There are two main elements to a service strategy: core service and the service experience.
Core service is the basic product or service you provide the market; your dial tone so to speak. Without your core service, you don’t have a business. Clean hotel rooms, accurate financial advice, working stereo systems, and 24X7 cable service are all examples of core service. Interestingly, customers expect your core service to work every time, and when it does they give you a ‘C’ on your service report card. Customer loyalty is unaffected; it neither goes up nor down.
The source of customer loyalty is the service experience; dazzling a customer will get you an ‘A’ on your service report card and they will keep coming back and tell everyone else how wonderful you are.
The objective, then, is to deliver your core service seamlessly and consistently and to dazzle and amaze the customer when you do it.
How does an organization create dazzling experiences?
- Hire human being lovers. Can you dazzle a customer if your front liners have a fundamental dislike for humans? Of course not. 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 is 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 as quickly as you can and then blow them away by surprising them with something they do not expect. - Kill ‘dumb rules’. Do you have policies that don’t make sense to customers? The rules, policies, and procedures that aggravate them royally? Seek them out, – ask your frontline, then modify or get rid of them so they are not a source of aggravation anymore. Policy creation should be driven from the customer’s perspective, not internal staff groups who are constantly in the control mode.
- Bend the rules; empower the frontline to ‘say yes’. You can’t dazzle customers if your frontline is enforcing rules all the time. Allow them a bit of flexibility to bend the rules when it makes sense to do what the customer wants and delight them in the process.
Organizations that build their culture around these 4 attributes are loved by their customers. And then they win. Because if you consistently provide dazzling customer service you will stand out from the crowd!
Your mastery of the subject amazes me to no end, Dear Sandy, Thank You! Relating to the above four points, here’s my personal experience:
A few years ago, I was mentoring the CEO of a mid-sized corp in Las Vegas. As he saw a remarkable change in his output as a result of our interaction, he invited me, along with Arvinder, to be his guests at the Bellagio for a week. Once there, we found out he had arranged the Penthouse Suite for us.
As we settled in, and just before I was to call my Mentee, Arvinder noticed a speck of dust on the wardrobe. Lo and behold, there was dust on all the furniture. She called the front desk right away and asked the Housekeeping Manager to come up, post-haste. Guess what, she apologized profusely for the lack of supervision. Then, they prepared another identical suite for us, brought in a bottle of chilled champagne, and a large box of their premium chocolates. Not only that, but they also gave us an option to either take a Credit Note for future use or extend our stay three more days, absolutely free of charge. At the end of our stay, the night before our final check-out, they brought us yet another box consisting of so many expensive gifts.
Basically, the HK Manager aced all the benchmarks with flying colors. She was my only window for redressal, saving us a lot of aggravation. She took immediate control of the situation, handled it in an unexpectedly pleasant way, and then went beyond the norms, considering the value of business our stay was bringing them. She sure knew the negative fall-out in the event they failed to pamper us.
Considering the above, how would you rate the level of Customer Service? I know I would rate it First Class.
As usual smart article with shareable tips.
Allow me to add some considerations that integrate my thoughts on the evolution of the customer experience.
Emotions have the greatest impact in addressing consumer loyalty and, therefore, companies that are able to promote loyalty through greater emotional involvement of their customers, get a potential benefit in terms of business,
Emotionally affected customers remain loyal to the brand they love, and voluntarily become brand ambassadors for family and friends. They want the brand to be involved and to change their loyalty in a bilateral interaction, but they also want to be active in giving the brand something in return.
Through the decoding of possible human emotions, brands will be able to have a greater understanding of customers, which will lead them to have an involvement that is based on deep roots and long-term loyalty.
Thank you, Dear Aldo Sir, for adding the value of the ’emotional’ impact that customers have the power to make on a brand. Once emotionally attached, the customer gives multiple returns through long-term loyalty and word-of-mouth advertising.
Warm Regards, With A Prayer For All
BM