Making a positive choice to deliver a Wow! service is a different strategy from avoiding an “Oww!” service. Unfortunately many organisations implicitly choose the latter by failing to positively choose the former.
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Wow! 2) Learning from examples
When I was setting up this site my intention was to provide a source of stories about superior service from my own and others’ perspective. So I was particularly pleased to find a book that contains just that. The only problem is that I didn’t write it.
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.
BT Yahoo Launchcast: superior service – eventually
BT’s recent handling of a technical query of mine supports my contention that it’s the small things that create superior service. As the name Open Chord implies I’m pretty passionate about music so if I’m working at my home office I’ll have music on for most of the day.
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.
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?
Five simple things that deliver superior service
Delivering superior service requires organisations to develop five essential capabilities in their service organisations. These are all straightforward: getting the basics right, making a personal connection, focusing resources, flexing the rules and going the extra ‘mile’.
In setting up this blog I initiated online discussion fora in the [now defunct] Ecademy and LinkedIn business networking sites under the question ‘When was the last time you experienced superior customer service?’
Enablers: location, location, location
If you want to lay the foundation for a great customer experience it’s a good idea to start with the look and feel of your location – both physical and virtual.
Let’s consider physical location – and I’ll indulge in another of my specious comparisons by comparing British and European motorway service stations.
Getting the basics right: a tale of two restaurants
Two restaurant visits in the space of a week reinforced my view that it’s getting the basics right that distinguishes a superior service from a purely functional one.
Back in August we were celebrating my eldest son’s birthday and arranged a couple of meals. The first was at the acclaimed South London restaurant Chez Bruce and the second was at Locale, an Italian restaurant near the London Eye. These are two very different restaurants: