My girlfriend and I had a visit to a well known Fried Chicken fast-food chain last week (we know how to spoil ourselves!), and the unthinkable happened: An employee broke the rules and made us very happy customers!

After placing our order and deciding not to upgrade to large meals, we had a conversation between ourselves about whether or not we regretted not upgrading (I’m sure you’ve all had the same conversation). My girlfriend made the comment that she normally only upgrades so she can have large fries, as she normally can’t manage a large drink. Thinking nothing more of this the conversation moved on to other things.

Moments later, when our food was ready and the employee handed it over she commented that she had upgraded my girlfriends fries to a large, without charge. This made us extremely happy for three reasons:

1. It shows that the employee took the time to listen, to care and to act. All too often one of these goes missing from the service encounter
2. We have become used to the employees in this particular chain acting like cogs in a lifeless machine. The fact that there is even one employee who is breaking the mould and going above and beyond makes me happy
3. Its not the extra fries that matter, otherwise we would be extremely easily pleased (not to mention cheap ). Its the generosity of spirit that small acts like this make, that can transform a customers experience with a service. Stan Phelps calls this a Purple Goldfish and is gathering loads of examples of these over at his Marketing Lagniappe site

Little things really matter and the only way employees can deliver the little things is to be given the freedom and the permission to do so.

So this got me thinking, what would happen if employees were allowed to break the rules to exceed customer expectations? What would happen if the rulebooks were scrapped completely? How could this transform an experience? And most importantly, how have acts like this transformed experiences you have had?

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A little while ago I posted an article about the book ‘Being brilliant’ by Andy Cope. At the end of the article I asked readers to do an exercise from the book and list the five words which typify themselves at their best. I really like this exercise because when you can put your best into words, you can remind yourself what your best feels like when you are below-par, which makes it easier to bring back that winning mindset.

A few weeks after posting the original article I received this tweet from the wonderful people at Stanley Casino in Plymouth:

@jedlangdon Nice article Jed, could picture you with red nose and HUGE feet Our 5 are Friendly-Lively-Welcoming-Social-Relaxed

Brilliant!

I love the idea of businesses doing this exercise and sharing the words they strive for. These five words tell us a lot about the experience Stanley creates for its customers and I can assure you that they deliver on all of them (especially during social media tweet-ups!).

In the same way that visualising yourself at your best can help put you in the winning zone, sharing the words that typify your business at its best with your staff could have a similar effect. These words outline to your staff the behaviours and attitudes they should aspire to, which in turn should help the business achieve the desired experience and ingrain the behaviours within the culture of the business.

This exercise could also be taken a step further. By also asking some of your customers to choose five words they associate with you, you can spot any gaps between the desired experience and actual experience.

So lets go again… which five words typify your business at its best? And how do you share these with your staff?

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The explosion of social media has put a lot of power in consumers hands. When a customer is unhappy with a product or service they can quite literally tell the world through platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Where previously they may have told tens of people about a negative experience, they can now tell hundreds and possibly thousands of other people.

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Whilst I was waiting to catch the train home this evening the train conductor who was just about to come on duty struck up a short conversation with me.

Half an hour or so later, when the same conductor was checking tickets she recognised me and mentioned that I should buy a weekly ticket, as it would save me money. I was impressed that she had remembered our conversation and the fact that I catch the same train every day. Fortunately though, I already knew that the weekly ticket is cheaper, but didn’t buy one because I’m not catching the train for the rest of the week. Nevertheless, if I hadn’t known, finding out this information would have delighted me and the fact that she had even attempted to save me money made me feel like she cared.

The moral of this short anecdote is simple, yet very important: It only takes a little effort to start a conversation with a customer, but this short conversation could just give you that little piece of information to delight them!

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I am a firm believer that creating an exceptional customer experience is all about people. It is about staff taking the time and effort to understand and appreciate that every customer is different and putting in the time and effort to surprise and delight them. To do this staff need to have the freedom to make decisions and to be able to treat every customer differently.

Recently, a friend of mine shared a story about a bar she used to work in. This bar was part of a national chain and doubled as a restaurant, selling a lot of pub type food. She explained how all staff were given a customer service procedures manual and the manager stood over them making sure they were performing the procedures correctly. These were things like doing their regular customer checks (every 5 minutes and then again on 20 minutes), the order in which they took the customer’s food order and the questions they asked (think “would you like fries with that?”). This story made me cringe as she recalled the fake smiles that the staff wore and the contrived and artificial atmosphere that was created.

Ditch the manual!

As I have said, to deliver exceptional service, staff members need the freedom to be able to adapt to different customers. Procedure driven service lacks warmth, empathy and emotion. Further than this the autocratic management styles that often accompany the procedures, as in the above example, act as a barrier to employee engagement and employees who aren’t engaged in a service will never go that extra mile to surprise and delight customers. Take little Johnny, who happens to be a great people person. His skills are in reading peoples body language to understand their moods and he is great at empathising and building a rapport with people. Which setting would Johnny deliver the best service in, one in which he is told exactly what to say and do, or one in which he is allowed the freedom to express himself?

Service organisations need to trust their recruitment processes to recruit the best people, and if they don’t, they need to revise them. They need to sell new employees the service philosophy to engage them and they need to train them to understand how the service works and the behind the scenes processes that are in place. Then they need to give them room and freedom to work their magic.

Don’t get me wrong, in creating these customer service procedure manuals the services hearts were in the right place. There have been some great conversations lately about personalisation vs consistency in the service experience and there is no doubt that these procedures were designed to achieve consistency. Customers have an abundance of choice, they crave the personal touch and will be loyal to the services that can deliver this because they trust their employees to understand and read their customers moods and expectations. These procedure driven services only allow for basic and not exceptional service.

A personal example

I have recently experienced a really poor service example at the hands of Talk Talk broadband suppiers. I don’t usually like to name and shame but this experience has left me feeling extremely frustrated. I was asked by my Grandmother to go over and help her (attempt) to get her broadband working again. She had already spoken to Talk Talk on the phone but not being technically minded in this Internet age she couldn’t understand what they were asking her to do. When I tried to contact Talk Talk, there was the obligatory long wait on hold before actually speaking to anyone, I didn’t mind this because it has been built into my expectations when dealing with Broadband suppliers. This wasn’t an issue for me, the issue was that because it wasn’t a straight forward problem my Grandmother was experiencing Talk Talk had to do all sorts of tests and had to escalate the problem to different departments. This meant me calling them back several times, because they wouldn’t call me back – they “don’t do that apparently”.

Each and every time I called back I was taken through the same scripted routine and same procedural tests, which I had already done several times with other operators. This was a waste of my time and really irritating. Whenever I tried to tell the operators that I had done these particular checks two, three, four times before they simply ignored me and asked me to go on with the checks. The problem still hasn’t been fixed and my Grandmother has told me if they don’t fix it the next time I speak to them to tell them to disconnected her! She is angry because of how difficult they made it for her to understand, so much so that she had to get me involved. They did offer to send someone round, but it would cost her £100 – quite rightly she wasn’t willing to pay this to fix their problem.

I strongly believe this experience could have been solved, simply by hiring people who have expertise in the subject and who are willing to help people. It is very clear that to save costs Talk Talk have implemented a walkthrough process that any telephone operator can follow. But what the operators can’t do is answer technical questions, diagnose problems themselves or personalise the experience and show empathy for their customers.

I would love to hear your views. Have you had a bad, procedure-driven customer experience? Do I have a misguided trust of employees ability to deliver exceptional service? Or like me, do you believe service organisations need to ditch the manual?

Image courteousy of skippyjon’s Flickr photostream

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A couple of weeks ago I was cycling along one of the quiet country lanes on my journey to work when a young deer appeared from within one of the hedges. Startled, the deer took one look at me slowing on my bike, began panicking and rushed hurriedly down the lane looking for the nearest escape from the road back into one of the fields. I began to worry as the deer was failing to leap over any of the hedges and was jumping into gates and bushes to no avail, and was getting ever closer to a busy road. I put my bike down and tried to help the deer by opening gates into fields and clearing openings for it to get into. This only spooked the deer further and it tried harder to get away from me.

Eventually, the deer managed to leap over a barbed wire fence and scarpered through a field towards a wooded area, before it got to the road. My mind works in mysterious ways because, somehow, this got me thinking about the customer experience and that startled look in the eyes of the deer reminded me of how I have felt as a customer at times.

It’s programmed in the nature of the deer to fear humans and as such the deer didn’t want my help. As humans, we are programmed in far more complex ways and we are all different. As customers we are all different too, some of us enjoy human interaction in service environments, but there are also those of us that shy away from it and want to be left to their own devices. Add to this the fact that we all have different moods, different motivations for purchases and different expectations and it can sometimes be difficult for customer service representatives to spot who wants help and who doesn’t.

As a staff member in a service organisation it is your duty to spot these differences though. It is your duty to treat every customer as an individual and ensure that every customer receives a level of attention appropriate to their mood and their preferences. As a customer it is extremely frustrating when we receive a level of service and attention below our needs and expectations, that much is obvious, but it is also worth bearing in mind the opposite can be true.

Have you ever been into a shop and been followed by an overzealous customer service assistant and wished they would just stop talking? I have, on several occasions, and it has caused me to walk out of a shop too. I’ve walked into a mobile phone shop and had a sales assistant try to sell me every phone I have looked at. I’ve been browsing clothes shops and had a retail assistant comment on every item I pick up. I have even been followed around a gift card shop when looking for a personal gift card for someone.

Sometimes a customer simply wants to browse without the pressure of being talked to constantly. Perhaps they are in an unsociable mood. Perhaps they feel shy about the lack of product knowledge they have. Or perhaps they feel that they might be pressured into a purchase they don’t want to make. Whatever the reasoning behind the customers preference for interaction, it is the service reps duty to read the signs and deliver an appropriate level of interaction. And there are many cues, eye contact (or lack of), open or closed body language, whether they are pre-occupied with children or on the phone, or whether they are slowly browsing or looking for something with purpose, to name but a few. Service personnel also need to be in the best position to read these signs, they need to be open, friendly and approachable but not too pushy.

As an advocate of exceptional service, I am not saying a customer should always be left alone. I personally love the interaction and attention that is showed to me by some exceptional service providers, such as Apple for instance, but on some occasions it can go too far. Also, I appreciate that often the overzealous staff member will have the best intentions in the world but haven’t given consideration that some customers, just like the deer, simply do not want their help.

Do you have any examples of a time an over-enthusiastic or pushy service representative that has detracted from the service experience? What advice would you give to these staff members to stop them making the same mistakes again?

Thinking about all this reminded me of two of my favourite fast show characters, which illustrate my point perfectly (Well, sort of! ) Enjoy!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1fMf8CB7jE

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On Sunday I completed my second ever Plymouth Half Marathon and am pleased to say that I made a slight improvement on my time this time around. However this is despite putting in far less training time this year and despite this improvement, I have never found anything so difficult! This years experience has reminded me how important preparation is in all areas of my life, not only when I am new to something, but each and every time.

Last years weather conditions were extremely difficult for running, the sun was scorching and there wasn’t much in the way of cloud cover and breeze. However my training effort paid off in the race as I managed to run it without too much pain or difficulty. I remember being especially pleased as it was my first ever half marathon.

However, this years conditions were far better for running as although the sun was shining (which made it brilliant for crowd support), there was also some cloud cover and a lovely breeze in places. I am sure that this is the reason why my time improved this time around. Despite this improvement in time I was far from satisfied because of the difficulty and pain I endured all the way around (and because I have been unable to walk properly for days afterwards).

Looking back on it now, it could well be that because I ran the half marathon fairly easily last time around that I was complacent this year. This, I can assure you is a mistake I will not be making again! I have made this mistake in other areas as well though, and I’m sure those of you reading will have too. I have worked hard preparing a training course and been delighted with how it went, only to put in less effort and preparation the second time around and delivered what I felt was a poor course as a result. And the same can be said for presentations, exams, reports, assignments, meetings and all sorts of other things in the past.

Don’t get me wrong, I have always understood the importance of preparation when something is new to you, but I can now see how important it is EVERY time, and I can’t envisage a time when it will cease to be.

I would love to hear your examples of a time where you have been complacent and realised the importance of continuous preparation, or whether you have found that preparation has become less important to you over time.

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I have just finished reading the excellent Seth Godin book, Linchpin. Although Seth makes a lot of brilliant points in this book, there was one particular point that has stuck with me, which is that of generosity.

Generosity

One of the main themes running through Linchpin is that in order to become indispensable you must first be generous. Seth makes a very strong case for this and you see the types of generosity that he refers to day after day on the Internet. Trainers and professionals share knowledge, theories, models and white papers on their blogs for free. Musicians share their music on Facebook, Myspace and their websites for free. People take time out of their own days to help others on Twitter, blogs and discussion forums.

Whilst pondering the idea of generosity, I began wondering how this relates to big business and to customer service. Sure, I understand that the waiter who is generous will soon become indispensable to a small restaurant because he wins over customers and creates connections. But is generosity something that is lost once a business becomes a certain size? I firmly believe that bigger businesses can learn a lot from the thousands of individuals and small businesses who are doing well for themselves by creating deeper connections like this on the Internet. If a company could embrace generosity within their culture, surely they would become indispensable to many loyal fans?

After all, we are now in an age where customers  crave relationships and deeper connections with the companies they buy from. Not only do they want to buy from brands or companies, but they want to have conversations with them and receive a more personal service.

Let me clarify what I mean by generosity in business. I’m not talking about a marketing initiative or a promotional incentive, such as loyalty cards in supermarkets or free gifts with magazine subscriptions. I am talking about a company going out of their way, be it through time or effort, or in some occasional circumstances finance to connect with a loyal customer and make them feel special. It is about reward and not incentive.

Punishing the loyal customer

At the danger of losing some readers at this point, I am a loyal fan of the Call of Duty and Modern Warfare games series on the Xbox 360. Every now and again, Infinity Ward, who develop the game release new map packs, which you can download. These map packs enable you to play online against your friends on new levels. Infinity Wards decision to charge 1200 Microsoft points (roughly £10) for their latest new maps caused a lot of outrage amongst loyal fans on Internet communities.

One of the secrets of the Call of Duty and Modern Warfare series’ success has been the strength of the customer loyalty they have been able to create. This disappointed me, not because I had to pay extra this time around, but because this could have been an opportunity for Infinity Ward to reward their fans for their loyalty and for championing their games on online networks and for recommending them to friends. Instead they chose to chase a quick buck, which judging from the $1 billion+ worldwide sales of the game itself they don’t need. Most of their upset fans would have bought the map pack anyway, not wanting to miss out and hear their friends talking about it. But this has come at the cost of brand loyalty decreasing and previously very strong relationships weakening, when they could easily have been made even stronger.

We see this everyday, companies enticing customers in with great deals, great products or great service, only to charge them a premium once they have become loyal customers. I understand that this is the principle behind business and companies want to make as much money as possible for their shareholders, but is a bit of generosity once in a while too much too ask?

The Purple Goldfish

Whilst I was knocking the idea of generosity around in my head, I came across this brilliant post about purple goldfish by Kelly Ketelboeter. The reason I am mentioning this post here is because it perfectly summarises why I think generosity is becoming more and more important in business. As more and more companies race to the bottom, other companies can stand out, be generous and create their own purple goldfish.

In this article Kelly explains that a purple goldfish is where a business goes above and beyond to provide that little bit extra and when they exceed your expectations. Generosity is a great way to achieve this and by taking the time and effort to make a customer feel special companies can create their own purple goldfish.

Stan Phelps is looking for examples of purple goldfish and you can find out more by checking out his website, his presentation below or by by reading Kelly’s blog post. I can thoroughly recommend them all and there are some great examples of purple goldfish there as well!

[slideshare id=3043506&doc=purplegoldfishebook-100131230108-phpapp01]

So, have you found any examples of generous companies? If so, how were they generous and how did they make you feel? Will you be more loyal and champion the company? I would love to hear from you…

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A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine had a complaint to make about a pair of trainers he had bought from the website of a major UK sports retailer. After visiting their website again and finding an email address he emailed them his compaint, to which he received an automatic reply stating that they would respond within five working days. Not content with this he also discovered that they have a Twitter account, so tweeted them to see if he would receive a faster response.

This sports retailer isn’t known for it’s terrific customer service and operates a low cost-low service strategy, so nobody would expect any miracles. In fact, this isn’t a post about bad after sales service because within a week or so my friend had received a response via email offering him some of his money back. The situation had reached a satisfactory conclusion and my friend was happy. There was still no sign of a response on Twitter though, despite public tweets by my friend about his trainers and their lack of response.

The fact that this retailer has a Twitter account suggests that they are making some sort of attempt to build and maintain a relationship with their customers, even if they aren’t fully embracing social CRM. However, on inspection their account I discovered this description of their Twitter account:

“xxxxxx is the UK’s largest Sports Store! Follow us on Twitter to get all the latest deals and discounts and exclusive Twitter voucher codes”

This description and further investigation of the 29 tweets they have amassed since their first in April 2009 revealed that they use Twitter solely as a marketing channel. It also revealed that they see it as a one-way communcations tool, used to push messages to potential customers and nothing else. The fact that they only have 71 followers shows us that their marketing efforts aren’t particularly inspiring either.

In my eyes there are many things wrong with this companies Twitter presence, all of which could reflect badly on their brand:

- By viewing twitter as a one-way comms channel, the retailer is missing an opportunity to engage and build a relationship with their customers. In today’s social world customers expect to have more of a relationship with companies they buy from. Furthermore, not responding to customers who openly make an effort to communicate with you in full view of other customers, will not only damage your relationship with that customer but also any others who are watching the conversation.

- When a customer finds a company on Twitter they expect to be able to discuss customer service issues through this channel and they expect fast an efficient response (possibly even faster than with email). By restricting their use of Twitter to marketing, customers will become irritated when they attempt to discuss customer service matters with them.

- It is clear that this company have launched their Twitter account without any real thought or commitment as to how they are going to maintain their online presence. Any social media expert (which I am not) will tell you that before launching into any SM channels, take some time to understand the communication channel and what your stakeholders will expect of you, set yourself clear goals and objectives and formulate a strategy accordingly. It is clear this company has not followed any of these steps and the sporadic nature of their tweets highlights their lack of commitment.

It seems that there are still companies limping into using Twitter, probably hearing about it and thinking it will damage their brand not to have a presence. In my opinion this is what has happened in this case and the reality is that a social media presence with no clear strategy and which hasn’t been thought through properly is far more damaging to a brand.

The fortunate thing for this particular retailer is that because of their low cost-low service position in the market, this probably won’t hurt them significantly.

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Do your customer-facing employees have a strong voice inside your organisation? Do you regularly seek their opinions on service matters? If not, why not?

Customer facing employees know their services customers better than anyone. After all, they are face to face with them day in-day out. They understand what makes them tick and they certainly know what makes them cross. They also understand which of the services processes work and which just make it more difficult to provide the customer with a great experience.

There has also been a lot of research recently which has proven that employees who have a voice and feel that their opinions are valued will be happier and more engaged in their jobs and thus be more motivated to go the extra mile to provide their customers with a better service experience.

So, if the answer to the question above is no. It might just be worth having a rethink and empowering your employees to have more of a voice.

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