"Sometimes when I think of the tremendous consequences that come from little things, I think...there are no little things." - Bruce Barton.

He's right. When most organizations look similar to customers, it's the small things that make you stand out in their eyes.

Here's an example...

Virgin Atlantic has a number of legendary employees who epitomize Virgin Flair (the personality they look for in employees and then allow them to express). One was Sue Rawlings, an in-flight attendant. People at Virgin still talk about her years after she left the organization.

Just before serving the ice-cream that Virgin offers to passengers when they are watching the in-flight movie, Sue would duck into the galley, smear ice cream all around her mouth, then emerge and start serving.

As she moved down the cabin, she would pronounce very loudly, so people would look up as she passed, "I never touch this stuff myself as I'm watching my weight, but people tell me it's delicious. Enjoy!"

The effect was a wave of laughter that moved down the cabin with her, as passengers looked up from plugging in their headphones or fiddling with the volume control in preparation for the movie, and saw the ice-cream smeared around her face.

Is this a big thing? Of course not. Is it expensive to do? Of course not. Is it a memorable customer experience that those passengers talked about to family, friends and everyone else they met for ages afterwards? Of course it is.

Virgin pioneered ice-creams with in-flight movies. And Sue Rawlings added further to the experience for passengers. Compared with the cost of a Boeing 747, the cost of serving ice-cream is virtually nothing. Yet it is the small thing - the small extra - that differentiates here because all the other airlines fly Boeing 747s, too.

As Seth Godin puts it in his new book title, Small is the New Big. You don't have to spend a lot to stand out from the competition in your customers' eyes and provide them with a memorable customer experience that makes them want to come back for more.

You just need some imagination and personality.

Source: The Sue Rawlings story was told to me by Lyell Strambi, Executive Director at Virgin Atlantic, and I used it in my book Seven Secrets of Inspired Leaders.

Labels: customer experience, Virgin

What can Prince (or the artist formerly known as...) teach us about customers?

Came across this wonderful phrase that liberates the mind, as the most powerful pieces of language do, from the concrete boots of normal thinking and lets it leap free with a single bound...

"The people formerly known as the audience" - Bruce Lewin

Some pieces of language just define what is coming, what is emerging, half-formed from beneath us (the future isn't ahead, it's here already and emerging from the edges of the present: we're just too busy looking at the middle instead of the edge), and tease it into shape. Bruce's phrase does just that.

It emerges out of a discussion of the book The Long Tail, which is useful for helping us redefine what profitable customers are or will be.

It's on an old Harvard discussion board from last year run by the ever-readable Jim Heskett. I'll dig out the links and add them here in a bit.

If you know Lewin's phrase already and I'm behindhand here, I usually am, but I get there in the end, so consider this a reminder of something important rather than a new insight.

If you haven't heard it before and think "Why is this significant? What are you on about?" then I wish I could explain better in a short post just why this is so important.

Participation. Co-creation. Web 2.0. Life 2.0. 15 minutes of fame. Fragmenting markets. Post-mass consumption. Post-supplier/consumer relationships. A post-consumer age (-ish). Economics of abundance vs economics of scarcity...It's all about all of that and more.

The audience is on the stage. The users run the system. You have to re-define customers accordingly.

Labels: co-creation, The Long Tail

NEW CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT SELF-DEVELOPMENT SYSTEM: I have just made this new book available as a 'print on demand' book. You order it online, it's printed and sent to you. Take a look if you are interested:
Take One A Day For Customers...January

It's a tip-a-day work book. Should take your people five minutes a day to fill in. The tips stimulate self-led continuous improvement for organizations that want their frontline people to take the initiative and improve customer service daily.

If you run a call centre or customer service department or have a network of branches containing frontline people I've priced this continuous improvement development system cheaply enough for you to dip into your training budget to buy everyone a copy as their personal daily action development programme - five minutes a day to stimulate regular self-directed collaborative improvements.