Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization (9 page)

Principle 3: The Information You Gather Needs to be Available in Real

Time.
Years ago, Leonardo’s team committed to making information about guests available throughout each location in an appropriate way that made guests feel good. Of course, the most basic guest information is the guest’s name, which is noted carefully upon arrival, and then used—graciously and with correct pronunciation—throughout the 52

Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

property, a technique that truly feels like magic to customers. (Discreet radio communication plus an attentive staff makes this ‘‘magic trick’’

possible.) See if there are ways to adapt this magic to your own business in creative ways.

For example, perhaps you run a managed health care facility rather than a hotel. Most of us know from personal experience how unsettling it feels when a nurse comes through the doors into the waiting room and calls like an auctioneer to everybody in the room: ‘‘Julia Jones!?’’

Talk about starting off on the wrong foot with your customers! Considering the hidden benefits of positive word of mouth from satisfied and loyal customers—and the hidden costs of alienating such a customer—it’s well worth finding a better way. (In health care fields, those hidden costs can be astronomical, due to the increased risk of a lawsuit from a dissatisfied patient.)

Once you’re committed to treating your patients like royalty from your first words, how would you do it? You could begin by training your receptionists to write down each arriving patient’s type of clothing or other politely identifiable features. (Julia Jones, 45, red blouse, blue slacks, blond.) These notes could then be carried along with the patient’s medical paperwork to the nurse who leads the patients in. Armed with these notes, the nurse can then find Julia and give her a warm, personable welcome when she’s ready to bring her back for treatment.

Principle 4: Preferences Change; Assumptions Are Tricky.
Preference tracking can run amuck. One of our favorite chefs, Patrick O’Connell of The Inn at Little Washington, tells this story:

Recently I stayed at a New York hotel that prides itself on customized service. The first morning, I had breakfast in the hotel restaurant, and I ordered tea. The next day, the waiter brought me tea as soon as I sat down. Unfortunately, that day I wanted
coffee.2

Keeping Track to Bring Them Back

53

Missteps like this shouldn’t stop you from using your preference tracking system as a starting point. If that same restaurant had greeted Patrick with a cordial ‘‘Good morning, Mr. O’Connell. Will you be having tea again? Would you like it again today with the Turbinado sugar?’’ that could have been splendid.
(Note: Preferences we’ve ascribed to
Chef O’Connell’s taste buds are for illustrative purposes only.)

Principle 5: Moods Change: Track Them.
There is an additional human metric we encourage you to track:
changes in your customer’s level of enjoyment over the course of your customer’s interaction with you.
The Inn at Little Washington’s O’Connell is the architect of one of the simpler and more effective customer happiness tracking systems we’ve experienced. At his Virginia countryside restaurant, each server discreetly notes the level of guest happiness at the beginning of a meal, rating it from 1 to 10. (So discreetly, in fact, that we never see them assessing us or logging their conclusions—no matter how often we conduct delicious ‘‘research’’ in Patrick’s dining room.) The goal is to bring the mood of the guests up to at least 9 before they hit the road for the ride home. Of course, how you track this in your own business will depend on how long delivery takes for your particular product or service and how complex other demands are on your staff ’s attention.

Principle 6: Don’t Blow It with a Wooden Delivery.
Information you cull from tracking needs to be used naturally and in a way that seems effortlessness to customers. As an example, Dale Carnegie’s insight that one’s own name is ‘‘the sweetest sound’’ has been endlessly quoted.

He’s right, too—but
mispronounce
that name, and ‘‘the sweetest sound’’

goes sour. (Trust guys named Leonardo Inghilleri and Micah Solomon on this one.) By the same token, don’t ruin a great thing by inserting a customer’s name or other personal information into the interaction in an artificial, fill-in-the-blank manner.

Have you ever called a help desk and had the person answer, ‘‘Good morning, thank you for calling XYZ, how may I help you?’’ and as 54

Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

soon as you give your name it’s inserted into everything, without emotion, without passion, clearly running through a script that appears on the screen? You feel like you could shout out that your house is on fire, and you’d get the exact same vocal response from this mechanized, allegedly personalized service. There’s no point gathering customer information if you’re going to use it in a canned, robotic fashion.

Principle 7: Using Technology to Ask for Information? It’s a Fine Line

between Clever and Creepy.
Beware the protective bubble.
Everyone has what we call a ‘‘protective bubble’’ around himself, to a greater or lesser extent. Teaching your staff to recognize this and probe only gently, re-treating as cued, is one of the keys to attentive service that we will discuss in detail in Chapter 7. But in electronic interactions you lose the human failsafe of direct verbal and nonverbal feedback. And as customers well know, electronic databases have the power to track
everything
in a way humans never would.

People respond skeptically when asked to help populate Internet databases. It’s not like when you request information face-to-face: Personally ask somebody where he was born, and there is a high chance he’ll answer openly. At worst you’ll get a ‘‘Why do you want to know?’’

and thus a chance to retract the question or explain the reason for it.

But if you require potential customers to divulge information on your company website, you’ll never know whether the requirement drove them away. You won’t realize that they thought your electronic persona was rude or that they didn’t trust the website version of you. Inexplica-bly, you simply won’t get signups.

The simplest solution is to remove all potentially intrusive questions from your Internet forms. An alternative is to make those questions optional, and fully explain your reasons for asking. Even customer-centered companies sometimes violate this rule; they may then experience a loss of market share or a drop in customer quality that they are never able to trace back to its origin.

In the physical realm, but with the ‘‘help’’ of technology, one Keeping Track to Bring Them Back

55

family-oriented chain of mall stores crossed this line in their eagerness to use automation, and they may not even have realized it. This company overall has a lot going for it: It serves parents and young children alike, offering a warm and welcoming experience, with great potential to bond with customers. That is, until the last moment—when they encounter an intrusive electronic procedure near the final checkout counter. The checkout kiosk was placarded thus, in huge kiddie-style lettering, the most recent time we visited the store:

Input your

•
Name

•
Address

•
Email address

•
Gender

and

•
Date of birth

in our Kiddie Carousel system and sign up to receive special
offers.

On every screen was cheery animation coaxing things along, complete with letters made out of colorful stars and buttons to simulate a child’s handwriting:

When is your birthday, [name of child from previous screen]?

•
Month?

•
Day?

•
Year?

Press the pink key after each entry!

(
Note
: Security experts call date of birth, name, and address the

‘‘holy trinity,’’ which, in combination with the often-breached social security number, lead most commonly to identity theft and other privacy problems. All items in this holy trinity are asked for in the se-

56

Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

quence of questions above—and they’re being asked of customers who haven’t graduated elementary school.)

The temptation to enter an entire birth date is driven home by photos of a family birthday celebration. A small ‘‘adult supervision recommended’’ disclaimer seemed to have been hastily placed on a card atop the monitor, but was obscured from where you would be most likely to read it. Regardless, disclaimers don’t win back your customer’s loyalty. If customers feel you’re being sneaky, they’ll run the other way.

Surprises Are Hazardous—Online and Off

Just because you
can
get information doesn’t mean you
should
get it.

And just because you’ve gotten information doesn’t make all uses of it appropriate. People don’t always like being surprised—even if the surprise shows them the impressiveness of your service systems. ‘‘Permission marketing’’ expert Seth Godin gives these examples.

If your credit card company called you up and said, ’’We’ve been looking over your records and we see that you’ve been having an extramarital affair. We’d like to offer you a free coupon for VD testing . . . ,’’ you’d freak out, and for good reason. If the local authorities start using what’s on the corner surveillance cameras to sell you a new kind of commuter token, you’d be a little annoyed at that as well.
3

Those are of course hypotheticals from Seth, but what about
this
real-life example from a friend of ours who was staying at a top hotel?

She called the front desk to complain about a problem with the service.

The front desk clerk fixed the problem but added a mistake of his own: Reading from the output of the electronically monitored minibar in her room, he told her, ‘‘I see you enjoy vodka. Would you enjoy one of our new vodkas with your dinner tonight as an apology?’’ The clerk thought he was being clever, but he came off as basically spying in his Keeping Track to Bring Them Back

57

guest’s bedroom—not something that’s going to warm the cockles of a customer’s heart.

Keep in mind that you are gathering information
to serve your customer
. Any other use is at best secondary. And because we are talking about electronic systems, always remember the limitations of working without physical or auditory feedback. Do not require information unless it is an absolutely necessary part of doing business. When you ask for it, ask politely, never using the information in a way that penetrates someone’s protective bubble.

How to Track Customer Preferences on the

Internet—Without Intruding

The Internet tempts us to gather too much information. It’s so easy to ask customers questions in an automated online interface that the temptation to ‘‘pile ’em on’’ can be very strong. Here are some principles to help you minimize this temptation:

1. If you must gather any sensitive information, explain why it’s necessary—clearly and fully.

2. Never require a date of birth unless you must screen un-derage users. Many people will either exit a website or falsify their birth date online if it is required of them. Pressuring customers to lie to you is the wrong way to begin a journey toward loyalty.

3. Think through every question you ask, first arguing

against it as well as you can. For example, play devil’s advocate about collecting telephone numbers. Why are you
requiring
your customers to reveal their phone numbers? Why, for that matter, require an email address? (There’s probably a reason, but think it through. Think about the potential costs, not just the obvious potential marketing benefits.)

4. If you give people a persuasive
option
of providing private information, your best prospects will often be agreeable. After 58

Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

that, the problem of sifting out bogus ‘‘required’’ data
(999-555-0505
and
lateralligator
@
getoutofmyface.com.usa.xxxy
) goes away.

5. Consider the supplemental use of live chat wherever possible and of prominently listed 800/888 numbers. This can keep people from being daunted by lengthy forms (and walking away) when they only wanted a bit of specific information. But don’t let any of this stop you from providing a rapidly-answered email address as well. Note that some who approach your company online don’t want to talk on the phone, no matter how friendly and well trained your ‘‘operators standing by’’ may be. Some are not even able to: The Internet has become an important tool for people with disabilities, including those with limited hearing, as well as for the inevitable stealthy at-work shoppers.

Fear Not: Don’t Be Deterred from Collecting

Information—Thoughtfully

Don’t be deterred from collecting information—in a sensitive way, for respectful
uses. There is little that’s more important to your growth as a company.
Indeed, effective tracking of what is important to customers—specific customers, not just customers in the aggregate—is a hallmark of all the excellent organizations we have worked with. It makes it possible for new staff to continue customer relationships built by departing or promoted colleagues as your company grows. It builds high,
sustainable
levels of customer loyalty.

It works for us.

We recommend it for you, too.

CHAPTER SIX

Building Anticipation
Into

Your Products and Services

Putting Processes to Work for You

Has Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz read
Catch-22
? Probably. What seems less likely is that Mr. Schultz has ever signed up for his own in-store Internet service.

Micah explains: