value they carefully watch.  When they witness employees who act like there is no light on inside they are fast to flee with their funds.  

Smart organizations nurture spirit.  It is not about organizational loyalty anymore.   We know the days of employees saluting the company flag are long gone.   It is about employees showing aliveness and enthusiasm while at work.  Most organizations today would rather have a fired up employee for a couple of years than endure an uninspired one who stays for the gold watch.

However, the very nature of spirit is to be unpredictable and untidy.  The heart is more unruly than the head.   And, “organization” can become the enemy of spirit.  While there must be a balance between enthusiasm and efficiency, the rational side of enterprise has always had the upper hand. 

Are logical processes rendering your employees apathetically automatic?   If mechanical wins over inventive and robotic replaces zealous, then the excitement customers adore will be wrung out of the organization.  Where are the spirit leeches in your organization?  How can they be exorcised? 

Imaginative Service: Turning an Oops into an Opportunity

We all know it when we experience it.  Things go wrong...the never-wear-out jeans wear out, the steak is too rare, the knock in the engine comes back...we feel let down, or just plain furious. We all have experienced service failure...and judged the culprit by how well they responded.  Customers who have had a problem and had it spectacularly solved can sometimes end up more devoted than customers who have had a problem.

Great service recovery starts with an expression of humility.  A simple “I’m sorry that happened to you” can communicate caring in a way which can calm even the angriest customer.  Customers need to hear words that communicate you understand how they feel—that you appreciate why they are upset.  Customers need to experience some urgency—words of momentum—which let them know you are working to correct their problem quickly.  It may be important to provide some gesture which tangibly telegraphs your sincere regret the disappointment occurred.  Finally, follow-up with customers after a problem has been fixed to telegraph to customers you sincerely care.

Remember, the difference between a good service operation and a great service operation is not how they perform in normal times; it’s how they perform when the customer is disappointed.  Customers don’t expect you to be perfect; but, they do expect you to care. 

Is your service recovery process one of your service distinctions?   

Imaginative Service: How to Decorate a Service Experience

Walk into the lobby of a Westin Hotel and your nose knows the scent suddenly shifts from the “smell of the street” to a signature fragrance called “White Tea.”  Reach the checkout counter of Dallas garden center Nicholson-Hardie and you can pet a big calico cat sprawled across the counter complete with business card with the title “House Cat.”  Stroll around a Bass Pro Shop and take in the sporting goods displays amplified by such visual desserts as a giant fish tank and museum quality wildlife dioramas.  An upscale jewelry shop has employees wear formal evening attire.

What’s happening in these pictures?  Enterprises magnifying the power of the five senses to augment their customer’s service experiences.  When realtors suggest baking an apple pie before holding an open house, when cookie shops pipe their kitchen aroma onto the sidewalk, and when upscale retail stores put a pianist at a baby grand on the sales floor, they all are declaring the common sense of uncommon senses.

Take a close look at the “touch me” features of your unit or organization?  Customers enjoy a tactile connection.  What does your enterprise sound like?  What do customers hear in the background when they call?  Is your parking lot interesting?  Does your unit’s entrance “welcome” in an obvious and positive way?  Have a friend “shop” your facility and count smiles.  

If you turned your five senses loose to audit your service experience, what would they come back and recommend?

Imaginative Service: Take Out the Papers and the Trash

These were the opening lines of a song by the Coasters that spent weeks in 1958 as the number one hit on the charts.  It holds a strong message for imaginative service.   All service has a certain amount of garbage.  And, in a competitive world in which customers demand more value for their diminishing dollar, if you don’t “take out the papers and the trash,” as the hit song goes, “You don’t get no spending cash!”

What are the biggest changes in customers in 2009?  Their expectations are higher, their patience is shorter, and their propensity to go elsewhere with their cash is greater.  That’s a wake-up call to ramp up close attention to service garbage--whatever hassles customers.  It means paperwork should be easier and simpler; lines should move faster, be shorter, or have someone managing customer wait time; and customer facing employees should be friendlier and more helpful.   If we get someone at a call center in India or Singapore, they should be graded on how well they made the call comfortable…not more rigid, more rushed, and more robotic.

Take a close look at where customers are having to labor to get the service that should come with ease.  They came in to give you their cash and too often get treated as if they are an interruption to more important tasks.  What if you organized a “garbage patrol” to spot and report places where service was a hassle for customers?  Everyone could take a turn “taking out the papers and the trash.”  Where is your service garbage?   Be an extraordinary service garbage collector!

Imaginative Service: Service as Pain Remover

A very gloomy Wall Street Journal on a very long flight left me with a very bad headache.  And, I never get headaches!  As soon as I exited the jet way at the San Francisco Airport, I headed for the nearest newsstand for some relief—Advilâ.  The vendor was about to close but I talked him into selling me his last package.  I opened the plastic package and removed the two tablets in foil for some quick relief.  Tucked behind the foil was a collapsible paper cup just big enough for two large swallows of water. 

I laughed out loud.  What genius!  What simplicity!  What great service!  I could almost feel my headache start to dissipate.  And, I had not yet taken the pain relievers.

Customers are getting more headaches than normal these days.  The economic recovery seems slow and uncertain; layoffs, bankruptcies and foreclosures appear to increase.  If customers have personally been spared disappointment, they have plenty for family or friends who have not.  So, customers drag their woes into stores along with their thinning wallets.  

Why not give them a “two-swallow paper cup.”  That cup might take the form of much longer patience when a customer frets over minutia.  It might be a sincere, unexpected smile.  It might be a random act of kindness targeted at a familiar service challenge—a long wait time, a crowded check-out line, or laborious required paperwork.  How can you use service as an antidote to customer pain and anxiety?  Do your customers see you as someone who is a pain remover?   What’s your free paper cup?

Imaginative Service: When the Light Goes Out

“Brilliant” is the word we use to refer to a special kind of genius--the type that profoundly influences others.  It is more than someone who is simply intellectual.  A genius might be a person with a super high IQ but keeps it locked inside.  A brilliant person shares the mental gift.  “Brilliant” is also the word we use to characterize light.  A light with that description is very bright and illuminates a large area.  The word comes up a lot when referencing a floodlight, beacon, or lighthouse.  Expansive phrases like “candle power” often replace limiting labels like “wattage.” 

Oren Harari was brilliant.  Dr. Harari was for many years a professor of strategic and global management at the Graduate School of Business in the University of San Francisco.  Many of his grad students worked under him as research assistants.  He was a dynamic, charismatic keynote speaker and traveled the globe illuminating business leaders.  He was an insightful consultant to many Fortune 100 companies. The Financial Times named him one of the forty “best minds” in management in the world. 

Oren authored several best-selling business books including Break from the Pack, The Leadership Secrets of Colin Powell, The Powell Principles, Leapfrogging the Competition and Jumping the Curve.  He was an avid tennis player and enthusiastic world traveler.  He spoke fluent Spanish.  Oren passed away peacefully in his sleep the evening of April 10^th with his wife and two sons by his side.

It was my honor and privilege to run leadership workshops with Oren.  He and I also wrote several articles together and co-authored Beep! Beep!:  Competing in the Age of the Road Runner (Warner Books, 2000).  We worked with the late Chuck Jones, creator of the Warner Bros. cartoon characters, Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner.  Chuck presented us with an original cartoon drawing to be used in our new book.  Oren and I enjoyed entertaining workshop participants after hours with each of us singing and taking turns playing either piano or harmonica.  He could make the Allman Brothers Band song “Jelly, Jelly” sound like it was performed by Scott Joplin or Eric Clapton.

When I was a kid my dad brought home after a business trip my first phosphorescent item in the shape of a star.  Before I went to sleep at night, I placed the star near a lamp light for a few minutes.  When the lights were turned out, the star would glow in the dark all night long.  I was always amazed more at the power of the light than the illumination of the star. Oren’s light has been turned out but our stars can now glow in the dark because of his generous brilliance. 

Chip R. Bell is a customer loyalty consultant and the co-author (with Oren Harari) of Beep! Beep!: Competing in the Age of the Road Runner.  

Imaginative Service; Don’t Ask; Don’t Tell

The military service practice of “Don’t Ask; Don’t Tell” has an interesting message for customer service practice.  If you don’t ask customers for their feedback they won’t tell you how to improve. Ignoring their issues may reduce the conflict, but it also reduces the learning.  And, today those customers with a problem will steal away in the night without warning. Why do organizations fail to solicit feedback in a meaningful way?  Most fear the customer’s ire if that Pandora’s Box is opened--better to leave well enough alone.

The truth is that simply asking has a big impact on the customer’s perception that an organization cares, even if nothing changes.  Granted, continually asking for feedback without change that customers notice will ultimately erode their trust.  Customers know you are not perfect and do not expect you to be.  But, they do expect you to care. 

One organization sent out feedback postcards to randomly selected customers.  When the cards were returned, the company filed them away without reading them.  The next time that company did a customer survey, those customers who had received feedback postcards gave the company higher customer satisfaction scores than those who did not receive one!  The point is this:  you get extra points just for asking!  

What are you doing to make it easier for customers to tell you their feedback?  What steps can you take to enable your front line employees to ASK in a manner that encourages customers to TELL?

Imaginative Service: Don’t Forget Who You Are

When I was a teenager getting ready to go out for a Saturday night of freedom and fun my mother would typically say. “Drive safe.” But my dad was more philosophical than parental. His exit words to me were, “Don’t forget who you are.” I never thought much about the meaning of those words.

When my son was a teenager I used my dad’s line every time he left for a night out on the town. One time when he was home from college and about to go out, I mechanically said those too familiar words. This time he turned and proudly announced, “I know what it means to be a Bell.” It was the first time I “got” the meaning – not just a statement of identity, but a commitment to a core set of values and standards.

Can your employees say, “I know what it means to be with ACME?” Do they own a signature definition and direction that sets your organization apart from others? Customers enjoy organizations with character that comes from everyone “knowing who they are”.

Imaginative Service: “Are You Chopping Wood or Building a Fire?”

It was my first lesson in avoiding the proverbial activity trap.  My grandfather was a man of action.  He had little patience with “make work” that looked busy and important but created no actual value.  As a farmer he had learned the hard way the lesson that success was tied to “draining the swamp, not killing alligators.”   He warned that if we focused only on the task and not the result, there would always be plenty of tasks to keep up busy.  

Every day was for him an opportunity for production--as in producing something.  When one of us grandchildren bragged about how hard we were working, he would rein us in about whether we were doing hard work for a solid outcome, or hard work as an end in itself.  Texans refer to this practice as “three feet and a cloud of dust”--lots of activity bravado; little progress.  “Are you an ant?” my grandfather would chide.  “They work hard all the time.” 

Customers are attracted to organizations where employees look busy.  It creates the initial impression that the organization is succeeding and growing.  However, without the capacity to witness solid achievements, customers soon recognize the illusion and exit for an alternative with real value.