Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization (10 page)

I had some work to do while out of town, so I headed to

Starbucks to try their new free WiFi.

First step: I had to get a Starbucks card in order to sign up for free Internet. Okay, I guess. I purchased the card and filled in all of my personal information via my laptop. But then I got a message from AT&T/Starbucks Internet telling me to check my email account for an access verification code so I could complete the login process and begin using my new

Internet account.

Of course, I didn’t have email access. That’s why I

bought the card and went through the sign-up process in the 59

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Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

first place. So in effect this message was telling me to drive home, check my email, click a link to get an access code, and then drive back to Starbucks.

We find a lot to admire in Howard Schultz. (One example: He’s made it his personal mission to provide health-care benefits even to part-time workers.) But in this particular case, his company overlooked the following straightforward principle:
A business needs to think like a
customer.
It needs to put in place processes that will mercilessly search and destroy anything that might inconvenience or disgruntle a customer. It must systematically incorporate procedures and build in product features that improve the customer’s experience.

Let’s look at how you go about this.

Get Your Company to Think Like a Customer

As a company, how do you learn what your customers are likely to appreciate—even before they arrive? You can start by making it clear throughout your company that it’s your
goal
to learn. Then you can work with your employees to think systematically about particular groups of customers and what they are likely to want or need.

For example: Consider the plight of someone eating alone at a restaurant. Surrounded by chatty couples, groups, and families, the lone diner can feel socially awkward and a bit, well, lonely. Time passes more slowly. Food seems to take longer to arrive. What might make things less stressful for a guest in this situation?

Well, one thing you may notice is that those dining alone often bring, or hungrily grab, any available reading material. Bill Bryson recalls getting to the point of ‘‘reading restaurant placemats, then turning them over to see if there was anything on the back.’’
1

Therefore, a thoughtful restaurant might establish as procedure to offer a choice of reading material, perhaps a newspaper or newsmaga-

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61

zine, to everyone who comes in to eat alone. That’s a simple, consider-ate service rule that everybody on staff can implement.

Here are a few other examples of how you can anticipate customers’

wishes with simple, thoughtful procedures:

? It’s the middle of summer, and the customers who are entering your Atlanta boutique are escaping 95-degree heat. What would such customers likely want? Wouldn’t they be pleased to find ice water with lemon slices on the counter when they walk in the door? You can easily establish this procedure as part of a daily weather-dependent setup.

? Do you know those signs that read, ‘‘If this restroom needs attention, please let us know’’ or, worse, the ones you see on airplanes that say, ‘‘It is not possible to clean up after every customer’’ and go on to suggest you sop up the basin with a hand towel as a courtesy to the next customer? The best procedural approach to restroom cleanliness probably isn’t to install similar signs that put the onus on your customers for maintaining a clean facility. Here’s a unique solution (in an admittedly rarefied setting): The staff at Charlie Trotter’s famed restaurant in Chicago decided the only way to ensure its restrooms met the restaurant’s standards, rather than leaving the next guest’s experience at the whim of the last, was to
themselves
discreetly check the towels and soaps after every use.
2
(We don’t necessarily recommend this extreme approach for you, except as a thought exercise; it’s obviously a nonstarter if you run a crowded pub, for example. However, another proactive procedural approach—perhaps an attendant on busy nights—may be worth considering in such a situation.)

? What if you are on Taco Bell’s executive team? Although your company’s roots are So-Cal, if you’re thinking like a customer, you’d fit watertight overhangs over your drive-through windows in most other locales. Customers in Sacramento might not care, but in Seattle don’t you think they would prefer to skip the side order of soggy elbow and damp power window electronics?

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Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

It’s important to build in mechanisms to ensure that company employees are frequenting your own physical and online facilities, because nothing is quite like the feedback you get this way. (By the way, if

‘‘company employees’’ currently means just yourself, still do your best to sample your own wares objectively, although achieving the anonymity we recommend below will be a stretch.)

We’ve all been to places where it seems no employee has ever eaten the food, attempted to reach the ill-placed toilet paper dispenser in the customer washroom, or noticed the way that items you’re trying to purchase seem to vanish from the website’s shopping cart. To avoid being one of these companies,
institutionalize
the internal, systematic use and testing of your own services or products. Offer deep discounts or comps for employee purchases, but with a string attached: If employees use your services, they must take detailed notes and—if this is realistic—remain anonymous, so they experience the same service other guests would.

Building procedural anticipation requires ongoing, daily effort. It requires managerial vision, judgment, and persistence. But it brings you closer to achieving customer loyalty.

Mr. BIV and the Art of Eliminating Defects

Sometimes problems
have
come up before and
have
been noticed by employees but are still hanging around. May we introduce you to Mr.

BIV? When he’s in charge, nothing ever changes.

Mr. BIV is a playful acronym coined by the group Leonardo worked with at The Ritz-Carlton. Addressing Mr. BIV helped them win two Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Awards. It remains one of the most useful—and easy to implement—quality improvement systems we’ve seen.

Mr. BIV is a streamlined, simplified, and easy-to-teach way to look for defects and defective situations; it can be adopted throughout an entire organization without requiring significant additional training. It stands for:

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63

M
istakes

R
ework

B
reakdowns

I
nefficiencies

V
ariation in work processes

Any employee, at any level of your organization, not only
may
but
must
alert the appropriate person to a Mr. BIV situation at once so it can be addressed right away. When Mr. BIV is encountered, it helps to ask ‘‘Why’’ as many as five times to reach the root cause rather than merely the symptom. For example:

Problem
: Late room service

WHY?
Waiters stuck waiting for elevator

WHY?
Elevator monopolized by housemen

WHY?
Housemen searching for/storing/hoarding linens
WHY?
Shortage of linens

WHY?
Inventory of linens only sufficient for 80 percent occupancy You can deputize every employee as an ‘‘improvement manager’’

who is responsible for helping to implement the Mr. BIV system.

Mr. BIV represents a concise example of a
Continuous Improvement
System.
The Continuous Improvement paradigm was developed in manufacturing industries, so, unfortunately, service, white collar, and

‘‘creative’’ professionals often make a knee-jerk assumption that it is not relevant to what they do. This is their great loss—and their customers’, too. It doesn’t really matter whether your product is electrical insulation, freelance editing, or wedding photography: You will only be able to
consistently
deliver a superb product when you have an effective system for monitoring and improving the product. That is why it would be hard to overstate the value of applying continuous improvement to the service aspects of your organization. It can close the competitiveness gap for a latecomer to a service industry or widen the distance between a standout service leader and the also-rans.

It’s powerful stuff.

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Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

Don’t Kill Mr. BIV’s Messengers

Never attack employees for the problems that your Continuous Improvement System reveals. You need employees who are not scared or cynical: employees who are open about revealing defects.
A defect that
happens twice should be assumed to be the fault of the process; the cure is in
fixing the process
. If you attack your employees, they’ll never help you find a recurring problem, and you won’t have an early chance to fix the underlying defective process.

Eliminating Defects by Reducing Handoffs:

Learning from Lexus

Leonardo recounts the story of how Toyota, with the assistance of Horst Schulze and other customer experience experts from varied disciplines, created the Lexus brand with the explicit goal of providing both an exceptional product and exceptional service interactions. Exceptional service was Lexus’s best hope to build customer loyalty in an industry where loyalty traditionally comes only after multiple car purchases. (Only after you yourself had purchased a series of reasonably reliable Mercedes over more than a decade—typically three cars in a row—or, if it were a ‘‘family tradition’’ to own Mercedes—your grandfather drove a Mercedes, your father drove a Mercedes—could it be expected that your
future
purchases would be Mercedes. Toyota had no intention of waiting so long for its first crop of loyal Lexus customers.)

Lexus’s final plan incorporated features we’ve addressed in earlier chapters, including greeting customers respectfully by name and unobtrusively logging and respecting individual customer preferences. But in addition, the company zeroed in on a strategy that we haven’t discussed yet: reducing service defects through the minimization of ‘‘handoffs’’ between service providers.

In many contexts, lapses in service are most likely to occur Building Anticipation Into Your Products and Services

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when you are handing a customer over from one function, agent, or division to another. Have you ever had to re-explain yourself from the ground up when a phone service representative forwarded you to Technical Support? Whenever you transfer someone on the phone from one person to the next, there’s a

possibility of dropping the ball—of losing the phone connection or of failing to convey the information or the tenor of the situation along with the actual transfer. (Whenever an insurance sales-person hands the customer to the production department for service, that’s where a problem is likely to happen. After a design client meets with the creative director, and the creative director then tries to convey the client information to the designer actually doing the job, that’s where the ball is in danger of falling to the ground.)

This brings us to what a car customer typically experiences: You bring your car for service to a service department. There is a
person
at the door
who greets you and takes you to the
service advisor
. The service advisor writes up what’s wrong and calls the
mechanic
. The mechanic takes the car away. At the end, when it’s time to pay the bill, the service advisor reappears, gives you the bill, and you have to go and deal with a disconnected, bored
cashier
, who is probably not focusing on you, not living up to service standards that match the car this same dealer sold you, and not capable of explaining what the strangely coded charges were for, because she wasn’t even aware of your existence until this very moment.

Imagine instead that a single superbly trained service advisor,
Sharon
, takes care of you from the moment you enter the premises until the moment you leave the premises.
Sharon
greets you.

Sharon
writes up your service ticket.
Sharon
summarizes your complaint to the mechanic.
Sharon
alerts you when the car is ready.
Sharon
presents you with the bill, and
Sharon
accepts your payment. Lexus settled on this as their ideal approach, to be used to a greater or lesser extent depending on the size and other realities of a specific dealership.

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Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

Systematically Reducing Waste to Add Value—for You

and
Your Customers

Since we are fully committed
service
obsessives, you may be surprised at the extent to which we are fans of the best available
manufacturing
-based systems and controls. We’ve benchmarked and adopted approaches from companies as far-flung as Xerox, FedEx, and Milliken. And over and over, we’ve found insight in such manufacturing-centered systems as Lean Manufacturing and Total Quality Management.

For right-brain, high-touch service types, this probably sounds kind of like being forced to do homework. Yeah, it is kind of like that. And it’s worth it.

These systems share the insight that
a company can increase its value by
continually locating and trimming waste.
If applied appropriately, this emphasis can strengthen a service-centered company as much as it can a manufacturing concern. For example, we can speed up service response times by removing wasted time and motion; improve the variety of our offerings by having appropriately scaled processing equipment located throughout our facility; and enhance morale and profitability by reducing the time our staff spends waiting around. These examples, you may recognize, represent three of the seven classic ‘‘wastes’’ identified by Taiichi Ohno, father of the Toyota Production System, (the direct fore-runner of today’s Lean Manufacturing methodology):