Creating Devoted Customers with Imaginative Service

Imaginative Service: In Pursuit of Seamless Service

Let’s look at how USAA delivers seamless service execution.  Let’s say you wrote USAA a letter about a claim.   A few days later you called.  Mary answers your call.  You say, “Mary, I wrote USAA a few days ago about a claim.”  And, Mary says, “Yes, I am looking at your letter right now.  You were inquiring about….”  USAA scans every piece of correspondence—thousands every day––to be available in an instant to every single one of its customer service agents.  Interview USAA customers and you’ll hear “trust” spoken a lot.  Their accolades are born from USAA’s making it super easy to get service and by having which ever server you get be completely irrelevant to the transaction.  Compare that to your next trip to the grocery store check-out line!

Customers would like to believe the organization is designed and managed around their needs, especially since they are the ones generating the funds needed for the organization to survive. 

How can you remove all the hassle from your customer’s experience?

Imaginative Service: Getting Smarter; Serving Better

Competence communicates to customers they are in the hands of a professional. Customers need to know (or perceive) that service providers not only have the commitment to deliver great service, they possess the capacity to do so as well. The roofing contractor who shows up without a ladder does not engender trust. Home Depot’s early claim to fame came through putting in their aisles employees from the trades.  Instead of dealing with a clerk in the plumbing section, customers enjoyed the advice of a real plumber. 

Walk into the lobby of a five star hotel and watch a minimum wage bell staff associate make you feel like you just stepped into the arena of the hospitality Olympics.  Compare the superior product knowledge of any Starbucks server with the nearby fast-food restaurant employee who has been hired from exact same labor pool.  Service greats not only spend more time and money on training than their competitors, they find ways to hardwire “getting smarter” into the work itself. 

How can you insure you stay updated?  What do you know that you can share with others serving customers?

Imaginative Service: Is Your Service Edgy?

The weather was the type that drives you indoors on a Saturday afternoon.  It had been a hard travel week and I needed some unwind time; perfect conditions for two back-to-back Academy Award winning best picture movies.  The first was the 1995 winner—Braveheart;  the second was the 1996 winner--The English Patient.  

The order of movie viewing was a big mistake.  I only watched 2/3rds of the second movie.  Now, before you play the “Guy Movie” card, you should know I actually prefer movies with more plot and less gore.  But, Braveheart was so “in your face,” heart-pounding edgy that The English Patient seemed plain vanilla by contrast.  The first movie made me ready to go out in the front yard and charge something; the second made me ready for bed.

Customers are generally bored with service these days.  They long for Braveheart edgy.  They want sparkly and glittery; a cherry on top of everything.  And, when they get edgy, every other service provider is compared to that memorable experience.   So, what are you doing to stimulate all your customer’s senses?  How can you decorate your customer’s experience in a way that makes it exciting, original, fun, entertaining, unusual, special, different, amazing, or any other descriptor that can take your customer’s breath away? 

Imaginative Service: Chasing Customer Trust

Smart organizations know that trust is an animated, always-in-motion dimension of all relationships.  Here’s why.  As humans, our concept of value perpetually changes.  Apples are less valuable after you have two dozen in the pantry than when you had none.  Loud music is less valuable when you are past fifty than when you were fifteen.  Making a difference gets more valuable with maturity; making the team less valuable. 

If trust is nomadic, it suggests the pursuit of trust building needs to include some mechanism for updating the proposition.  Think about expectations.  Every service experience we have alters our expectations for future service.  If customer expectations are part of what trust is made of, and those expectations are in perpetual motion, service providers must find ways to stay current.  Wise organizations use a myriad of ways to get customer feedback.  They perpetually work to look at service through customers’ eyes.   

What are ways you can update what you know about your customers’ ever-changing expectations?

Imaginative Service: Avoiding Perceptual Anxiety

Why do we put bent cans of vegetables back on the grocery store shelf?  Why do we FedEx or UPS a large check when speed of arrival is not a requirement?  A part of understanding the customer’s experience is that it often involves perceptual features that, if missing, mangled, or in jeopardy, trigger alarm.  The customer’s perceptions of a bus driver with obvious alcohol breath are not just about the driver’s personal habits.  When passengers lower a serving tray on an airline and notice coffee stains, their negative reaction could trigger an intuitive leap to the condition of the plane’s engine and a concern that the plane might crash. 

Customer perceptions can take them way past what they observe to what they conclude.  And, when those conclusions leave them anxious about the outcome, then the message to a service provider is irrefutable:  be a constant guardian of the details that feed a customer’s perceptions.

What can you do to protect customers from perceptual anxiety?

Imaginative Service: The Painful Side of Service

“Wear your pain like an oyster wears its grain of sand.”  These words were buried in an editorial by Victoria Hick in a July, 2009 issue of the Dallas Morning News.  The poignant piece was about the death of a close friend.  It could also have been about remarkable service recovery.  “Manage your service hiccups like an oyster…”

Delivering service always carries a potential for customer pain.  Service is generally delivered by people and “to err is human.”  Service providers know that; customers do as well.  What characterizes the superstars is not zero service defects, but rather how they turn a grain of service sand into a pearl.  It requires a sincere understanding of the customer’s pain and the communication of that understanding.  It takes atonement that encases the pain with an appropriate and authentic gesture of sorrow.  And, it involves the demonstration of a commitment to better protect customers from future pain.

How well are you inoculating your customers from service pain?  What lessons are you learning from previous service failures? 

Imaginative Service: Putting Customers First!

We were looking for parking in West Hartford so we could try a Mexican restaurant that came highly recommended. West Hartford is a very popular upscale neighborhood with great restaurants but limited parking. We happened upon a parking garage a few blocks from the restaurant and I pulled in. Chip indicated several front row places to choose from and I pulled into one only to encounter THAT sign. Unbelievable exclaimed Chip!

Think about the symbolism of this. Why would the parking garage staff need to park close to the entrance/ exit area? Try as we might we could not come up with a good reason for these reserved spots. We feel sure the Barnes & Noble across the street would rather their customers get those prime spots. And so would the other merchants and restaurants whose customers end up in that parking garage. Dinner was great but what signals does this send to area patrons about how they are valued when they see 4 prime spots empty because they have THAT sign posted? If you polled the retail operators in the area who would they vote those parking spots for?

Signals like this provide a peephole for customers and employees into the true values of organizations. Customers make choices based on those signals. We don’t know who put the garage staff in first place but we think they made a BIG mistake. What signals is your organization sending to customers and employees? Who comes first in your company?

Imaginative Service: The Magic of Transference

Transference is the magician’s tactic called misdirection.  It involves establishing a frame of reference that occupies someone’s attention while something completely different is happening. The magician who gestures to the left or right of the audience is almost always moving the audience’s attention to where the trick is not happening––or to be precise, away from where the effect is subtly being staged.

Transference happens in everyday life. The nurse asks the patient about their weekend while giving a flu shot; the bellman calls the guest’s attention to a beautiful painting opposite the site of new construction; the dentist chitchats about his ski trip while the patient has a mouth full of stainless steel. . . all transference.  

What are the negatives in your customer’s experience that you might be able to remove from their consciousness by channeling the customer’s attention elsewhere?  What are ways a small gesture, token, or action can replace your customer’s adverse emotion with a positive one?