November 8, 2009

Let The Customer Control YOU!

The Four Steps to Dazzle Customers
Hire Human Being Lovers
Recover from Your Blunders
Kill Dumb Rules

Most businesses that I know talk about ‘customer service’ as being a critical plank in their market strategy. I have always had difficulty with this expression because it perpetuates the notion that the organization decides what to supply its customers which is influenced by internal considerations such as operating costs, employee capabilities, Union contract agreements and operating procedures. In other words customer service becomes the outcome or product of a number of internal company constraints and is wrapped up by the smiling faces and voices of its people. In the Customer Service world, the company is in the control position.
In the Serving Customers world the customer drives the company. It’s a world where ‘How can I help?’ is the common theme that drives all business activity not ‘Here’s what we provide.’ Serving customers literally defines everyone in your organization (it applies to not-for-profits as well as they also have customers) as a servant whose role is to respond to the moment-by-moment changing needs and expectations of people who touch your business.

Serving customers requires a different operating model for companies. Rather than the operating procedures dictating what service looks like, operations is created in the image of the flexibility required to serve customers day-in and day-out.

Serving customers demands a customer obsessed culture where leaders coach and serve rather than command and control. Frontline people have a tough job in a servant role and they need their leaders to be supporting them not telling them what to do.

Serving customers means that we need to start hiring people that like humans. To be able to flex to the often volatile behaviour of customers starts with an innate love for people. You can’t train people to love people. You need to go out and find them, bring them in to your organization and allow them to infect their fellow employees.

Serving customers creates rules, procedures and policies from the customer’s perspective, enabling frontliners to ‘say yes’ to what customers want rather than enforcing internal rules and having to ‘say no’.

BE DiFFERENT and start the journey to serve customers.
Cheers,
Roy

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Posted 11.8.09 at 08:13 am by Roy Osing | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 5, 2009

Dazzle your Customers - The Four Step BE DiFFERENT Process

Serving customers has two components: Core Service and the Service Experience. Core Service is the basic thing you provide the market; your dial tone so to speak. Without your Core Cervice you don’t have a business. Clean hotel rooms, dial tone, accurate financial advice, working stereo systems and 24X7 cable service are all examples of Core Cervice.

Interestingly, customers expect your Core Service to work every time, and when it does they give you a ‘C’ on your report card. Customer loyalty though is unnaffected. The source of customer loyalty is the Service Experience; dazzling a customer will get you an ‘A’ on your report card and they will keep coming back.

How does an organization create a dazzling experience? The BE DiFFERENT principle to dazzle is called Vary the Treatment and is based on the formula:

Variable service experiences = constant levels of satisfaction = increasing customer loyalty

The principle at play is that every individual coming in contact with your organization has different expectations; no two people are alike. It follows that in order to achieve consistently high levels of service satisfaction you need to be able to flex to what each person demands of you at any point in time; i.e. your organization must be designed to provide variable service experiences for your customers.  Here are four practices to Vary the Treatment.

Hire human being lovers. Can you dazzle if your frontliners have a fundamental dislike for humans? No. Creating memorable experiences for customers requires employees who want to serve; they want to take care of people. Look at your recruitment programs. Do they explicitly look for this attribute?

Recover: fix it and do the unexpected. Service mistakes happen in any organization; what’s critical, however, is what you do when they occur. The amazing thing is that customers are more loyal after a successful service recovery than if the mistake never happened at all! How to recover? Fix the mistake FAST and then blow them away with the surprise factor.

Kill ‘dumb rules’. Do you have policies that don’t make sense to customers? You know the things you try and enforce that create de-dazzling experiences? Seek them out - ask your frontline - modify or get rid of them so they are not a source of aggravation. Policy creation should be driven from the customer’s perspective not internal staff groups who are in the control mode.

Bend the rules; empower the frontline to ‘say yes’. You can’t dazzle customers if your frontline is in the rule enforcement mode all the time. Imposing your rules, policies and procedures will annoy some of them so allow your frontline to bend them when they need to.

Cheers,
Roy
Remember to follow me on Twitter

Related Blogs
Hire Human Being Lovers
Recover from Your Blunders
Kill Dumb Rules
Bend your Rules in Favor of the Customer
Serving Customers NOT Providing Customer Service
Serving Customers Model

Posted 11.5.09 at 09:06 am by Roy Osing | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 11, 2009

Dazzle your Customers #4 - Bend Your Rules and Policies

Rule #4 of the four step process to dazzle customers deals with the often encountered situation when your rules clash with what the customer wants, and how your frontline employees are empowered (or not) to deal with the situation. Do your frontline employees spend a great deal of their time enforcing the rules, policies and procedures of your organization and, as a result, are constantly saying NO to your most precious asset? The most frustrating thing for frontliners is to have to be a rule enforcer and halving customers constantly pushing back. Do you really think it is possible to dazzle anyone when you are constantly trying to get someone to ‘tow the line’ on something they don’t agree with?

Every organization has a rule infrastructure to govern their operations; its a necessity. BUT when your rules start to butt heads with a customer to the point that they get upset (and yes, enraged sometimes) and recoil from you due to your rules, you need to introduce the notion of flexing to the customer when it makes sense to do so. Frontline people need to be able to bend a rule on the customer’s behalf if it means keeping the customer loyal.

I’m not talking about doing anything illegal or anything with this type of consequence; rather the internal policies that can be bended for a customer who has special circumstances that were not foreseen by the policy. Rules and policies are created in the image of an ‘average’ customer but the reality is that the average customer doesn’t exist. They are ALL different; if you don’t believe so, you haven’t look closely enough ad for sure you haven’t asked a frontliner.

So, empower your frontline people to bend one of your ‘standardized’ rules, policies or procedures when the customer needs a different treatment; when their needs are quite reasonable but out-of-bounds to what the book says. First of all, your frontline will NOT ‘give away the store’ and chaos will NOT result from this. In fact in my experience, empowering frontliners to ‘say yes’ actually produces a greater degree of rule enforcement as they typically reserve flexible treatment for those customers who truly need it.

You will be rewarded by a customer who is dazzled by how they are being treated as a human being rather than as a transaction that has to be controlled by the rules. And, in addition, you will have a loyal customer who will tell others how truly great you are.

Cheers. Roy Osing

Other blogs in this series
Hire Human Being Lovers
Recover from Your Blunders
Kill Dumb Rules

Remember to follow me on Twitter

Posted 6.11.09 at 03:20 pm by Roy Osing | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 6, 2009

Dazzle your Customers #3 - Kill Dumb Rules

Rule #3 of the four step process to dazzle customers involves a common occurrence in most organizations every day: customers run head on into an internal rule, practice or procedure that annoys them makes them go postal.

This is the Dumb Rule, a rule that was given birth probably by some control freak with a nonsensical purist view that a customer should behave in a certain way that serves the organizations purposes with little regard for whether or not a customer will react favorably to getting treated in a prescribed manner. In my experience the fathers and mothers of dumb rules can be found in staff jobs whose role is to develop and implement operating procedures to govern, among other things, customer transactions. And, unfortunately, in some cases customers where customers are not the prime target they become collateral damage in the rule’s application. Dumb Rule origination can come from internal audit, staff marketing, credit and collections, finance, and systems and procedures functional areas who wouldn’t know a customer if they jumped up and bit them in the behind.

In Section Four of my book, I mention numerous examples of Dumb Rules. One of my favorite stories took place at The Mirage Hotel Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. There is a wonderful de in the casino that serve the best deli sandwhiches ever but the customer friendliness of their rules sucks. My wife and I show up at the deli about midnight with an insatiable appetite for a rueben. We asked the hostess for a booth and were told flatly that our request was not possible since it was their policy to offer booths only for parties of 6 or more. I get that some analyst wanted to maximize the check value from these specific seats, but in this case the store was empty save my wife and me! Maximizing revenue beyond the two of us was an impossibility! Not only is this rule Dumb (since the appropriate way to deal with customers from a hostess point of view is to ask the customer where they would like to be seated), the hostess was not empowered to break it when it made sense to do so. Oh no, she enforced this stupid policy mindlessly with utter disregard to the impact it was having on us. Not her fault really as the organization had their rule enforcer glasses on and were not about to bend even a fraction of a standard deviation from it.

Dumb Rules need to be killed ir they will kill the business! They serve as nothing more than a de-dazzler in the customer experience and people will definitely take their business elsewhere.

How do you go about identifying and wacking these ugly loyalty threateners? Well, go ask your frontline what Dumb Rules they are constantly having to deal with. They know them. The issue is do you have the courage to listen and do something about them? I created Dumb Rules Committees in operations divisions and appointed a ‘CEO’ for each committee responsible to seek out and destroy (or otherwise modify) rules that made customers crazy. Fun was had by all over this concept. All divisions welcomed this initiative; they all were passionate about the purpose; all made stupendous progress. We had contests among the DRC’s and celebrated the ‘winners’; these committees that not only identified the most aggravating customer rule (judged by their peer group)but also took whatever action necessary to get it resolved. My role and that of my direct reports was to remove any roadblock’s preventing the committees from getting a rule dealt with.

What about rules that are ‘required’ by law or regulatory governance? Well, first of all do careful due diligence to make sure that the claim is real and not posturing of a DR champion who doesn’t want their object of control removed. If the rule IS necessary, however, then at least look for ways to make it customer friendly. And reconsider how the rule is enforced with a customer; what communications strategy is used. Is it friendly and helpful or is it demanding and intimidating? You need to take the time to design the customer communications content to minimize an adverse reaction; not always possible but it is worth doing nevertheless.

At the end of the day, if you purify your organization of 80-90% of DR’s you have succeeded and your customers will reward you with continuing loyalty and your reputation will soon attract new customers as well.

Know a Dumb Rule? Share it with me and I will pass it on .

Cheers, Roy Osing

Other blogs in this series
Hire Human Being Lovers
Recover from Your Blunders
Bend the Rules

Remember to follow me on Twitter

Posted 6.6.09 at 01:54 pm by Roy Osing | Permalink | Comments (0)