Wow! 1) Getting the basics right

This week’s mini-series deals with the idea of the Wow! experience – literally an experience that makes you go ‘Wow! That was great!’ Later in the week we’ll look at the Wow! Awards which contain the most comprehensive examples, in the UK at least. First,  I wanted to share my own recent Wow! that shows that sometimes it’s the little things – the basics, you might say – that make a customer experience superior.

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Improve service: get ideas from anywhere?

Plenty of ideas in this crowd?

Asking your customers for suggestions seems like a great way to improve your services or products. Two recent items I came across suggest it’s not something you should do without clearly thinking through what you are trying to achieve.

Report 103 is an excellent newsletter from Jeffrey Baumgartner on applied creativity and ideas in business and this week’s edition follows on nicely from my previous post about feedback. If you buy the idea that customer feedback is a rich source of service improvement ideas then proactively soliciting ideas from your customers (and non-customers) seems like an even better idea.

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Feedback: your view is important, but not very

To round off last week’s series on feedback here’s a story from my recent experience with the BBC. Prompted by a discussion on Ecademy about the new series of Dragon’s Den I realised I had been really annoyed by the trailer.

I’m a fan of most business programmes, particularly the ones we can watch as a family – my 11-year old son has been addicted to both Dragon’s Den and The Apprentice – but I get more than a bit irritated when the “showbiz” aspects of the programmes overshadow the business content.

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Be a great customer: give the gift of feedback

I can’t hear the expression ‘the gift of feedback’ without hearing a slightly sarcastic tone of voice probably because I have heard it used in that fashion to refer to feedback that’s un-diplomatic, too blunt or just plain rude. However, for any organisation committed to superior customer service, encouraging and dealing effectively with feedback is one of the most powerful things to drive improvement. I’m continuing to provide feedback to organisations that I deal with and will share the best examples on this blog. Here’s one that illustrates some good practice.

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