Recently I spent an evening at the theatre seeing Yazmina Reza’s new play God of Carnage. It’s got an excellent cast (perhaps the only time you can see DI Rebus, Voldemort and Debbie Archer in the same bill) and only detains you for about 95 minutes. Its central, rather bleak premise sparked thoughts about the conditions under which superior service flourishes.
Ideas
Making Change Happen: the definitive book on change?
It’s not often that you read a management book and think ‘everyone should have a copy of this’ but Jane Northcote – management consultant and occasional contributor to this blog – has written a book that everyone involved in change should read. Making Change Happen is quite simply
Business innovation 4) Revive, re-form, cash in!
I’ve been slightly surprised by the amount of coverage generated by the one-off reunion of Led Zeppelin earlier this week. Although I wasn’t one of the one million people who tried to get tickets for their performance at the O2 I do remember them from the 1970s
Improve service: get ideas from anywhere?
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.
Getting a grip on emotions: 3) Putting customers second
Putting customers second is possibly a counter-intuitive response to superior customer service but it’s at the heart of creating an emotional connection. The point is not to disregard customers in favour of e.g. shareholder value, profit or some other measure but to put the needs of employees before those of customers.
Getting a grip on emotions: 2) Who cares what you think?
Customer surveys are a brilliant idea, no? No, not always. When you try to measure superior service and the emotional connection a customer has with you or your product, it can be difficult to get data that really helps pinpoint where and how to improve. In this article I will highlight some pitfalls in satisfaction surveys and measures and suggest some simpler approaches to measurement that will help drive the right kind of change.
Getting a grip on emotions: 1) Customer loyalty
This week I will be putting up three posts on the emotional element of superior service. I will be covering:
1) How creating an emotional connection can build customer loyalty
2) Where customer surveys can let you down
3) Why, paradoxically, customers don’t always come first
First, let’s look at how a positive emotional connection can build loyalty better than loyalty schemes.
Harvard Business School suggests how to be a customer
Harvard Business School professor John Quelch writes in the HBS Online discussion forum this week on How To Be a Customer. It reinforces the point made in the earlier post on this blog about the customer’s role in getting superior service. To summarise, Quelch suggests five approaches:
Simplicity, trust and black napkins
At the risk of turning this blog into a restaurant column, John Maeda’s excellent simplicity blog features an interesting item on his visit to a restaurant where his white table napkin was removed and replaced with a black one. Maeda treats this as an example of trust – by demonstrating an attention to detail.
The customer’s role in superior service
The discussions on superior service examples yielded a detailed response from management consultant Jane Northcote (www.janenorthcote.com) whose take on superior service recognises that it’s a two-way transaction. Jane writes:
Customer service is traditionally regarded as an attribute of a company: Waitrose provides ‘good’ customer service, an electronics discount store provides ‘bad’ customer service. Equally, however, it is true that customer service is an attribute of the customer. Some people experience good customer service, and others bad, even from the same organisation. Why is this?