Phil's Customer Service blog

When trading conditions get tough, you have to take even more care of the customers. If that message isn’t clear from leaders at all levels in the organization, watch out for this kind of customer service as a result (the clip is about three and a half minutes):

Not me. But Shaun Smith, who writes a nice piece on this in the GCCRM July e-newsletter, which you can read here:

“There are some brands that I hate: Brands like Ryan Air, IKEA and Capital One. Yet I admire them for their singularity of purpose, clarity of vision and superior returns.I hate Ryan Air because it …full story

Though I sympathise with the Bill Hicks’ ‘all marketers should die’ rant that Johnnie Moore re-discovered on You Tube lately, I’d exclude the creators of this, just because it’s so creatively cheeky:

It’s a flyer for a pizza company, disguised as a pizza delivery boy that you see through your front door spy hole. Here’s how they do it:

Spotted on the Firewire blog.

…low expectations.

When you have no choice and you are disappointed, the world is responsible.

When you have 100s of choices and you are still not happy with the ones you make, you blame yourself.

The more options we have, the more we regret what we didn’t choose. This opportunity cost becomes a lingering regret that subtracts from the satisfaction of the choice.

That’s a distillation of the core of Barry Schwartz’s excellent book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, which Schwartz says he wrote after counting 175 different salad dressings and 75 iced teas on his local supermarket shelves and thinking, “This is crazy”.

If you have the time, here’s a 20 minute talk Barry Schwartz gave at Ted on how the abundance of choice makes us (consumers) unhappy. Think about it if part of your customer strategy is the assumption that offering more choice makes customers happier.

I’m re-reading Jan Carlzon’s book Moments of Truth. He’s the CEO who turned around the Scandinavian airline SAS.

He starts the book with these four statements. They are a mini manifesto for getting people engaged and energized throughout the organization. The four rules apply particularly to the steps you need to take to free up your front line people to serve customers more effectively.

1. Everyone needs to know and feel that he or she is needed

2. Everyone wants to be treated as an individual

3. Giving someone the freedom to take responsibility releases resources that would otherwise remain concealed

4. An individual without information cannot take responsibility. An individual who is given information cannot help but take responsibility.

Source: Taken from the opening of Jan Carlzon’s book Moments of Truth.

I was invited to breakfast a few weeks ago at the home of Charles Handy, the business guru and author. So I didn’t look too ill-informed or stupid, I read his latest book ‘Myself and Other More Important Matters’ before going for breakfast.

In the book, Handy reminds us that if our direct reports, co-workers, front line colleagues etc., do not feel valued or do not feel that they matter, they can easily take it out on the people they do have some power over – your customers.

Here’s what he wrote:

“In one recent survey, seventy-two percent of workers said that they were dissatisfied with their organization. Nineteen percent said that they actively wanted to sabotage it.

“…Frustrated workers can be tempted to activate the negative power that even the most humble possess. The woman in the call center who puts the phone down on me, the waiter who ignores me, the airline employee who closes the gate just as they see me rushing up – they may be exercising their negative power because it was the only way they had of demonstrating that they mattered.”

Circulating stories about ‘how we do things around here’ – the behaviours that mark your organization out as distinctive – models those behaviours so people know what is expected of them. The great thing about leading through stories is that they can become viral; other employees and customers take up the story and circulate it.

Here’s an example, told to me by Lyell Strambi, Executive Director of Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic airline.

Virgin has a number of legendary employees, who epitomize Virgin Flair. If you are a manager at Virgin and have to define Virgin Flair to a new recruit, you might have a hard time defining it. But, by telling real stories describing it in action, you get the message across.

One employee who epitomized Virgin Flair in action, said Strambi, was an in-flight attendant called Sue Rawlings, with a larger than life personality. Just before serving the ice cream that Virgin offers to passengers while they are watching the in-flight movie, this particular attendant would duck into the galley, smear ice cream all around her mouth, then emerge and start serving.

As she moved down the cabin she would pronounce very loudly, so that people would look up at her, ‘I never touch this stuff myself; I’m watching my weight, but people tell me it’s delicious. Enjoy!’ The effect was a wave of laughter that moved down the plane with her, as passengers looked up from plugging in their headphones or adjusting the volume control.

What stories do you have illustrating ‘the way we do things around here’? Are they as distinctive as this one? If not, then your customer experience probably isn’t that distinctive either.

I’ve become addicted to Slideshare. I like this (the Slideshare, below), though I think the title doesn’t do it justice (‘Customer Service is the new Marketing’).

I particularly like ‘The Secrets of The Concierge’, which you can find on Slide 21. They are:

1. Put conversations at the centre of your business
2. Reduce your sphere of control to increase sphere of influence
3. Smash the silos

3. is now a cliche (though true). And the Cluetrain Manifesto taught us 1. ten years ago. I find 2. the most potent message at the moment. Anyway, here’s the slideshare:

[slideshare id=372622&doc=csitnm-1-1209150783625237-8]