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The Customer Blog
Tips to get you closer to your customers
Friday, November 24, 2006
The General Manager in the Bellman's Uniform
Ron writes:
"The manager who tells the team "Get out there and serve!" while he stays comfortably in back is not a service leader at all. The real service leader gets out on the frontline to help whenever she can, especially when times are busy, customers are angry or staff are overloaded.
At a leading hotel in London, the General Manager spends one day every three months dressed in a bellman's uniform and doing the bellman's job. Here's what happens:
1. The General Manager meets customers in a completely different way.
He asks real questions, and gets honest answers. The bellman hears a lot of unvarnished feedback that guests may be reluctant to share with the General Manager.
2. The General Manager gets a first hand taste…
of what it's like to work on the frontline. He wears the uniform, stands by the door, carries the bags, and eats in the staff cafeteria. This first hand experience means small things that might irritate staff get noticed quickly, and fixed quickly.
3. Most of all, the hundreds of other staff working in the hotel
…see their General Manager doing frontline work with dignity and respect for the customers, and their colleagues. This respect is returned with a shared dedication to providing superior service."
SOURCE: Ron Kaufman, a customer service consultant and teacher based in Singapore whom I have a lot of respect for
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
The New Golden Rule (Part 2)
But it needs updating. You need to treat customers as THEY want to be treated, not as you would like. There are universal basics about how people should treat each other, yes, of course. But beyond the basics of politeness, attentiveness, friendliness, efficiency, etc...You need to discern what the customer wants and how they want it.
Chris Daffy has come to the same conclusion (which is reassuring, as I respect Chris's view and get a bit worried if I am out on a limb and don't notice anyone else independently saying the same thing). Chris gives one or two nice examples in his latest email newsletter, which I'd recommend. Chris concludes:
"...great service is not the service you would like, it’s the service the customer would like.
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Tip #3 on hiring, orienting and training as part of developing a customer-focussed culture
"So, after hiring and orientation you have training. Here's something powerful and simple that we do:
"The best room service waiters write the training manual for the new room service waiters."
Source: My shorthand notes from a talk given by Horst Schulze at a conference I helped organize in LondonThis tip is a sample from a book series I am putting together calledOne A Day
365 Practical Ways to
Get Closer
to Your Customers
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
How to reduce employee turnover (2)
"Orientate them to WHO WE ARE so they can become part of the company, not just work for the company. This applies to everyone, even, say, dishwashers. I have only ever fired three General Managers. One of them was a man who said to me 'You want to give a dishwasher a process?' How arrogant of him!
"At every new hotel, I gave the orientation myself. I have done it at 45 hotels so far.
"From the busboy to the housekeepers to the room service chefs, I line up the new hires and say to them:
" 'Who's more important to this hotel, you or me? It's you! If I don't go to work on Monday morning, nobody knows. Nobody cares. If you don't, the food doesn't get served, the beds don't get made. You are far more important than me!'
Source: My shorthand notes from a talk given by Horst Schulze at a conference I helped organize in London
This tip is a sample from a book series I am putting together called
One A Day
365 Practical Ways to
Get Closer
to Your Customers
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
How to reduce employee turnover (1)
In some sectors that rely on temporary employees this doesn't matter. But, in most it does. So, here's a tip from Horst Schulze, founder of the Ritz-Carlton hotels, on how to reduce your employee turnover:
"We derive our employee selection profile from our best dishwasher, manager etc. We analyze what the best ones do then we hire against that profile. Annual employee turnover is typically over 100% in the American hotel industry. In the Ritz-Carlton in 1992 it was 80%. By 2000 we had reduced it to 24%. It was because of the process."
Selection was only part - but a significant part - of the process Schulze introduced and embedded. I'll return to other parts of the process in later tips.
Source: My shorthand notes from a talk given by Horst Schulze at a conference I helped organize in London
This tip is a sample from a book series I am putting together called
One A Day
365 Practical Ways to
Get Closer
to Your Customers
Friday, November 10, 2006
If Jack Nicholson were your customer
A post over at the Tom Peters site by Tom Yastrow led me to dig out my notes of what Fred said and to find the scene on You Tube. Here they are:
Jack Nicholson: I’d like a plain omelette, no potatoes - tomatoes instead - a cup of coffee, and some toast. Jack Nicholson: (Still polite. Softly spoken.) What…you mean you don’t have any tomatoes? Jack Nicholson: (Still polite) I know what it comes with. But, it’s not what I want. Jack Nicholson: (Still polite…but determined) Just a minute: I HAVE made up my mind. I’d like a plain omelette with no potatoes on the plate, a cup of coffee and a side order of wheat toast. Jack Nicholson: (Turns full attention to waitress. Still speaks quietly.) What do you mean, you don’t make side orders of toast? You make sandwiches don’t you? Jack Nicholson: (Sighs) You’ve got bread? And a toaster of some kind? Jack Nicholson: (Still calm. Talks slow) OK…I’ll make it as easy for you as I can. I’d like an omelette. Plain. And a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast. No mayonnaise. No butter. No lettuce. And a cup of coffee. Jack Nicholson: (Smiles) …and a cup of coffee… (Diner scene from the movie Five Easy Pieces.) And the point is: | ||||
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It's always the year of the customer
"Not so long ago, IBM celebrated "The Year Of The Customer." One wonders what the company celebrated in other years - "The Year of the Monkey?" perhaps?"
It's in the foreword to Stuart Crainer's very readable book The Ultimate Business Library: 50 Books That Made Management, which I am working through at the moment.
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Don't ask customers what they want
"Companies have relied rather too much on traditional customer research and consumer marketing. If you look at those that have really changed the customer experience and customers’ expectations, most of them have done it from a deep insight into unarticulated needs.
We’re talking about things that customers can’t even know yet, so no point asking them! By the time a customer starts talking about something and asking for it or complaining that you don’t do it, it’s too late."
Other 'gurus' like Tom Peters recommend seeking out 'leading edge' customers - the awkward ones who seem to be in advance of the others and are always making demands on you that you can't currently meet. Maybe they are too small and too kooky for you to pay attention to. But one or two of them are early arrivals at where your other customers will arrive soon. So, listen to them to get ahead. Hamel says something similar. I have a quote from him about Nokia that I will dig out and post to reinforce the point.
This tip is a sample from a book series I am putting together called
One A Day
365 Practical Ways to
Get Closer
to Your Customers
Monday, November 06, 2006
The REAL Ultimate Question to ask your customers
So, I'm committing the sin of almost repeating my post over there over here, if you see what I mean.
Fred's ultimate question is "Would you recommend us to a friend?" And it's a great question. He recommends scrapping all your satisfaction surveys and replacing them with this one ultimate question. Enterprise Rent-a-Car has done something similar, and to great effect.
But, it's still a question about intention. And customer intentions are slippery beasts. There is a better question.
I heard Chris Pilling, the CEO of the UK bank First Direct describe a better question that they ask customers:
"HAVE you recommended us to a friend?"
It's a measure of actuality, not intent; of what customers are doing now, not what they say they might do.
He gets a massive positive reaction to that question from First Direct customers: an astonishing 96% of customers say ‘yes’, 86% saying they have recommended the bank in the previous year. As a result, 36% of all new customers come from existing customer recommendations.
Reichheld told me off once when I interviewed him and had the temerity to ask "Is loyalty dead, Fred?". But, I didn't mind, as it was a cheeky question. He has converted thousands of marketers from a 'get customers' mentality to a 'keep customers' mentality. And you have to love him for that. Still a long way to go, of course...
This tip is a sample from a book I am putting together called
One A Day
365 Practical Ways to
Get Closer
to Your Customer
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Close your customer service department
"We use a new definition of customer service. It’s not the interface, the edge where your company meets customers. It’s the theme that runs through everything you do, from the Boardroom right on down."
- Val Gooding, CBE, CEO, BUPA. Named by Fortune magazine as one of the world’s 50 most powerful women in business
Steve Ridgway, CEO of Virgin Atlantic, told me when he was COO of that company that Virgin, too, practises what he called "whole body customer Service". It's the same underlying principle as runs through how BUPA, Amazon and one or two other organizations do business.
In a sense, EVERYTHING, from your business model to the agenda of your board meetings to your staff motivation programmes (if, god forbid, you have them) is about customer service.
Tom Peters is fond of saying in his seminars "Close your customer service department! Shut it down! Lock the doors!" He's using shock tactics to make the same point: Customer service departments are either complaint departments or call centres used to queue customers.
They are not sufficient. Customer service is much bigger than that. Yet the vast majority of organizations don't get it.
This tip is a sample from a book I am putting together called
Take One A Day
365 Ways to
Get Closer
to Your Customer
Thursday, November 02, 2006
Abolish as many layers of approval as possible
“I noticed a while back that the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong had won, for the second time running, a highly prestigious customer service award. The General Manager there was a friend of mine. So I called him up, congratulated him and asked him what his secret is.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it’s because we give our frontline people the authority to say ‘yes’ to customers. But we don’t give them the authority to say ‘no’. If they feel they need to say ‘no’ to a customer request, they have to seek permission from their manager first.”
If you want to make a real difference to customers, look at your approvals and permissions process. The more decisions have to be referred for approval, the more in danger your organisation is because it’s not going to be fast enough to be competitive.
Reminds me of something I heard Tom Peters say and jotted down at the time:
TOM PETERS' DEFINITION OF A MIDDLE MANAGER
"The definition of a middle manager is a human being whose power is defined by their ability not to sign things. No scrap of paper should sit on anyone’s desk today waiting for their perusal. That’s a sign of an organisation facing certain death."
That's not fair to middle managers, by the way. They are often the people who keep an organization going in the face of unrealistic demands from above and desperate requests from the frontline below for resources or changes of process to allow them to do their job better (requests which the middle manager is not empowered to give permission for). I'll return to that issue - the critical role of middle and line managers - later in this blog.
This tip is a sample from a book I am putting together called
Take One A Day
365 Ways to
Get Closer
to Your Customer
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