Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization (12 page)

Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

customer make sophisticated service or purchasing decisions by analyzing the preferences of past customers who have behaved in the same ways as the current one, as well as taking into account how the customer himself has behaved in earlier interactions on the site.

The Netflix online video rental site is an example of an unusually sophisticated, algorithm-based procedure. Netflix’s algorithms are based on millions of previous customer actions. The algorithms allow Netflix to accurately predict which movies will appeal to a particular customer as soon as that user begins selecting and rating movies. The software can even make rather impressive educated guesses
before
a customer makes a first selection by weighing such variables as the customer’s gender, zip code, and initial ‘‘search style’’ on the website.

Humans appear to be wired to respond appreciatively to anticipatory service. That’s why Netflix’s ability to figure out a customer’s preferences feels so impressive. Indeed, regular customers describe a sense of having a ‘‘relationship’’ with the Netflix website; it feels to them as though the site ‘‘knows’’ them personally. That’s how Netflix creates intense customer loyalty—it’s one of the best-loved customer service sites on the Internet—despite providing customers with not even a single moment of direct human interaction in the course of a typical encounter.

But before you rush to become the Netflix of your industry, remember our discussion in Chapter Five of how easy it is to cross a line from ‘‘ultra-functionality’’ to ‘‘creepiness’’ online. Given the creepiness factor, should online retailers make personalized purchase suggestions based on the behaviors already traced to a customer’s IP address, or should they wait until the customer has voluntarily logged in? It’s tempting to push the envelope, isn’t it? After all, if you logged and analyzed
all
of a customer’s behaviors on your website, you could probably make your website more relevant for them.

But consider the downside: Do your customers
want
to have their behavior tracked even before they log into your site? And do you want to risk potential side effects, such as inadvertently offering children sug-

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gestions for lacy, barely-there things based on some browsing their parents did in anticipation of Valentine’s Day?

Our opinion is that a committed service provider needs to make the decision to actually serve its customers’ interests—not just
seem
to serve them. So modulate your use of online anticipatory technology.

Steer your company practices away from that creepiness line.

Using Tools to Gather Information About Your

Customers’ Experience

There are many tools available to help you build the viewpoint of your customers into each of your products and services. Consider making use of one or more of the following: mini-customer surveys (‘‘quizzes’’), in-depth surveys, and possibly secret shopper services to gather information about the typical customer experience.

In-House ‘‘Quizzes.’’
An on-site, three-to-seven-question mini-survey, or ‘‘quiz,’’ tends to yield a very high participation rate. This rate is typically much higher than for a survey sent after customers have returned home and much higher than a full-length survey, whether offered onsite or later.

In-Depth Surveys.
In-depth surveys can be useful to any company, no matter how small. If your company is large enough to generate survey data of some magnitude, these surveys should be administered and analyzed scientifically. This may be best done in collaboration with a specialized outside service. However you decide to handle them, be sure to remain involved in their design and administration, because there’s no point in a survey that gives you plenty of answers—but to the wrong questions! Consider the following points:

? A survey should reflect your most important questions about customer likes, dislikes, and needs. A good survey question is clearly worded and directly explains what you are trying to find out.

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Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

? A survey should include free-form text fields to identify novel responses that you may not have even considered and to offer your customers an opportunity to express themselves.

? Questions and introductory material on a survey should be designed to give you meaningful responses. Asking a customer to be a mathematician (‘‘Estimate your chances of returning to our store this month in terms of percentage of 100 . . .’’) will create confusion and frustration. Asking your customer several individual questions and only
then
getting around to asking for an overall rating is the exact wrong order, and invalidates the overall rating. Ask for the overall rating
first
, since it’s the single most important rating, reflecting a gut reaction.

Concluding your survey with language such as ‘‘Thank you so much for entrusting us with your business!’’ helps you to end up with customers who are on your side, but don’t use this flowery language as an intro—it’ll skew your rating. Don’t use rating categories like ‘‘excel-lent’’; ‘‘excellence’’ is essentially undefinable, so look for something that is based on your customer’s own experience. ‘‘Exceeded expectations’’

is okay as the wording for your top rating category, or consider calling your top rating something emotive like ‘‘Loved it!’’

? Two questions that are especially useful proxies for loyalty are

‘‘intent to return’’ and ‘‘willingness to recommend’’ your business. Top scores in these two areas are strong indicators of a loyal customer.

? As you might suspect from where you’ve been with us so far, in our experience the number of so-called ‘‘top box’’ scores (the highest raters, especially highest raters on the key ‘‘intent to return’’ and ‘‘willingness to recommend’’ questions) you receive on your surveys is more important to your brand than the average or overall satisfaction score you get by tabulating all your surveys. In other words, customers who rate you in the absolute top category are the ones who are adding the strategic value to your business.
These
are your loyalists. Put another way, with a properly designed survey, you should be happier to receive a sizeable chunk of tens (if that’s your top score) with a smattering of fours than to receive solid sevens across the board. The sevens are not Building Anticipation Into Your Products and Services

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loyalists and are not going to sing the praises of your brand from the rooftops. Furthermore, with the mad skills you’re learning from this book, you’re not going to let that smattering of fours scare you: you’re going to reach out to them pronto and work on winning them over and getting them up to a ten before they fill out another survey.

Six Survey Blunders: How to Alienate Customers Fast

1. Neglecting to respond
personally
and
promptly
after receiving negative feedback. When you receive negative survey comments, respond quickly by telephone (this is best in most cases) or email; this is a situation where a handwritten note takes too long to arrive and can leave a customer stewing in the interim. Don’t set a batch of surveys aside for later en masse response without scanning them first for negative responses that require immediate replies.

2. Failing to thank—again,
personally
—anyone who offers you personal praise on a survey. A handwritten note is wonderful in this case.

3. Providing a reward for a completed survey that doesn’t fit with your company’s image or a sweepstakes chance so unrealistically small as to be meaningless. (Rather than offering either of these, it would be better to simply say, ‘ We really want to improve—please take this survey to help us out if you’d be so kind.’’)

4. Asking customers to be on an ‘‘advisory council’’ or hold a similar honorary position . . . and then only contacting them with obvious come-ons.

5. Creating a survey that is too much work to fill out, with no opportunity to answer a short form or skip any portions of the long survey. (Do you really only want to know the preferences of customers who took the time to answer a thirty-question survey without leaving a single answer blank?)

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Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

6. Asking intrusive demographic questions (such as income or gender) and not making the questions optional. Do not assume that respondents will trust your privacy practices.

Secret Shoppers.
Professional ‘‘secret shoppers’’ will anonymously patronize your business and describe the experience to you in detail. For some businesses, this can be invaluable. The fact that a critical review comes from a complete outsider is very helpful to some organizations.

Members of an organization respond differently to criticism from somebody outside of their social and power hierarchies—someone who pre-sumably has no dog in the fight. Some employees find it easier to accept truths about their service shortcomings, and to get right to work making important changes, when the news comes from a secret shopper service.

On the other hand, as with outside survey services, a secret shopping firm needs to know what you want it to test for. What’s important to your business may be very specific and contextually subtle. So the generic checklist used as a default by an outside service is unlikely to be useful. Instead, you will need to work with them to ensure that they are after what
you
are after.

Steering a Company Is Easier with a (3-D) Dashboard

You could, in theory, drive a car without a dashboard. But sooner or later you’d be caught speeding, or run out of gas, or burn up the engine—all hazards that indicators on a dashboard would have signaled far in advance. A company also needs a dashboard: a complement of highly visible meters and early warning signs that protect against foreseeable problems.

The kind of dashboard we recommend includes more than

traditional ‘‘hard’’ measurements. Steering your company while only looking at such measurements is kind of like running a business by only looking at your checkbook (
‘‘Hey, I’m not over-

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drawn right now, so everything must be fine.’’
); it’s a unidimensional way to manage a business. The simplicity of the dashboard concept can be used instead to bring the richness of what’s important to the forefront. So, while your dashboard will include the so-called ‘‘hard’’ indicators of corporate health like throughput, revenue, and expenditures, at least as important will be indicators such as employee engagement, problem resolution success, and customer loyalty. (Are you losing or gaining in the number of customers willing to refer your business and who are planning to use your business again? Your dashboard should provide these answers at a glance.) These ‘‘softer’’ indicators can be derived from your preferred tracking tools—your customer ‘‘quizzes,’’ surveys, secret shopper reports, and employee-filed reports, as well as data gathered on employee engagement by your managers and HR leaders.

Process-Based Solutions Become People Solutions

When you are able to anticipate a customer’s wishes, it implies that you are paying close, caring attention, the kind of attention that is a universal, if often unexpressed, desire. In many industries, what you’re primar-ily selling is this pleasure of attention: rich, personal attention. Ironically, the thing that’s most expensive to provide customers—a defect-free product—just gets you in the door. Only human attention is going to differentiate you and win your customer’s loyalty.

You don’t need to have a luxury brand or serve a specialized clientele to build loyalty through anticipatory service—although the details of how you should attend to the wishes of customers will vary with the expectations and cultural norms of your customers themselves. For example, it is expected and necessary for staff at a Disney park to provide
briskly paced
attentiveness. Contrast that with the slow, luxurious attentiveness of a high-end spa. In our experience, all businesses can benefit from building an anticipatory service culture—from golf courses to Google—and even to a gas station.

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Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

Think of a fellow who buys his gas at the local service station—let’s call it DinoFuels—many mornings. He’s a
habitual
customer: It’s convenient for him to stop there on the way to work. But if he’s coming
from
the office, he’s not going to go to all of the trouble of making a half-mile U-turn in order to patronize that particular service station. If it’s not perfectly convenient, he’ll fill up somewhere else.

Is there anything that DinoFuel’s friendly, personable attendant could do to turn this habitual customer into a loyal one? Put differently: What costs almost nothing, yet would make this hurried gentleman go half a mile out of his way in order to shop there in the future for gas, and for higher-margin items like milk, eggs, snacks—even a tune-up?

We encourage our clients to role-play this scenario, to figure out what procedures DinoFuels could institute to turn
them
into loyal customers. Let’s let Leonardo lead by example here by playing the role of the customer:

The attendant should be keeping an eye out for customers who are becoming habitual customers: customers who are

frequent, but not quite loyal. If he’s doing that, he’ll be aware of my repeat business. Then he could note the name on

those customers’ credit cards—since nearly everyone pays for gas with credit cards these days—and at the very least use my name when thanking me. If he’s up to the task, he might take it much further. Something like:

‘‘Oh, that’s an interesting name. How do you pronounce it?’’

‘‘Ing-hill-AIR-ee,’’ I would say.

‘‘That’s a nice name. Where are you from?’’

‘‘I was born in Italy.’’

‘‘Italy, wow! Italy looks so lovely in the pictures I’ve seen.

Where in Italy were you born?’’