Be Different or be dead

June 3, 2013

Why are company policies set to control customers who cheat the system?

Source: Pexels

Why are company policies set to control customers who cheat the system?

One of the things missing in most customer service plans is how to architect a rules and policies system that favours the customer.

The customer experience with any organization is destroyed when internal rules and policies are designed to prevent ‘cheaters’.

One of the main drivers of policy setting in organizations is to stop cheaters

Dishonest people who will try to beat the system for their own gain.

▪️ People who will steal from you — hence the policy of limiting the number of pieces of clothing you can take into a change room in a retail store.

▪️ People who will leave an outside serving area without paying their bill — hence the policy of requiring you to provide a credit card before being served. But it’s ok to be inside and be served without brandishing your card and having it retained.

▪️ People who will not spend enough money with you — hence the policy of refusing a booth for two people because booths are reserved for parties of 4 or more, who will generate more revenue per serving.

▪️ People who will not tip the server enough to compensate them for their hard work — hence the policy of automatically applying a 20% gratuity for parties of 6 or more.

How many more cheater policies can you name?

The truth is: people who want to screw you over wIll screw you over regardless of your policies and to the honest person the customer experience is ugly..

The problem is: while you go about implementing these cheater-policies, you infuriate all of your honest loyal customers who feel they are assumed guilty with unsavory motives.

That they are part of the cheater herd.

Here’s the distribution: cheaters = 2%; honest folks = 98%.

Which crowd do you think should determine your policies?

if you want to provide an amazing customer experience, create rules for honest people, not cheaters.

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

• Posted 6.3.13 at 06:12 am by Roy Osing
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April 22, 2013

Amazing customer experiences can happen by doing these simple things

Source: Unsplash

How do you create a customer experience that blows a customer away and can’t be boxed?

Amazing customer experiences can happen by doing these simple things.

It can’t be time-bound. It can’t be created with an employee trying to get a customer on and off the phone in 20 seconds or less.

It can’t be engineered or architected. It can’t be manufactured from a blueprint. It doesn’t come from a can.

A magic moment is created when someone ‘puts in the time’ with another person, showing caring and thoughtful behavior.

It’s created through a process of listening, asking questions and responding with a serving attitude.

The spellbound customer experience cannot be managed with efficiency in mind.

This is how to create a customer experience with magic moments:

▪️Remove time restrictions on people who deal with customers. Let them take as much time as they need to serve them well and deliver the magic.

▪️Establish loyalty- building outcomes as the prime objective of any customer contact not how long it takes to unload a customer.

▪️Redefine how you use ‘work force management’ to manage your call center. These are useful tools to diagnose problems and issues but they shouldn’t be used to drive behavior of the call center rep.

▪️Hire employees with a proven track record of taking care of others. You can teach them your business but you can’t teach them to be customer experience moment magicians.

▪️Empower people to do the right thing for a customer, not enforce organizational rules and policies that do nothing but piss them off.

▪️Encourage the surprise element in your customer service strategy. What can be done to surprise a customer in a moment?

▪️Recognize and reward moment magicians. Make a big deal of treating them as heroes.

▪️Talk to customers. Mechanized touch points are limiting in their ability to create magic. They are designed to minimize engagement time and simply cannot replicate the experience humans can create for other humans.

The customer experience riddled with magic moments will propel your organization to the top because your customers will never leave you.

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

• Posted 4.22.13 at 06:29 am by Roy Osing
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March 11, 2013

What stupid words should never be uttered in customer service?

What stupid words should never be uttered in customer service?

There are certain things you should never say if your intention is to create an amazing and memorable customer experience.

How many times have you heard people in customer service jobs make comments like these?

— It’s not in my area
— You can’t sit here, this section is closed
— Booths are only for parties of 4
— I already told you
— I’m going on my break
— It’s our policy
— You can’t do that
— I’m new here
— I have no idea
— It’s over there
— We can’t do that
— No
— The special deal doesn’t apply to you
— The sale is over
— I’ll have to talk to my supervisor
— The clothes in the Mannequin not for sale. They are are for display purposes only
— Can you eat that much? (actually asked of me at The Sentosa Golf Club in Singapore)

I am sure you can add to the list from your own experiences.

A successful customer service culture has its own vocabulary, and the above utterances are not included. Customer service leaders must seek out and eliminate any of them that are spoken.

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

• Posted 3.11.13 at 07:48 am by Roy Osing
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December 31, 2012

What is the best way to measure the quality of your service?

Source: Pexels

What gets measured gets done. And it’s exceedingly important to measure how well you are serving your loyal customers.

Decide what metric you need to monitor your progress to your goals. Measure regularly. Take action on what you learn from measuring your results.

And never be put off by the argument that you can’t measure what you want to — anything can be measured.

I have seen some measurement systems rely on a formula to derive the service result; it’s not a good idea. I have rarely seen this approach work.

A service objective like X (overall customer satisfaction) = 2Y (where Y could represent how long it takes for a call center rep to answer an incoming call) + 9Z (where Z could represent how long the rep was on the customer call to deal with their request) won’t motivate people to achieve X.

They won’t understand it — how do they know the formula is right? — and won’t have much control over producing the result.

You don’t need a complicated algorithm to drive measurement.

Keep measurement simple. It needn’t require heavy lifting systems technology and records processing. In fact the simpler the better.

Use customer perception surveys as the basis to measure the quality of your customer service.

Declare 3 service elements that are critical to you and ask a customer on a regular basis how you’re doing.

Ask them if their service experience with you was memorable — were they dazzled?

And act on what they say.

Some organizations use internal statistics as the basis of service measurement. For example, the length of time to fulfil an order as determined by the statistics produced by their internal systems.

Although this measure has value, the real question to ask is “How did the customer enjoy the experience of placing their order and receiving the product?”
The order fulfilment time may very well be a good diagnostic tool for unsatisfactory answers to the question.

Be cautious of relying on internal measures as your measurement focus.

Use the customer perception measure — an expression from the market is worth listening to.

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

• Posted 12.31.12 at 10:23 am by Roy Osing
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