BOOKS
Take Their Breath Away: How Imaginative Service Creates Devoted Customers
Customer Loyalty Guaranteed: Create, Lead, and Sustain Remarkable Customer Service
ARTICLES
Accountability: Turning Trust into Loyalty
Accountability is both the sweet spot and Achilles heel of most leaders. Leaders learn early the importance of “holding employees accountable” for results. Despite its downbeat reputation, accountability effectively executed remains the keystone for trust between leaders and their employees; employees with customers. The accountability path has four parts: clear expectations for outcomes, frequent “check in” conversations to stay on track, candid feedback for growth, and fair consequences for great, poor and non-performances.
Attracting Loyalty from the New Customer
The landscape of customer loyalty has been re-contoured! Today’s customers are not like they use to be twenty-five years ago. First, customers get terrific service in pockets of their life and use those experiences to judge everyone else. Customers also have way more choices than ever before. Today’s customers are much smarter buyers than their parents were. Figuring out how to attract and retain loyal customers today is no simple task. Not only are customers different, the same customer is different at different times. However, there are five key loyalty drivers we find fit most customers most of the time about most services.
Casting for Imaginative Service
Selecting people for customer service roles is similar to casting people for roles in a play or movie. First, both require artful performances aligned with audience expectations. Second, both require a casting choice based on personality. How then, do you cast people for extraordinary customer service? Here are four guidelines that will enable you to avoid the conflict between fair and subjective.
Crafting ‘Happy’ Processes
Organizations that create loyal customers look at their processes as the Native Americans did; believing every creation had a soul. While they know, of course, that an order entry process is not “alive,” thinking of it in that fashion – as a living, feeling, organic system – helps ensure it is designed and maintained in a way that best serves the organizational “tribe” of customers and employees. A “live” perspective ensures key service processes receive the proper care and feeding so they don’t fall into disrepair and consistently deliver the kind of hassle-free, friendly service experiences that create distinction in the market.
Eight Rules for Emotional Connection
Customers are favorably attracted to organizations when they get an emotional connection. This means heart-touching encounters filled with spirit, caring and a positive attitude. Whether in line, on-line or face-to-face, customers recall the experience long after they’ve forgotten you met their need. Below are eight rules for building customer loyalty through emotional connections.
From Leader Centric to Customer Centric
When organizations are led by sizably charismatic, sharply demanding, even memorable leaders, the focus can turn to compliance, obedience, even obsession with “Jack’s” way, “Jack’s” style, and “Jack’s” vision. When a visitor asks, “Who runs this place” and the answer is the person in the corner office, the organization is fated to be leader centered. Organizations do not exist, thrive or grow for the leaders on mahogany row. They exist, thrive and grow because of customers. And, centering the organization around the customer takes courageous leaders more interested in excellence than ego. Transitioning from leader to customer takes a total alteration in agenda, attitude and action. Those who make the shift employ three strategies.
Happy Stats: Demystifying Customer Research
Customer research should serve many constituencies in an organization. It is a tool for important executive planning, a means to validate, alter and refine decisions made both on behalf of the customer as well as the organization, a device to shape the practices and behaviors of customer-facing individuals, and a means to lend verifiable evidence to important coaching conversations. When customer research is planned, conducted and communicated with these ultimate constituencies in mind, it alters the “how.”
Leadership Greatness From the Rules of Combat
The rules of combat can teach us much about effective leadership. Granted there are a gazillion books drawing business parallels with the practices of Patton, Powell, and Bradley. But, the rules of combat cleverly authored by Logan Graves offer special insights for leading in today’s competitive world.
Leading Customer Surveillance
Customer centric leaders know that customer behavior is the source of their success. And, behavior is vibrant evidence to be encountered, not a statistic or specimen to be researched. These leaders live Peter Drucker’s advice: “the purpose of an organization is to create and retain a customer.” They know that financial prowess is a by-product of great customer service. Since customers’ needs and expectations constantly change, leaders must be in the field, not in the “tent.”
The Service Side of Metric Management
Customer service dashboards are vital tools for direction, alteration, maintenance, early warning, and the setting in which the organization is operating. As such, they provide a critical part of the guidance system needed to traverse the marketplace. Like the odometer of our vehicles alert us to change the oil or the speedometer warns us to slow down, various components of the organization’s dashboard provide a myriad of information key to progress and success.
Why Most SLA’s Suck
Most Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) are indifferent! They are lifeless measures that show zero compassion for the quality of service nor the authenticity of the agreement. Worse, they can seduce their users into thinking they have a partnership when in fact they have a sneaky tool to play “gotchya!’ Most SLA’s end up in a notebook reviewed annually or occasionally surfaced in anger when an aggrieved partner seeks to prevail in an argument. No partnership can be successful without a meeting of the minds on expectations of all partners, assurances of understanding, and a means to both measure progress and ascertain accountability. So, what’s wrong with Service Level Agreements? In a phrase--they are typically too much about “Level” and not enough about “Relationship.”
