I have just read this and thought it was a good article, so sharing it with everyone! This talks some sense. The author and contact links at bottom of the article.

Monster Service Blunders and How to Avoid them

Despite all the rumbling and grumbling about poor customer service, there are always a handful of renegade businesses that somehow find ways to keep their workers fired up and their customers delighted and coming back for more. In these rarified places, highly motivated employees pursue customer delight with a passion; they ignite a flashpoint of contagious enthusiasm that spreads throughout the organization like wildfire.

How do they do it? They conscientiously avoid what I call the Top 5 Monster Customer Service Blunders\”:

Monster Blunder #1: Trying to solve the problem with superficial employee training. Workers call it smile trainingprograms intended to convince staff to look and sound more cheerful, while giving them no particular reason to feel any more cheerful. When you boil it down, this kind of training does nothing more than itemize the specific service behaviors workers are expected to exhibit. It then becomes managements job to somehow enforce these designated behaviors into the daily operation of the business. If this approach has any effect at all, it typically creates conduct that strikes customers as mechanical and insincere. Worse, it often intensifies worker resentment and cynicism.

Instead of attempting to dictate what workers should be doing to delight customers, the better approach is to give workers opportunities to generate their own ideas for delivering a better customer experience. Managements role then becomes helping employees implement these ideas, allowing workers to enjoy the motivational boost they derive from positive feedback from delighted customers. This level of employee ownership and involvement is a key cultural characteristic of virtually all flashpoint businesses.

TO AVOID THE BLUNDER: Train managers and supervisors, not just employees, to facilitate interactive brainstorming sessions in which employees come up with their own strategies for improving the customer experience. Read the rest of this entry »

Aren’t people strange animals. I am constantly surprised by people’s behaviour. It has just happened to me again. I am sat outside a Starbucks in Sarasota in Florida, enjoying a coffee, some sunshine and writing some stuff for the blog. A guy walks up to me and says “will you look after my bike for a moment, whilst I go in a get a coffee”? Here is the bike….nice huh?

“Of course” I replied. 

Why me I wonder? Why not the young girls chatting on the next table to me?  Read the rest of this entry »

In our experience of working in the CE arena for ten years we have discovered it is critical for an organisation to address three strategic questions.

 To enable people to consider these questions we have recently produced a video that lasts around 5 mins that explains their importance to an organisation to start the debate.  We hope you find this useful to spread around your organisation as part of their education and understanding of what is to be done to improve the experience. Three key strategic questions 

Our intention is to produce a number of these videos to help educate people on different aspects of the CE. Please let us know if there is any particular subject that you would like addressed in these videos. 

What does your organization really stand for? What is the real culture you your organisation? Not what people put on posters in the offices, but what happens in real life. We gain glimpses of the culture of an oprgansiation through the policies and procedure that are enacted by companies.

For example last week I arrive on a flight from Dallas to Philly that landed at 12.25am. As instructed I call the hotel shuttle to get to the Sheraton Four Points hotel at Philly airport. It duly arrives and after a very long day I was very much looking forward to my bed. 

When I arrive at the reception there is total confusion. One guest complaining her room was dirty and three others in front of me waiting to check in. This surprised me so late at night.

I am not going to go through the entire experience. Suffice it to say that they had decided to sell my room that I had booked. What an insult. Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago, I flew to Amsterdam from London Luton Airport on Easyjet (a budget airline in England), with a colleague. My assistant had decided to book “Speedy Boarding” to ensure we could sit together and talk on the flight.

Now the words “Speedy boarding” would indicate to me that you board speedily. Pretty logical wouldn’t you say? Apparently this isn’t the case.

When we arrived at the gate we duly lined up in the speedy boarders’ line. The speedy boarders were called first. Normally as we were at Easyjet’s home airport Luton, the plane is just outside the gate and you simply walk out and onto the plane. Not today. We were ushered onto a bus. The second group were invited on board thus when we were dropped off at the plane we were the last to get on board as we were at the back of the bus. I was very disappointed. I paid for something I didn’t receive. I therefore decided to complain on my return. Read the rest of this entry »

I was recently delivering a conference speech in Singapore and stayed at the Mandarin Oriental hotel. A few days after my visit I received a Customer satisfaction survey via email. I am always fascinated by what people measure as this sends a subconscious signal to the Customer about what the organisation thinks is important.

One of the questions the Mandarin Oriental Hotel asked was “How well did we anticipate your needs?” ‘Wow!’ I thought. ‘They are trying to anticipate my needs….. and more importantly they are measuring it!’

What a great question. Consider the normal hotel Customer satisfaction surveys. They ask about the cleanliness of the rooms, the speed of check out etc. These are questions from the 1980’s! Surely we have progressed since then?

All too often we find that most organisations’ customer measurement needs a lot to be desired. On a BA flight Read the rest of this entry »

One of our clients, a utility, had spent millions of dollars on implementing a new bill payment system over the web, as traditional customer satisfaction surveys had shown that customers said an online bill-payment system was important to them.

But when we delved further, we discovered that, even though customers said they wanted such a system in the survey, it was really at the bottom of a list of 35 things customers wanted. At the top of the list was having the utility care about and understand customer issues. That’s the type of disconnect we see time after time between what people say and what their subconscious really rates as valuable.  

‘My subconscious sees scuff marks in the hall, a threadbare carpet and a porter half throwing customers’ bags on the floor.’

“Our customer satisfaction rate is 95 percent, yet customers are leaving us. Why?” This is a question I am increasingly asked. My answer is simple: You are measuring the wrong thing. In my view, most customer measurement is woefully inadequate. It only scratches the surface of a customer’s true experience and does not take into account the subconscious experience.

Our last book, The DNA of Customer Experience, outlined that all organizations have an Emotional Signature®, but how do you measure the emotional aspect of an experience?

Try this exercise. Read the rest of this entry »

I always remember watching a film a number of years ago of a famous racing driver in the late fifties. He had just won a race where there was a fatal accident. He was asked “after seeing the accident did you slow down?” His reply has always stayed with me. He said “whenever there is a bad accident other racing drivers slow down. I don’t. I see this as my opportunity to win. I accelerate and drive harder than before. As others slow down I pull ahead of them and win”.

This for me is the same as the “credit crunch”. Having worked in big business all my life, I am more than aware of what is happening today. The ‘powers of darkness’ are gathering. There are those people in an organization who have never really believed in the benefits of improving a Customer’s experience. They think cost cutting and efficiency is the answer to everything. The Powers of Darkness are “inside out”. They will see the credit crunch as their time to strike.

The Powers of Darkness are starting to cast their shadow far and wide in companies. They talk of the doom and gloom that will befall the company if we do not cut costs. Whilst professing their support to Customer focus, now is not the time. Now is the time to cut costs, now is the time to become more efficient, now is the time to look internally. They say “When times are better we will re look at improving Customer experience”. Read the rest of this entry »