Be Different or be dead

October 14, 2010

Why a customer beating is something to be cherished

Source: Unsplash

Why a customer beating is something to be cherished.

The ability to take a punch is one of the most critical strategic issues facing organizations these days and yet few view it as an opportunity to thrill their loyal customers.

It’s not particularly pleasant when you are on the receiving end of your customer’s wrath. It can be terrifying, intimidating and painful.
Someone else is in control and your first impulse is to try and deal with the situation and escape FAST.

Get it over with and escape the pain seems to be the favoured response by companies these days.

The ‘get it over with’ phrase usually involves quoting company policy as the explanation for the customer’s annoyance that they should accept.
This NEVER works as it was probably a company policy that made the customer go postal in the first place.

It’s not the frontline employee’s fault that customer complaint moments go very wrong.

Organizations generally don’t understand the latent power they have if they respond the right way, and even if they did they rarely go as far as defining the specific way the situation should be dealt with i.e. the behaviours required to successfully handle the situation.

Enlightened organizations strive to serve their customers in a remarkable way and make themselves indispensable get it.

They are able to turn the other cheek and realize the benefit of being bullied, harassed and beaten up by their most precious assets.

‘Take-a-punch’ opportunities

◾️ Realize its nothing personal. Your fan is pissed at your organization and the way it’s have treated them. If you can’t get to an objective plane you simply won’t be able to take care of the situation.

Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and look at the circumstances from their point of view. Wouldn’t you be upset if you were treated the same way?

◾️ Treat this experience as a source of learning. You are getting the real deal. The customer is telling you how they really feel. You are getting their secrets in no uncertain terms.

Listen and Learn how to change policy and procedures so they serve what the customer wants instead of infuriating them.

◾️ Look at this as a gift of service recovery that will actually build customer loyalty.
Create a dazzling moment for them by not only solving their problem but also adding the surprise factor - something thoughtful they did not expect.

◾️ As long as they are screaming at you they haven’t left. If your organization wasn’t serving them in any meaningful way, they wouldn’t be chastising you.
They would be gone. And they would be telling everyone they connect with how rotten you are.

Bottom line… develop your own take-a-punch strategy for serving customers if you want to enjoy the financial fruits of loyal and caring fans.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 10.14.10 at 11:00 am by Roy Osing
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August 18, 2010

12 proven ways to fix a colossal service mistake

Source: Unsplash

12 proven ways to fix a colossal service mistake.

Mistakes are a way of life in every organization notwithstanding the attempts to achieve an error-free working environment. Mistakes, however, can be a source of opportunity — enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty — if the right steps are taken when a screwup is made.

Dazzling service recovery = (Fix the OOPS! within 24 hours) + (Surprise the customer with something they don’t expect)

It’s a leader’s responsibility to put in place these 11 elements necessary to execute an effective recovery system and make it a way of life in their organization.

1. Service strategy — amazing service recovery doesn’t happen through serendipity. It requires a comprehensive strategy defining the outcomes expected and the way to achieve them. Focus on execution;

2. Togetherness — the relationship between the customer, the breakdown event and the organization must be tight. Seamless recovery demands all teams in the organization working unbelievably well together;

3. Connectivity — hyper-communications is essential to enable the recovery process: customer contact when the disaster event happens, follow up, status reports and final resolution;

4. Secrets — you need to know the secrets of the person being screwed over if you want a recovery that will blow the customer’s mind;

Find out what would the customer would NOT expect. Remember, a Dazzling Recovery = Fixing the mistake + Doing the Unexpected: the surprise factor;

5. Problem solving — service recovery isn’t about applying the rules and policies of the organization to make things right for the customer; rather it’s about solving the problem that the mistake has created. Make sure your recruitment process looks for proven problem solvers;

6. Celebration —to reinforce the behaviours expected of people in recovery, make sure that you recognize and reward service recovery ‘heroes’ consistently and that you make a big deal of what they do to recover from a blunder and and how they do it;

7. Story telling — further to #6, use storytelling as a way of making explicit the actions that employees must take to affect a successful recovery. Storytelling is an effective way of ‘painting a picture’ of what an expected recovery process looks like. Establish a recovery storytelling channel in your organization and make it a big deal;

8. Training — give employees the skills to execute dazzling recovery as a high priority;

9. The right to act — empower people responsibly to ensure that the earth is moved to enact the recovery process. This is a critical point. Recovery is successful and customer loyalty enhanced only I’d the process is completed within 24 hours of the mistake. Speed is required which means that traditional approval processes must be circumvented by allowing people involved in the recovery to make decisions to get it done. Waiting for a manager’s approval to proceed will not only render the recovery useless, it will also demotivate the employee and the overall strategy will be compromised;

Empower people to act and trust they will do the right thing

10. Measurement — service recovery must be seen as business as usual throughout the organization and in order to support this objective, recovery objectives must be set, monitored and displayed throughout the workplace. For objective setting, set a target for the % of mistakes recovered in 24 hours or less and over time move the target close to 100%.
For the surprise factor, ask your victims if they were blown away by something an employee did that they didn’t expect; move this target to 100% as well;

11. Accountability — to make service recovery matter to the entire organization, put recovery expectations into every leader’s performance plan and make it equally important as other balanced scorecard categories such as financial performance and Human Resources;

12. Recruitment — Finally, make sure you have people in the recovery process that ‘like humans’. Employees who innately care about others and who are passionate about rectifying the breakdown event and going the extra mile to blow the customer away are needed to make your recovery strategy come to life.

These 12 steps are not only essential in building a successful service recovery process, they are also instrumental in creating a service culture that really does exist to serve customers.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 8.18.10 at 10:36 am by Roy Osing
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July 26, 2010

Why an executive leader is necessary to support customers

Source: Unsplash

Why an executive leader is necessary to support customers.

The “Chief” designation is well used in organizations these days: Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer, and Chief Marketing Officer are but a few positions that carry this prestigious tag.

The serving side of a business (some call it the service side) gets short shrift however.

Very few companies have established a Chief of this side of the business.

The CSO — Chief Serving Officer — must in my view be established in any organization who has a strategy to acquire and retain loyal customers

This is a huge mistake! If serving is a critical component of your strategy you need single finger accountability to a senior executive for the flawless delivery of both coire service and dazzling customer experiences.

Diluting the responsibility across the organization will simply not work. It won’t get the attention required. Nor the focus. It requires a champion who can sit in executive team meetings and hammer the table when actions in the organization are preventing raving customer fans from being secured.

Here’s the CSO position description:

▪️ Create and execute the service strategy of the organization.&

▪️ Re-engineer customer serving processes from the customer’s point of view.

▪️ Develop the ABSOLUTELY-MUST-HAVE-WILL-TAKE-NOTHING-LESS competencies of frontline positions.

▪️ Define the recruitment process to be used in bringing on Customer Servers.

▪️ Get the value of the frontline leader position re-valued in the organization to be THE MOST STRATEGIC POSITION EVER.

▪️ Be the ultimate guardian of customer moments of truth. Watch them. Evaluate them. Improve them. Coach. Coach. Coach.

▪️ Kill dumb rules - the internal rules and policies that infuriate customers.

▪️ Set up dumb rules committees throughout the organization to seek out and cleanse the internal environment of stuff that makes no sense to customers.

▪️ Be THE advocate for the frontline. Protect them. Nurture them. Celebrate with them. Help them. Be the do-whatever-it-takes person to make sure they can delight customers.

▪️ Set up customer feedback panels to hear the truth about how you serve them. Get the CEO involved as well. The entire executive team. Leaders need to hear how your serving is perceived.

▪️ Assume the role of Chief Storytelling Officer. Get out in front of people with stories that breathe life in the service strategy.

▪️ Pay homage to service heroes. Know who they are and the names of their kids.

These are strategic acts that must be performed to stand-out in the way you serve your customers.

Put a CSO in place to make it happen.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 7.26.10 at 12:00 pm by Roy Osing
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June 21, 2010

Why an ‘opportunity spotter’ is necessary for amazing customer service

Source: Unsplash

Why an ‘opportunity spotter’ is necessary for amazing customer service.

If your organization really is obsessed about customers, spotting opportunities routinely happens because it is a fundamental part of your business plan.

I’m talking about the inclination and ability for someone (normally a customer server) in the organization to anticipate an opportunity — a moment — to do something special and unusual for a customer and do the thing that will dazzle them.

Give them something they don’t expect. Blow them away. Surprise them. WOW! them.

Spot it; Act on it

My son and his family recently vacationed with us in Maui and they took the opportunity to spend an evening in the Ritz-Carlton in Kapalua, comforted by the fact that the kids were in good hands with Gramma and Papa.

Knowing that I am an absolute customer service experience fanatic, he told me the story of what happened to him around the Ritz pool; he was obviously very impressed.

Apparently he was lying in his lounger struggling to adjust the back position of his chair and was startled when a pool attendant came up to him and said “Here, sir let me help you”, at which point the attendant adjusted the chair back to the precise position my son desired.

He apparently he did it cheerfully, with a gleam in his eye and an attitude that shouted out “I want to help you (no, I really do)!”.

A customer opportunity spotter in action! Not serendipity. Not a fluke. Not an isolated incident.

This was an occurrence that I would bet is hammered into Ritz employees heads as an expected behavior. Look for every moment to serve a customer in a way that they don’t expect.

This is the essence of creating dazzling customer moments.

If you can surprise them and do something they don’t expect you will literally take their breath away. They will remember the moment and they will tell others about it.

They will take every opportunity to visit you again, and again, and again…..

So if your organization professes to create amazing service experiences for your customers, does your strategy include the customer opportunity spotting tactic?

Does it articulate this specific expectation of customer servers? Is it included in the server performance and compensation plan?

If not, your customer server journey has just begun.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 6.21.10 at 01:00 pm by Roy Osing
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