Phil's Customer Service blog

My friend Marion returns from a trip to the States full of interesting observations – She has an eye for spotting the new and interesting.

On the customer front, she spotted an article about “Toronto’s trendiest changing room”, which is in a yoga-wear shop. A sale’s assistant writes the shopper’s name on a wipe-board on their changing room – “my own personalised compartment”, wrote the journalist.

Clever and simple. What do you do to make your space the customer’s space?

At St. Lukes, the radical advertising agency in London, major clients have their own themed room, which they can work from as if it’s their own office, whenever they are in the area. So, meetings with executives from Clarks, the shoemakers, take place in the Clarks room. In typical St. Luke’s style, the Clarks room is themed around shoes – even the coffee table wears shoes; the legs on the table have feet on the end, which sport Clarks footwear.

How at home do St. Luke’s clients feel, do you think? ‘Put yourself in your customers’ shoes?’ At St. Luke’s they even put their furniture in their customers’ shoes.

In their book Made To Stick, brothers Chip and Dan Heath make the case for six factors (in combination) making the difference between what’s memorable and what isn’t.

Their six factors are:

1. Simplicity (any idea over one is too many)

2. Unexpectedness (a surprise grabs our attention)

3. Concreteness (the more dimensions of details the more hooks our minds use to create a memory)

4. Credibility (even untrue stories don’t stick unless there’s a hint of truth, such as beware of what’s too good to be true in the urban legend that opens the book)

5. Incite Emotions in Listeners (we remember emotional experiences much more than anything else; we care more about individuals than groups; and we care about things that reflect our identities)

6. Combine Messages in Stories (information is more memorable and meaningful in a story form

SOURCE: The book Made To Stick, and Donald Mitchell’s Amazon review of the book

Very nice slideshow from Andy Hanselman on Slideshare. Click the play button, below, to advance the slides:

Or, “Everything OK over here?”

…and we always say “Fine, thanks,” even though the potatoes were lumpy and the gravy cold.

Ritual exchanges do not elicit real information, and too many of the exchanges between people who serve and customers now fall into the category of ritual exchanges.

So, ask real questions instead of getting people to go through the motions. As Ken Blanchard puts it:

“Ask them questions they can answer. If you are a restaurant manager, this doesn’t mean “How was your meal?” as the answer will always be ‘Fine’. It means ask them ‘What is one thing we could have done differently that you’d expect us to do better?’ Then look for commonality in the answers.”

Brand Autopsy’s John Moore reminds us that this is the real organization chart. No matter what your over-complicated existing one claims to be, it’s not reality. This is. John says this is Starbucks’ organization chart, though they have one of the complicated ones, too. Sounds like trying to have your latte and drink it.

From Shaping Tomorrow, I learn this new word, which I love: Crowdsourcing. Inspired by the book The Wisdom of Crowds, of course. Here’s what it means, according to the Shaping Tomorrow crew:

“We all know something
We all have unique ideas. We can all contribute to our futures. And, though as individuals we might be blind to tomorrow, collectively we can see much of what is coming.

Stakeholder views
We have learned from direct experience that companies miss the most obvious source of information on how the future will be different; their stakeholders. An organisation’s people, its suppliers and customers often have deep insights into many aspects of the future that management ignores. Tapping this source is easy and fast using tightly framed questions about how the future will be different and what you should be doing about it.”

“For a generation of customers used to doing their buying research by search engine, a company’s brand is not what the company says it is, but what Google says it is. The new taskmasters are us. Word of mouth is now a public conversation, carried on in blog comments and customer reviews, exhaustively collated and measured. The ants have megaphones.”

Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief, Wired, from his book The Long Tail: Why the future of business is selling less of more. If you are one of the many organizations that assumes that 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers, you really need to look closely at the new phenomenon of the ‘long tail’ to see ifyou need to revise the figures.