Phil's Customer Service blog

I interviewed Val Gooding, CEO of the healthcare company BUPA, a while ago. She pointed out that BUPA no longer uses the definition of ‘customer service’ that 99% of organizations use. She’s right and the 99% are wrong. Here’s what she said:

“We use a new definition of customer service. It’s not the interface, the edge where your company meets customers. It’s the theme that runs through everything you do, from the Boardroom right on down.”

– Val Gooding, CBE, CEO, BUPA. Named by Fortune magazine as one of the world’s 50 most powerful women in business

Steve Ridgway, CEO of Virgin Atlantic, told me when he was COO of that company that Virgin, too, practises what he called “whole body customer Service”. It’s the same underlying principle as runs through how BUPA, Amazon and one or two other organizations do business.

In a sense, EVERYTHING, from your business model to the agenda of your board meetings to your staff motivation programmes (if, god forbid, you have them) is about customer service.

Tom Peters is fond of saying in his seminars “Close your customer service department! Shut it down! Lock the doors!” He’s using shock tactics to make the same point: Customer service departments are either complaint departments or call centres used to queue customers.

They are not sufficient. Customer service is much bigger than that. Yet the vast majority of organizations don’t get it.

This tip is a sample from a book I am putting together called
Take One A Day
365 Ways to
Get Closer
to Your Customer

I heard Jan Carlzon, the turnaround CEO of SAS Airlines and author of the classic book for creating a customer-centred turnaround, Moments of Truth, tell this story:

“I noticed a while back that the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong had won, for the second time running, a highly prestigious customer service award. The General Manager there was a friend of mine. So I called him up, congratulated him and asked him what his secret is.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it’s because we give our frontline people the authority to say ‘yes’ to customers. But we don’t give them the authority to say ‘no’. If they feel they need to say ‘no’ to a customer request, they have to seek permission from their manager first.”

If you want to make a real difference to customers, look at your approvals and permissions process. The more decisions have to be referred for approval, the more in danger your organisation is because it’s not going to be fast enough to be competitive.

Reminds me of something I heard Tom Peters say and jotted down at the time:

TOM PETERS’ DEFINITION OF A MIDDLE MANAGER

“The definition of a middle manager is a human being whose power is defined by their ability not to sign things. No scrap of paper should sit on anyone’s desk today waiting for their perusal. That’s a sign of an organisation facing certain death.”

That’s not fair to middle managers, by the way. They are often the people who keep an organization going in the face of unrealistic demands from above and desperate requests from the frontline below for resources or changes of process to allow them to do their job better (requests which the middle manager is not empowered to give permission for). I’ll return to that issue – the critical role of middle and line managers – later in this blog.

This tip is a sample from a book I am putting together called
Take One A Day
365 Ways to
Get Closer
to Your Customer

‘…even those you dislike. Encourage people to ignore and defy their superiors and peers. You won’t get change otherwise.’

– Stanford Prof. Robert Sutton, author of The Knowing-Doing Gap

This tip is a sample from a book I am putting together called
Take One A Day
365 Ways to
Get Closer
to Your Customer

“Customer satisfaction sucks. Bob Nardelli, who was head of GE Power Systems and is now CEO of Home Depot, says you need to shift your thinking from ‘customer satisfaction’ to ‘customer profitability’. The question is, he says ‘Are we contributing to the customer’s bottom line?’ That’s your agenda: not ‘Is the customer satisfied?’ but ‘How have we contributed to their profitability?’ ” Or, if you deal direct with consumers, how have you contributed to helping them live their life the way they want to live it?

– Tom Peters, described as ‘the Ur-guru (guru of gurus) of management’ by Fortune Magazine, speaking at a one-day seminar to mark the twentieth anniversary of his and Bob Waterman’s book In Search of Excellence.

This tip is a sample from a book I am putting together called
Take One A Day
365 Ways to
Get Closer
to Your Customer

‘To create frontline heroes you have to concentrate on developing what we call The Six Basic Skills of Heroes, which are: empathy, social skills, motivation, self-regulation, self-awareness and emotional skills.’

– I heard this from Gerry Farrelly, Director of Training & Creatology, Farrelly Facilities & Engineering. Gerry combines ancient Chinese philosophy (the Tao Te Ching) with the principles in the best-selling book Funky Business and other inspiring sources to create possibly the world’s funkiest and most customer-focussed facilities management and engineering company. They are based in the UK’s Midlands.

This tip is a sample from a book I am putting together called
Take One A Day
365 Ways to
Get Closer
to Your Customer

‘It’s not the age of the Internet. It’s the age of customer control.’

– Tom Peters, speaking at a seminar I chaired* a while ago, quoting American Express’s Anne Busquet.

(Note: I’ve heard Richard Branson and Patricia Seybold come out with exactly the same words. Don’t know which of them said it first, but it’s obviously TRUE).

Through the late 1990s there was a shift in power that coincided with the Internet reaching a tipping point and breaking out to become a mass medium. The widespread assumption at the time was that the Net was what was causing the disruption of the balance between suppliers and customers. It wasn’t. It was just a symptom and accelerator of a shift of power to customers that was already going on.

*All that means is I introduced him to the audience and he did the rest.

Too much choice will actually stop a lot of people from buying. See Barry Schwarz’s book The Paradox of Choice.

And here’s a Borat clip spotted on Lee McEwan’s Serendipity Book to prove it. Click on the big ‘play’ button in the middle then the small one bottom left:

1. Pay fantastic attention to detail
2. Everything you do walks the talk
3. EveryONE walks the talk
4. Customers are best heard through many ears
5. The competition is anyone the customer compares you with
6. Reward, Recognize and Celebrate
7. Everyone makes a difference or ‘Xvxryonx makxs a diffxrxncx’ (just one defective typewriter key makes a massive difference)

SOURCE: From a friend of mine who runs the business banking division of one of the major banks. He stole the Disney service principles and his people agreed to adopt them as their own. How do yours compare? What do you mean you haven’t got any? Rip these off, adapt them if necessary and ask your service people if they will adopt them as their own. If they don’t fit, ask your people to look at them and come up with their own suggestions then adopt the ones that get the most votes. People buy into it if they made it.

This tip is a sample from a book I am putting together called
Take One A Day
365 Ways to
Get Closer
to Your Customer

The NEW Golden Rule: “We’re always told to treat customers as we would want to be treated. That’s not right. Treat customers as THEY want to be treated. Find out. Don’t assume. The golden rule isn’t ‘Do as you would be done by.’ It’s ‘Do unto others as they would like to be done unto’. ”

SOURCE: I heard this from Ken Pasternak, President, Inter Associates Ltd

This tip is a sample from a book I am putting together called
Take One A Day
365 Ways to
Get Closer
to Your Customer

Loyalty is not about customers being loyal to you. It’s about you being loyal to your customers. You earn loyalty by giving it. One way you do that is noticing how they wish to interact with you in the real world and trying to duplicate that, where appropriate, in the virtual world.

For example: Most of our searching is visual in the real world of supermarket shopping. Our memory relies on colours, shapes and positions to navigate through a vast range of choices. This is hard on the Web. Tesco, the world’s largest home delivery grocer (now helping Safeway in the US get its web/home delivery act together), found that customers were giving up halfway through filling up their on-line basket using an A-Z product finder. The process was much faster than in the store itself. But, it didn’t feel fast: it felt tedious.

So, Tesco offered first-time web visitors a ‘favourite list’ drawn from ClubCard data, which came from the customer’s off-line behaviour – how they shop in real-world stores. Instead of the customer’s favourite products lying hidden in an alphabetical list, there they were at the top, ready to buy. Click through rates soared.

And the point is…the on-line and off-line worlds are not two different places. Customer behaviour in one is a guide to customer behaviour in the other.

Source: I learnt this from Clive Humby, whose company Dunnhumby, created Tesco’s Club Card, possibly the only loyalty card I’ve come across that deserves the name ‘loyalty card’.

This tip is a sample from a book I am putting together called

Take One A Day
365 Ways to
Get Closer
to Your Customer