Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization (19 page)

So we expect your path to loyalty online will be different from Amazon’s. Aim for perfection on a smaller scale—imbued with caring at each of many human touch points.

First Time Online: A Nuts-and-Bolts Case Study

Suppose you have a traditional brick-and-mortar business, and you want to add an Internet presence for the first time. How should you go about it, step by step? We find it helpful to work with each of our brick-and-mortar clients individually, when establishing them online.

But many of the principles we apply with them are universal. To illustrate, let’s consider a semi-hypothetical rug cleaning business, one that has never before ventured online.

First, why go online? Well, a lot of homeowners now prefer to begin researching topics like rug cleaning online. (How often is it needed? How common are overcharges and scams? How much does it cost?) So before using the Yellow Pages, they venture onto the Web and search for ‘‘rug cleaning.’’

An approach you might consider to attracting business is well removed from starting with a hard sell. Rather, it’s providing reliable, free information. Think about it: As an expert in the business for multiple years, you’ve got to know pretty much everything there is to know about rug cleaning. Your opinions are valuable. Why not become the online go-to source for free, expert advice on rug cleaning? Give away this information and revenue will come back to you—in the form of 128

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customers who stumbled across you even before they thought they were searching for your service.

There are many ways to create an online informational presence (YouTube videos; guest blogging; an information-only area of your commercial website interwoven with links to your services and products; etc.). Being the go-to place for free information online is terrific.

It magnifies your perceived trustworthiness. It appeals to potential customers, because giving away expert information makes you an expert—their expert. And it brings potential customers to your virtual doorstep.

Just be careful not to make these same offerings into explicit advertisements for your own product. Consumers often prefer to have a feeling of separation between their information-gathering sessions and their service-selection sessions online. (Don’t make the converse mistake either of making it unclear that you’re open for business should homeowners be looking. Just keep that information segregated tastefully.) What should your business’s own
commercial
website look like?

Overall, your site should feature friendly introductory information highlighting what’s better about your approach, your technology, your background, your people—whatever is important to your prospective customers. Base your approach on the long copy/short copy model: Keep it brief up front, but make additional information accessible as desired for those who want more.

Next, use the power of computer-driven modeling to make it easy for your visitors to compute a realistic estimate of the cost of your services. They should be able to enter the basics (X number of rooms, X

number of flights of stairs, entry hall or no entry hall) and immediately receive a clear and thorough report.

To make your site feel welcoming, customers should be able to use such features
without
entering their password, geographic location, or other personal information. Once customers are accustomed to the site and using it appreciatively,
then
offer a chance to password-protect, store, and annotate their sessions. Give them a chance to buy
themselves
in to your company.

Building Customer Loyalty Online

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Less Can Be More with Preconfigured

Software ‘ Solutions’’

If you buy powerful Web technology preconfigured by a specialized software company in your industry, your best service outcomes may result from
turning off
features that make things difficult for the customer, like requirements to immediately log in with a password, and other similar stumbling blocks for prospects when you are just ‘‘meeting and greeting’’ each other.

Let a customer who wants to be contacted choose her contact time and submit it on a Web form. Monitor the workings of this form on a regular basis (make sure your methods of monitoring include our recommended [Chapter 3] idiot-proof method—i.e., try it yourself ) to ensure that the form gets to your scheduling department.

Now, finally, comes the first human touch point
. Here is your chance to start building loyalty. Call at the appointed time. And have your nicest of nice, best trained person do the calling: someone sensitive to the fact that the person being called may not even immediately recall having made this ‘‘appointment,’’ multitaskers that we all are. You need someone with impeccable telephone manners. Someone sensitive to the resistance that any business phone call, even a previously requested one, may elicit at home. Her call should sound approximately as follows:

‘‘Good morning, this is Mary from Fuzzy Rug Cleaning. I received a request
to call this morning, to speak with Ms. Sinclair. Is she available?’’

The next human touch point will be when your cleaning technician arrives at the Sinclair residence. Have the
same
nicer-than-nice employee call to confirm the appointment:

Hello, Ms. Sinclair. Good morning. I’m calling again from Fuzzy Rug. This is just a courtesy call. I want to reconfirm that 130

Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

our technician will arrive at your house between 5:00 and 7:00.

Think how refreshing this Internet-originated experience has been.

Without intrusion, without inconvenience, a customer has found the information she needed: specific, personalized, customized information.

She has decided for herself how much personal information to reveal.

She has used Internet scheduling to ask a company to work on
her
schedule—not to conform to theirs. And when the time came, a warm person, with impeccable telephone manners, moved the exchange gracefully into the human dimension.

Let’s assume that your technician arrives on time and does an excellent job. And that your billing is fair and handled effectively, with a thoughtful thank you and farewell given at the end of the project. At this point, you have made excellent strides toward winning a powerful ally for your company—someone who will be a loyal repeat customer and also recommend you to her friends. You’ve done this by harnessing the power of the Internet to draw her near to you—and by using the power of skilled and caring personal contact to keep her close.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Hello/Good-Bye

Two Crucial Moments with a Customer

We’ve been tough taskmasters throughout this book, urging you to do everything right and to never let up. We’ve drilled in the value of putting in exceptional effort, day and night, with your customers. But there is a place for shortcuts in customer service, too. In Chapter 3, we mentioned that concentrating on certain
crucial emotional moments
with your customers is your guarantee that you’re putting your efforts where they make the most difference—where they lodge most vividly in memory.

We covered one of these crucial emotional moments,
service recovery,
in Chapter Four. Now we focus on the other two:
hello
(your greeting) and
good-bye
(your farewell).

Hellos and good-byes are beginning and end points, the two highest positions in what memory researchers call the
serial position curve
. In a list of items or events, they will be remembered most easily. If you want to prove this to yourself, follow in the footsteps of memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus and give a friend a list of items to remember—let’s say turkey, salt, pepper, tomatoes, pumpkin, cheese, milk, oregano, chili powder, butter. Odds are good that the first and last items (turkey and butter) will be the ones most easily remembered
1.

The same is true for hellos and good-byes. Handle them superbly, 131

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and you’ll reap a disproportionate dividend in what ‘‘sticks’’ as a customer’s opinion of you.

Timelessly Time-Sensitive

Greetings and first impressions have been uniquely important to human relationships for thousands of years. Odysseus’s son Telemachus knew that first impressions matter: ‘‘[H]e glimpsed Athena now and straight to the porch he went, mortified that a guest might still be standing at the doors,’’ writes Homer
.2

Fast-forward a few millennia to postcard-perfect Bar Harbor, Maine, where Chris Cambridge owns The Scrimshaw Workshop, a gift shop perched next door to an immensely popular ice cream shop. Chris understands the importance of a good ‘‘hello’’ as well as the ancient Greeks: While customers at other shops are greeted with a ‘‘No Food, No Drink’’ sign, or, at best, ‘‘Please Finish Your Food or Drink Before Entering Our Store,’’ Chris bucks this trend. Imagine how many more customers Chris wins by upending this norm with this welcoming (and brave) statement:

YES! YOU MAY BRING IN YOUR ICE CREAM CONES

—Just be careful of their drips.

To make
sure
you get the idea that his store is a welcoming place, Chris added this in a smaller font:

P.S. We love your dogs, too!

(See the sign at
www.micahsolomon.com)

In many businesses, it’s a front desk receptionist, host, or other human greeter who welcomes and bids farewell to visitors. So, it’s cru-

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cial that the person in this position conveys a warm welcome and a gracious, heartfelt farewell; the handling of these two moments is key to your brand’s image. This is why inbound and outbound reception is best handled by a skilled, trained, and motivated veteran with great customer-focused traits. It’s why we recommend against treating reception as an entry-level, stepping-stone position—because, whatever you call it, ‘‘First and Last Impression Creator’’ is among the most important positions in your enterprise.

Which Level of Service Do You Provide?

Let Them Know from ‘‘Hello’’

One of the first things a greeting does is convey the level of service a customer may expect from your establishment. Are they going to get
non-compliant
service,
compliant
(reactive) service, or
anticipatory
service?

Non-compliant service (‘‘Can I get some water from you,

please?’’
‘‘Uh, there’s a vending machine down the street.’’)
will push away customers every time. They asked for a glass of water and received nothing—except a grudging set of directions. (In fact, non-compliance is such a wretched level of ‘‘service’’ that we’ve given our readers the respect of wasting very little copy on it in this book.)

Compliant service (‘‘May I have some water?’’ ‘
Certainly. Here
you go!
’’) is pretty much the baseline for the contemporary business world. It doesn’t offend customers, but it won’t win them over either. Compliant service can be well-executed, but it’s not going to build loyalty for your brand.

Anticipatory service (‘‘
Welcome. It is such a hot day today. May
I offer you a glass of water?
’’) is extremely rare. But as we’ve discussed, this is where customer loyalty is created. When customers’ wishes are anticipated, they get to bask in the magical feeling of being cared for. That feeling creates loyalty, which builds strategic value for your company.

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Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

So, if you can tip your hand at the front door that this exceptional level of service is what they can expect—if you can manage to literally ‘‘have them at hello’’—you will predispose your customers to think well of you throughout the rest of the service experience.

Greeted properly and warmly, a customer will be less sensitive to minor issues later in the encounter. A good greeting enhances subsequent human interactions and can—significantly—affect a customer’s perception of a physical product that is offered for sale.

A crucial aspect of a proper greeting is recognition. What is recognition? Being seen, literally and figuratively: being acknowledged, being welcomed, and being appreciated. Recognition, to cite Danny Meyer again, is ‘‘the number one reason guests cite for wanting to re-

turn.’’3

When a customer is arriving on a
repeat
visit, this should be a special type of recognition: that the customer was
missed,
that his return fills a gap that was there in his absence. Beth Krick, an administrator we admire at a small primary school in Pennsylvania, greets the children and parents every morning at drop-off. So, when a child or a parent is absent for a few days, Ms. Krick is sure to notice, and she commemorates the return with a heartfelt
‘‘We missed you.’’
What a standard for any company, of any size, in any field, to strive for: to give that level of simple recognition to every returning customer.

The Customer May Come in Contact with

You Earlier Than You Expect

Remember that service begins as soon as the customer comes in contact with you—but only the
customer
gets to determine when that first moment is, and it may be much earlier than you think, or would wish. For example, suppose a customer parks his car in a retailer’s parking lot, and the first things he sees are broken chain link fencing and cigarette butts strewn all about. In this Hello/Good-Bye

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instance, the first contact has occurred, unbeknownst to the retailer, who now must struggle to overcome this negative impression. It’s unfair (the retailer may not even control the lot), but it’s reality. This is why every carefully managed resort pays attention to the arrival sequence: the flowers, the signage, the friendly security guard at the gatehouse, the doorman. By the time you get to your room, you should feel gently transported to another world.

Don’t Rush Your Hellos and Good-Byes on the