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
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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

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Posted 11.5.09 at 09:06 am by Roy Osing | Read Comments (0) | Leave a Comment