Service Encounters Onstage

Compete Through Service Symposium: Guest Post by Sybil Stershic

2011-10-28T09:20:00.000-07:00

Today's guest post comes from Sybil Stershic, author of the Quality Service Marketing blog and the tremendous book "Taking Care of the People Who Matter Most". Sybil's business focus is on using internal marketing and communications to engage employees and positively impact employee satisfaction and customer retention. I'd been following Sybil's work for awhile without knowing that we covered some of the same ground at Compete Through Service Symposium, and we were able to finally connect in person at last year's event. Unfortunately, Sybil is not attending this year, but she gave Service Encounters her thoughts on what she's missing.

With my entire career in services marketing, I consider The Center for Service Leadership’s Annual Compete Through Service Symposium to be THE best gathering of professionals who come together to share ideas, best practices, leading-edge research, and current and future issues in services marketing and management.

My professional passion is engaging employees and customers with internal marketing, and the Symposium is a meaningful source of insight on employee and customer focus, workplace culture, the customer experience and services leadership. In addition to services marketers and managers, the Symposium also attracts executives from product-oriented companies interested in becoming more service-oriented.

Although I haven’t been able to attend each Symposium, I’ve been following the program since its early days. Back then several staff members from the Center for Services Leadership and AVNET, a program sponsor, published follow-up summaries of conference ideas and takeaway questions for application. I’ve got several editions ranging from 1997 to 2005 in my office library … and still refer to them.

The good news is Symposium summaries from 2002 to 2006 can be downloaded online for free!

If you’re unable to get to this year’s program, I highly recommend you include it in your professional development budget for next year.

I'll be blogging and live tweeting the 2011 Compete Through Service Sympsosium Wednesday through Friday of next week. Follow me on Twitter to see more from this tremendous event.

The restaurant that never brings me what I order.

2011-10-24T14:59:00.000-07:00

My wife & I frequent a sushi restaurant we’d both describe as our favorite. Having lives and travelled the Pacific Rim, it’s not the best sushi we’ve ever had – but for Kansas, it’s very good.

What makes us to choose their experience over competing experiences: since we’ve been going there, they have never brought us what we’ve ordered.

Sure, they take our order and bring us the appetizers, rolls, entrees and desserts we’ve asked for.

But as long as we’ve been going there, we have yet to have a meal that didn’t include an extra added in. Always free of charge, and usually something that isn’t on the menu that they bring over and ask us to try.

Some are terrific, while others are misses. (Japanese-Mexican fusion inspired tempura-battered green beans are a product innovation that should not have “left the garage”.)

Stan Phelps and the Purple Goldfish project call this lagniappe, associating the Cajun expression for giving a little extra to a great service business practice that delights customers. It is that – they give us more than we’ve asked for, exceeding both our expected and requested service experience – but it’s also more.

A few of the items that we’ve tried have ended up on the menu. We’ve had prolonged engagements with staff, talking about a dish and what might make it better. That they include us in new product development makes us feel like partners, invested in the success of their menu and their restaurant.

It took time – months, years – to develop a bond this deep. But consider the sushi joint down the street that instead of investing time & effort, offers up a frequent diners card to tie their customers to them. Their main business line has its margin voluntarily eroded by a program that doesn’t make a customer choose them any more or less than the other purchase frequency programs they use.

Jimmy Johns: "Freaky Consistent" Brand Delivery.

2011-10-18T23:59:00.000-07:00

Today's features a guest post from Sean Roark, a working marketing professional and graduate student in the Integrated Marketing Communications program at the University of Kansas. This semester, students in Max Utsler’s “Innovations in Marketing Communications” class and Barrett Sydnor’s “Integrated Marketing Communications and Sales Strategy” class are writing blog posts on branding, marketing, social media, experience marketing, and innovation.

Sean's post on Jimmy John's consistent brand delivery through the service experience fits well with a Service Encounters theme of using marketing to consistently make the promise you deliver through the experience. I also thank Sean for writing a post that gives me an excuse to post a picture of Krist Novoselic.

"Freaky" Brand Delivery

My lunch hour had arrived and this blog had to be ready for you fine people in five hours. I needed something quick – not quick, fast. The usual suspects ran through my head. Wendy’s? No, too slow. Sonic? No, I don’t want to tip. McDonald’s? No, gross. I know! Jimmy John’s – “freaky fast.”

Frequenters of Jimmy John’s know “freaky fast.” It’s what makes Jimmy John’s what it is. Sure the “mama approved” sandwiches are delicious. The over-staffed and surprisingly friendly workforce is refreshing. The wall hangings are always good for a chuckle, that is, if you have enough time to read them. But it’s the “freaky fast” preparation and delivery of my sandwich that keeps me coming back every week. Today I walked in the door, placed my order, handed the clerk my credit card and received my receipt and freshly prepared sandwich at the same time. It was freaky --at least that’s what I used to think.

The Jimmy John’s brand should be a benchmark for all marketers. JJ’s understands their relevant difference -- Jimmy John’s is “freaky fast”, equal parts “freaky” and “fast”. However, the critical component to JJ’s benchability is that Jimmy John’s reinforces its brand promise throughout every customer touch point. There’s Ed, Jimmy’s “freaky fast” delivery guy. Don’t forget the JJ Freaker blog at, you guessed it, freakyfast.com. Even the napkins are freaky.

But all pale in comparison to the freakiest of them all -- Jimmy John himself. Jimmy John’s is now America’s second fastest growing restaurant chain, averaging one restaurant opening each day. Jimmy John Liautaud’s recipe for success is simple. Listen to your customers and outwork your competition. Simple but rarely duplicated.

Most companies say they listen. Some companies do. Few companies do anything worthwhile with what they hear. Jimmy John’s has delicious subs, but delicious subs alone don’t open a store a day. JJ’s customers told them they want more than just another delicious sandwich. They want a delicious sandwich with minimal line time. Jimmy’s delivered and pointed it out.

Jimmy’s has its shortcomings but so does every company. Jimmy John’s doesn’t try to be all things to all people. Jimmy John’s simply provides “freaky fast” quality sandwiches and entertains its customers for the short time they’re in the store.

I guess it’s working. Freaky huh?

Mastering the Science of Service: A CTS Symposium Primer

2011-10-15T23:59:00.000-07:00

November starts with the 22nd annual Compete Through Service Symposium, produced by the Center for Services Leadership at Arizona State University. I’m a multiple event attendee. Because I’m also an alum, they let me hang around and produce some social media tied to the event.

This year may feature the best roster of service business speakers yet. If you’re going, here’s a peak at the who’s who of service businesses you’ll see on the main stage. If you’re not, it’s who you’re missing, but can catch snippets of if you’re following me on Twitter or following the CTS blog.

To get warmed up, I’m including a few articles from some of the speakers, showcasing their service models:

Services at Procter and Gamble - A Paradigm Shift: Nathan Estruth, General Manager, The Procter & Gamble Company

Guessing isn’t anticipating.

2011-10-10T23:59:00.000-07:00

I was witness to a train wreck of a service encounter yesterday. A well meaning service provider was trying to go “above and beyond” in anticipating an unstated need of the customer in front of me. The customer was definitely not looking for the “perk” she was offered, and based on the interaction, was understandably taken aback. At best, she left annoyed and maybe slightly offended. At worst, the provider lost a customer.

What struck me is that the encounter would have been a success if the provider would have simply not tried so hard to guess what the customer wasn’t saying about herself.

Her efforts were met with a sour response because instead of anticipating her customer’s need based on knowledge, she guessed at what the customer wanted based on an incorrect assumption about her.

I’ve seen the popular literature that companies should just focus on the basics of the service customers expect and stop trying to “delight” them. Both notions are right and both are wrong.

A company is better off designing a customer experience that aligns with business strategy – their industry / market / customer expectations, their own business model, and who they are trying to be in their market. If you’re McDonalds or the local drycleaner, consistent execution on basics represents your market. If you’re Ritz-Carlton, a flexible service model that allows individuals to go beyond the minimum fits with service strategy.

But alignment of business strategy and service strategy wasn’t the problem in this case.

The issue was that while the provider, likely told by a supervisor to look for opportunities go above & beyond, tried to delight a customer based on a guess about that customer’s characteristics, based on appearance. Instead, she should have used certain knowledge about the customer to take a logical next step in providing what the customer needed. If that knowledge didn’t exist, then concluding the encounter providing only the basics would have been an acceptable outcome, and in fact much better than what happened.

Lawyers subscribe to the notion of never asking a question to which they don’t know the answer. Similarly, when trying to delight a customer, do so in anticipation of a need based on certain knowledge. Not one based on a potentially faulty assumption.

The (service) revolution will not be televised.

2011-10-07T05:59:00.000-07:00

What makes service businesses so exciting is that when it comes to services, inefficient systems abound. Opportunities are everywhere you look.
An example:
Product recall systems are about as inefficient as it gets, still relying on news releases, direct mail and mass media – that is, when a recall is dangerous enough to consumer health be picked up by the five o’clock news. If your product is simply defective, you’re out of luck here.
I asked Hen House Market, an absolutely terrific local food & grocery chain, how they distribute recalls.
Spreading the message through informed teammates and social media updates were the top answers. Those likely inform a lot of people, but far from everyone.
I then asked whether they measured the effectiveness of the communications. Sadly, the answer was “no”. (As an aside, if you’re faced with a choice between measuring the effectiveness of your latest direct marketing initiative and the effectiveness of your product recall communications, choose the latter. It isn’t tied to revenue, but it’s better business.)

But interestingly, they also mentioned that to improve the effectiveness of recall messages, they were working on a text message alert system for loyalty program participants. You know – those annoying key chain tags that provide savings on select products, where when you’re filling them out, you wonder, “what are they ever going to do with my cell phone number – call to tell me they’re having a sale on cantaloupe?” Once launched, loyalty program participants would receive text message alerts if they’ve purchased a product on a recall list using their rewards card. Discounting products AND helping prevent me from accidentally killing my dinner party guests? Talk about a loyalty program worth signing up for.
It's a small fix to a long-standing problem. These kinds of service inefficiency problems are so prevalent, most of us don't even think of them. Yet people are addressing them in increasing numbers, using technology in dramatically new ways, whether the local grocery store’s use of text messaging for recall information, or the IBM Watson project, a program devised as an initial salvo in the fight to create better service outcomes through technology.
My own personal request for technology to improve my service encounters: In a world with nearly universal wi-fi, Google maps and Twitter, why do I ever have to wait in a line?

How about you: What services would you like to see made more save time & effort or produce better results?

Credibility. Critical to all, but more so to some.

2011-10-01T09:59:00.000-07:00

How credible does a service have to be in the eyes of its customers?

It depends on what the service means to the people that use it.

Imagine you visit the ecommerce portal for one of your most-used service experiences.

The site is down.

Inconvenient. You wanted to use them today. You feel a little dissatisfied at the (lack of) an expected interaction, but not too put out by it.

Now imagine that the service business is a bank. Maybe they look after a lot of your money, maybe just a little. But your money nonetheless.

The angst grows just a little. “It’s my money. I demand access whenever / however I want it.” (Of course, forgetting weekends in college where you had to hand a withdrawal slip to a teller on Friday to get you through a weekend’s worth of social activities.)

Somewhere in the back of your mind, it occurs to you that this bank is one of the “too big to fail” banks. That for the last couple of years, it has been mentioned in the same conversations as AIG, Fanny & Freddy, and more recently, Greece.

Surely nothing is happening – of course not, it’s all insured (Note to self: review the FDIC site one of these days to see just what is insured) – but still, the thought creeps into your head, doesn’t it?

I don’t care if the company that made my toaster goes out of business. Oh sure, in the macro sense perhaps, but not in the way where I get concerned about a direct personal impact.

But service experiences with ongoing relationships carry an expectation of stability & credibility. It’s part of how customers evaluate reliability. The deeper the personal investment in the relationship, the more critical the evaluation. Because a person’s money is involved, banks are about as deep as a personal investment in a service gets.

Consumers’ brand decisions are a reflection of themselves, and particularly their ability to make good decisions. If what people see & hear about a brand strikes at its credibility, they judge it more harshly. The negative press may put them onto the attrition ledge, but it can be a small thing that sends them over.

Like a site outage. That still isn’t resolved overnight.

Great promise. Why are you hiding it?

2011-08-16T23:59:00.000-07:00

By now, most Starbucks regulars are aware of their quality guarantee.

They’ll remake any drink that isn’t to the customer’s liking, free of charge.

It's not stated as a guarantee, but it is, and a good one. It would be enough to say that they’ll remake any drink they don’t make correctly, but their promise goes farther to the source of customers’ satisfaction with the experience.

But here’s the problem with this outstanding promise. It's unstated, and almost hidden.

In a local store, this sign was posted in a dimly lit hallway on the way to the restroom. To get even this poor image, I had to move 12 inches from the picture and manually disable the flash on my phone’s (admittedly awful) camera.

Making a guarantee promise so softly detracts from its value to customers. Those that are unaware, have forgotten, or feel too intimidated to engage the promise end up not saying anything, walking out of the store with an ultimately unsatisfying service encounter.

Marketing pros with a finance mind love this scenario, (it’s a form of slippage), the idea being that a large proportion of guarantees on defective experiences will go unclaimed, allowing the company to save money while claiming the value of a guarantee without having to fulfill it.

But customers that walk away disappointed diminish the value of the brand, regardless of whether they enacted a guarantee or not. Companies should be seeking customers with less than stellar experiences in order to recover them, not hiding their guarantees furtively around the corner near the service entrance in hopes that they never say anything.

If you’re going to make a great promise, then make it loudly.

Post the sign in a place immediately noticeable, in a high traffic area where customers are actively engaging in the evaluation of their service experience. Encourage customers to invoke the guarantee, and send them away happy when you get it right.

When a referral reflects badly on the referrer.

2011-08-08T23:59:00.000-07:00

This past weekend, this sign stopped me in my tracks as I was walking into a Wendy’s.

Apparently, famed restaurant survey company and industry reference – Zagat – rated Wendy’s the #1 restaurant. A claim like this is so amazing it has to be true, so I investigated further.

It turns out that Wendy’s had both the Top Food and Top Overall rating among mega chains in Zagat’s 2010 Fast Food Survey. Still, something doesn’t fit.

What do you use Zagat for? To find which breakfast sandwich will work best on the way to your son’s Saturday baseball practice? Which fast food restaurant you should be dining at during the spare fifteen minutes in your crazy day? Which children’s meal your little ones will enjoy most while doing the least long term damage to a lifetime of healthy eating?

If I’m considering a fast food meal, it’s unlikely that I consult Zagat, or any ratings agency. The rating is far too vague to be of much use, even if it is credible, which, coming from Zagat, it may not be.

Zagat may conduct a survey rating the “mega chains” (their term, not mine), but the rating applies at the system-level, and gives little indication as to the quality of a specific location. As evidence, the “#1 rated restaurant” was out of both biscuits and sausage during the service encounter when I took this. Without debating whether they were doing me a favor, I wanted a sausage biscuit, as did the people behind me and the people behind them. Does a restaurant that on a Sunday morning negates 6/13 of their breakfast menu warrant the top rating?

A referral is a promise, usually given by a trusted 3rd party, that your experience is going to be a good one. Its critical characteristic is its credibility.

Zagat is, in general, a credible restaurant referral. It’s a good thing too, because their entire business hinges on the credibility of their referrals.

You have to wonder whether rating the mega chains doesn’t undermine their overall credibility in the view of customers who see a sign like this as they engage in a mediocre dining encounter. It did for me.

If Zagat can’t be a credible referral for all restaurants, perhaps they should focus on those in the core of their model – those where customers actively seek their opinions and rely on their credible referral.

Brevity is overrated.

2011-08-07T09:59:00.000-07:00

Some terrific business strategy leaders espouse brevity as a virtue in business writing. There are hundreds of examples of books, articles and programs on the suject. Seth Godin, Mike Brown, and many others others have, in the in the last few months, reinforced the requirement for brevity in business as a cultural truism.

And some believe the benefit of brevity in correspondence extends to the customer experience, with the emphasis on finishing engagements as quickly as possible. I'd argue that for the best of service encounters, brevity is not always the best course of action.

Does The Phoenician spa shepherd guests out of the immediately after their experiences?

Does Art Smith at Table 52 hustle patrons out so he can get in another seating?

Does Chris Zane get customers out of his shops in the absolute minimum of time?

Damn right he does - when it’s appropriate. But Zane’s Cycles doesn’t have an espresso bar in the shop to give customers the bum’s rush as soon as they’ve been seen by an associate. It’s there because the experience is about more than keeping dialogue to the bare minimum needed to make a sale – rich dialogue with customers makes Zane’s service experience work better.

What makes your favorite book your favorite? Its length? Or that it is well crafted, appropriate for you and therefore memorable beyond others?

Brevity can be efficient. Brevity can be effective. But use it when its appropriate. If your experience hinges on being memorable, on being crafted specifically for someone, be selective with brevity.

Trader Joe’s: Can you join a cult slowly?

2011-08-03T08:59:00.000-07:00

Trader Joe’s arrived in my community last month. I had reviewed them before, but inspired by this week’s post at Write The Company, I planned an excursion to see if the home town service encounter was more compelling than the one I wrote about on a trip to the west coast.

Not unexpectedly, the place was packed.

Trader Joe’s enjoys a cult-like following wherever it crops up, and suburban Kansas was no exception. The number of patrons was the major difference between this visit and those I’ve had previously, in mostly west coast stores, and those other customers that finally turned the light on for me as to what the Trader Joe’s experience was all about.

It seemed every time I picked up a store-branded item – I’d guess 6 times in a 30 minute visit – a nearby customer either asked me whether the product I’d picked up was good, or offered their opinion on the product. The customer-to-customer interactions were rich throughout the store, and all based on the unique merchandise that Trader Joe’s carries. As time went on, I felt badly, as though I wasn’t contributing as much to the experiences of other shoppers as they were to mine.

All of my previous visits to Trader Joe’s had been in the middle of a mid-week day, few patrons, mostly rushing in to rush out. Now, I had seen it for the other side – where unhurried customers stroll through the store, asking other customers about the products and referring products they like to them, in a social network defined by the outer walls of the store.

At the checkout, the attendant gave me details about each of the products that I had purchased. When I asked her what proportion of customers she thought had been Trader Joe’s customers in other areas of the country and were familiar with the store, she astonished me with a reply of 90%.

90% seems like a high estimate. But even if it were half that, you’d have a retail store, completely foreign to the region and open less than a month, where almost half of customers were familiar brand users. That’s still amazing.

I used the word “cult” before, and I think it does apply, in that a cult – in this case the Trader Joe’s experience – doesn’t make sense to people that aren’t “in” it, but it makes complete sense to those who are. My service encounter was terrific, and as a result, I'll go back and get a little more familiar with the cult-ure.

A sign near the exit reads, “There’s no place like Trader Joe’s.” The quote is likely a an outsider's nod to Kansas culture based on their perception, but for those that have indoctrinated into the experience, it’s an apt comment. For cult members, there really is no place like Trader Joe’s.

Restaurant reviews also help the reviewed.

2011-08-01T06:59:00.000-07:00

My wife and I are fans of the Top Chef television series, so I was thrilled when this year the one of the Top Chef Masters contestants was Celina Tio, proprietor of Julian here in Kansas City.

A Top Chef Masters selection represents a strong endorsement of a Chef’s work and, by extension, their restaurant. In the show, they showcased Celina's credentials as a Top Chef, which included Chef Magazine’s 2005 Chef of the Year and the 2007 James Beard Best Chef: Midwest region.

Impressive stuff, and my wife & I were excited to try her service experience.

But when we started looking at some reviews, we noticed that not everyone who had an encounter at Julian had come away impressed. OpenTable users rated it 4.2 out of 5, but had chared some negative comments about the service. Google reviewers were less kind, rating Julian 2.5 out of 5.

Among the comments on Google:

“Our server was also unattentive and our water glasses sat empty for most of the meal.”

“Food was excellent, however the service and atmosphere left much to be desired.”

“The servers were very unkept and unmotivated.”

Its tough to say - we may not have felt as good about the food had the reviewers’ comments not tempered our Top Chef-level expectations, but the meal was terrific all around.

The most notable thing about the service encounter: How unlike the reviews the service staff were.

Sure, they were dressed casually, but casual is the vibe of the place. Every person we interacted with went out of their way to thank us for coming, asked multiple times how the evening was going and if they could do anything to improve on it. As we left, service staff we passed but had never otherwise interacted with thanked us for coming. It's a small place, but by the time we hit the door, it felt as though every employee of the restaurant had helped us or thanked us.

Its possible that the service staff, who the comments largely reflected on, had read the negative comments and amended the service behavior themselves. If they didn’t, it is likely that Celina read them and conveyed their content to the staff, with some additional direction.

For anyone labeled a Top Chef Master, their name is their brand. Their reputation is on the line not just with every meal, but with every service encounter. The negative reviews didn’t just give prospective diners information about what they can expect, it also gave the service provider additional cues on what customers think they can improve on.

Great failure AMC – keep ‘em coming!

2011-07-16T07:59:00.000-07:00

I’ve written about the service innovation going on at AMC Theatres – both the introduction of Fork & Screen and the rollout of reserved theatre seating.

So I was surprised when, taking in a movie with my children, I noticed this sign stating that AMC is discontinuing the reserved seating process later this month.

AMC says that the while theatres were intending to improve the viewing experience by introducing assigned seating, customers were not receptive to the $2 additional charge above the standard movie ticket required to cover the cost of the additional technology to guarantee a seat and an usher to guide you to it.

It has been positioned as the kind of value that a customer appreciates but isn’t willing to pay extra for. This kind of decision happens all the time, when would-be innovations are doomed because customers aren’t willing to pay for them. If this were a hyper-competitive local market where little things made the difference in brand selection, I might suggest that the “sunk costs” of the technology were just that, and that any additional value perceived by the reservation system would help bunker them from the ever-present competition. But it’s not. AMC is almost the only choice in local cinema, and if the variable cost of the ushers isn’t offset by people willing to pay for the experience, the sunsetting of the offering (or storing it in a closet until a more appropriate time) is likely best.

But beyond the immediate decision, I’m hoping more that someone at AMC isn’t fretting over the result and hoping that they never make a mistake like that again.

Whatever the strategic decision, I appreciate that the theatre was willing to take the chance that ultimately made the mistake. I wish that more service companies I deal with did the same. Many service encounters could use a fresh perspective and the benefit of a new take on their old models. Movie experiences are high among them, having not changed much since the 50’s.

Companies like AMC aren’t letting nostalgia for one format get in the way of creating a better model. Many other service businesses – those stuck in the “this is how it has always been done” mode, should take note.

Efforts too small to matter.

2011-07-10T05:59:00.000-07:00

Terrific use of physical evidence to reinforce the experience from Garry Gribble’s Running Sports, a local running shop where my wife got her most recent pair running shoes in advance of her first half-marathon.

It reminded her of why she went there in the first place and the value her unique experience provided. It differentiated their experience from the alternatives, and reinforced what a great decision she had made by purchasing from Garry Gribble’s.

It would be easy to skip this step. Every other place I have ever bought shoes simply puts the shoebox in a bag and lets the customer walk out the door.

It takes more effort – though not much more – to commit your service manifesto to a printed 3x5 card and tape it to an outgoing package. They also sent a handwritten note shortly afterwards. Three lines thanking her for her purchase and wishing her luck in her run. Again, more effort required, and again, nothing backbreaking.

You know who does this, takes the time to perform these small experiential elements that are so small that others see them as not worth the bother, because how could something this minor really make a difference when after all our price on the same shoe is 8% lower?

People who care about their business and who they serve.

People who succeed in building the unassailable brands most of us talk, tweet and write about.

People who get these. (Not that it matters to them)

Asking someone to play a role? Ask plainly.

2011-07-07T05:59:00.000-07:00

Today I was booking a trip on Southwest.com for my two sons (and I) to head home for their summer visit with their grandparents. They’re 6 and 2 years old.

When asking for the ages of the travelers, Southwest asks for travelers by category. Curiously, the “full fare” category is labeled “Adult Age 2+”. Now, my youngest is mature for 30 months, and might arguably identify more states on a map than several people whose opinion is showcased on prime time game shows, but I’m not sure I’d describe him as an “Adult, 2+”.

Seniors are identified as a separate category, exclusive of “adults. I could see and can understand a member of The Greatest Generation getting offended that my LEGO aficionado and my Elmo fanatic are considered adults, while they are classed otherwise.

I don’t know the operational reason behind this. I’m guessing that the term “full fare” may not be as marketing friendly as “adults”. It’s unnecessary. Companies are better off in a service environment in describing their process and its inputs as plainly as possible.

Since the only people that are subject to a reduced fair are those under two or 65+, identify the category as “full fare travelers”, defined as anyone 2 to 64.

Don’t forego accuracy for a term that sounds a little more appealing. Say what you mean. At worst, the simplified language will reduce confusion. At best, it will earn a measure of respect for being forthright with customers trying to fulfill their role in the service encounter.

Sewing the seeds of defection.

2011-07-04T23:59:00.000-07:00

This holiday weekend, my county got a good lesson in how a failure with one service encounter can create a trcikledown of additional failures. The local water company, WaterOne, experienced a loss in pressure in their lines. Because they couldn’t guarantee the safety of the water during that time, they issued a countywide water boil advisory for roughly 36 hours.

From the beginning to its (thankfully) rapid end, the boil advisory impacted local residents and businesses significantly.

The idea that Johnson County might not have safe drinking water for a few hours sent residents into a frenzy. Water flew off the shelves of local grocery stores, leaving local businesses failing their regular local customers at a moment when those customers perceived they needed them most.

Service businesses that use water as an input to their experience (i.e. most food services businesses, including this Starbucks) had a major operations hurdle to overcome. At best, they increased cost to work around an input quality issue not of their making. At worst, they were unable to operate.

For businesses that depend on other services as an input to their experience, what is their recourse for the a failure like this? Usually, the utility tells them they don’t have to pay for service for the period in which it was inaccessible or unreliable. But what about increased operational cost? Lost revenue? Utilities are often insulated from the threat of customer defection due to dissatisfaction. They almost as often act that way.

It’s a reminder that service failures at utilities are unusual, but when they happen, they’re deeply felt. They're the kinds of events that, even if they only ever happen once, get companies thinking about contingency plans, “what-if” scenario planning based entirely on the idea that “we don’t ever want to go through that again.”

No matter how secure a business is in their local market - even if they enjoy a monopoly - this exercise gets customers looking for alternatives.

Every businessperson is a service agent first.

2011-06-28T05:59:00.000-07:00

Through a strange set of circumstances, a junior colleague was scrambled on short notice last week to be the lead contact for our company at an industry tradeshow.

As he was getting ready for his first major solo customer-side contact, someone in our group asked him if he was prepared to answer customer questions onsite. He rattled off corporate positioning detail and product knowledge like the most heavily-trained sale professional, gaining confidence as he did. As he was about to leave, we threw him one more question.

“What if someone asks you for service?”

“What?”

“We’re a service business that runs 24/7. How do you handle a customer who approaches and would like you to help with a service issue?”

Blank stare.

“Do you know how to get him / her to someone locally who can help?”

We spent some needed time giving our friend some critical detail on how to resolve a few service issues without reaching out, and hooked him up with someone that would know most local customers and could step in to provide assistance.

This story is unfortunate, but not unusual. Every time you see a company’s social media expert ask a customer with a complaint if they have called customer care, it is this dynamic at work. We’re a culture of corporate specialists. If you are unlucky enough to work in a corporate headquarters, picture all the people that could serve a customer immediately, if one approached them in a crowded airport and asked for help. Probably not many. (As an aside, are any of the faces C-level executives?)

It’s flawed logic to say that because serving a customer is not a role that everyone in an organization plays, not everyone needs to know it is done. Anyone in a support role ultimately plays a part in serving customers. Consequently, we should know how that job is done and be able to do it. Support organizations (that army of staffers most of us are part of) provide better internal service and customer support when we know the details of the customer experience.

The Army gets this. The idea that “every soldier is a rifleman first”, doesn't mean that infantry is everyone’s primary responsibility. It means that everyone should know how to help the organization achieve its most basic objective, because that knowledge helps the organization better support those that play that critical role.

Zappos knows it too. I hear experts claim that the Zappos culture can’t be replicated – that their culture is specific to their business model and doesn’t translate to other organizations. That may be. One aspect of their business that is transferable to any company is their core understanding of each function’s role in supporting the overall mission.

My new colleague did spectacularly well in his impromptu field assignment, because he carries a service orientation and had the willingness to learn a role others might feel was beneath his level.

Organizations that aren’t top performers are the ones that don’t stress to all employees the importance of understanding the service role.

Customer-centric leadership? I'll take Sir Richard, thanks.

2011-06-20T23:59:00.000-07:00

We’re in an interesting time, where the ubiquity of business has created an environment where some CEO’s have become celebrities like their entertainment and athletics counterparts.

There has been much written about whether having a celebrity CEO is good or bad for a business. But it is good for service businesses, in that celebrity CEO’s keep companies honest by keeping them in touch with customers at the highest levels.

Lack of interaction between management and customers is a problem that has long plagued all kinds of companies. How many service businesses do you support through a regular billing cycle, for which if the CEO rang your doorbell on Saturday morning, you would recognize them?

The flipside also applies. I know several senior leaders who couldn’t pick one of their customers out of a lineup. Not that they don’t know any individual customers, more that they are too far removed to be empathetic to their customers’ lives and experiences.

But take a handful of celebrity CEO’s. Richard Branson of Virgin, Mark Cuban of HDNet, Gary Kelly of Southwest, Tony Hsieh of Zappos. They’re highly recognizable to their customers, but more importantly, they are often caught moving among them in the service environment. When a customer recognizes one of these business leaders in the service environment, there’s a good chance they’ll take a second to give feedback – good or bad – about their encounter. There’s also a good chance that these CEO’s spend a minute or two asking customers about how their experiences are going.

Feedback – solicited and unsolicited – begets questions that CEO’s ask their teams. Why do we have this policy? Couldn’t we change this process to make things easier? Why can’t we deliver this part of the experience better?

That kind of connectivity is contagious. Leaders that report to a CEO that spends a good portion of their time interacting with customers, aren’t going to spend less, and so on and so on.

Many senior leaders never bring these questions up because they don’t have the context to do so. Their only connection to customers is through the customer satisfaction reporting and 4 layers of staffers at corporate headquarters. The only hard questions they have to answer come from Wall Street. If that’s the only constituent input to base future business direction, it’s a bad one. Celebrity CEO’s may have their problems – it seems that more of them are prone to incarceration, though that may be a visibility thing too – but for customer service driven by the interaction of business leaders and customers, they have the built-in advantage of customer connection.

We’re running out of stupid customers.

2011-06-12T23:59:00.000-07:00

Years ago, I worked with a company President that remarked on multiple locations that his best customers were stupid, and what he really needed from sales & marketing was for them to find more stupid customers.

What he meant was that, at least on the surface, customers that showed the highest levels of operating profit were those that were willing to sustain a long-term relationship with our organization but did not price-compare among service brands. As a result, the price they paid was dramatically above-market.

Apart from the customer contempt that this remark showed, it also showed his (and that organization’s & really, that entire industry’s) fundamental lack of understanding of cost-to-serve and customer lifetime value. As the industry rejected any effort to base it’s business model off of contemporary service pricing schemes, it developed another industry comprised completely of intermediaries who (smartly) made their money by helping end users make more informed decisions.

The pattern repeats itself across service industries. Airlines had their own version of the imperfect information problem. Wireless and cable services are well known examples, but any industry that has an ongoing service relationship model faces a version of the same thing – a company’s commitment to an existing profit stream favors new customers, allowing them better access to value than existing customers exhibiting brand loyalty.

Is this a fair outcome?

It doesn't matter what the company thinks. It isn’t perceived as fair when the relationship customer accidentally gets a “service invitation” promotion in the mail, and calls the cable company for the new customer deal, only to be told their ineligible. (I have heard literally scores of those stories about cable companies)

The Internet changed many business models, and it has become the great equalizer when it comes to improving the information customers rely on to make purchase decisions. Small, loyal customers that once happily paid above-market prices today have full visibility to what a fair price is, and can compare their deal with that of others.

The counter I often hear – usually from pricing and finance organizations – is that “our company can’t afford to give those customers the same deal that new customers get.”

That’s a shortsighted answer. Those loyal customers are precisely the one that your competitors are targeting with their new customer offers. When they ultimately discover what their relationship is worth, they won’t be nearly as receptive to your matching offer. Some of the most intelligent people I know have run themselves ragged trying to figure out how to stop loyal customers paying above-market rates from churning from a business, without ever considering what loyalty looks like to a customer who learns that a prospect who has never put a penny into the company's coffers is more prized than their relationship.

The only thing that hasn’t exposed how bad this is as strategy is that in each industry, every competitor follows the same strategy. A company married to this business model inevitably loses that business to someone who isn’t, who doesn’t draw their profit from a small base of loyal stupid customers.

We don’t have perfect information yet, but it’s closer than it was 10 years ago and approaching rapidly. The pool of stupid customers is getting too small to sustain everybody. Amen to that, because it’s about time that these service industries started designing value into their offer, rather than dispatching search parties for the increasingly elusive stupid customer.

Sports. Just service encounters with extreme customer interaction.

2011-06-05T23:59:00.000-07:00

I’m a sports fan.

My pragmatic side knows athletic competition is mostly arbitrary, but as entertainment businesses go, sports have some of the richest service environments developed.

Customer-to-customer interaction isn't just encouraged, it's expected. (In fact, without any other customers, sports entertainment would be a pretty silly service encounter indeed.) Front-line service providers (the athletes) prefer the environment when customers (fans) become part of the performance.

And so it is with today’s post.

With a nod to the ongoing Stanley Cup final series, here is how the Vancouver Canucks anthem singer Mark Donnelly and 18,500+ fans collaborate on production of Oh Canada. (Full disclaimer, I’m a born & raised western Canadian, though I would think this was a cool execution in any context.)

Notice that Mark raises the microphone to the crowd to indicate that it is their turn to carry the song. This isn’t a singer taking advantage of an unusually participative crowd, it’s the way the service encounter begins on Canucks game nights. Customers know & accept their role in the production. Even those attending for the first time pick up the social cues from other customers quickly enough to participate.

In this encounter, something so routine as the singing of a national anthem, when embraced by the customers, changes the entertainment experience and makes it much more compelling than it is in other venues.

It is the nature of sports experiences that the customer-customer interaction makes the experience richer. Customers arrive in the service environment ready for a heightened level of customer-customer interaction and co-production. But they didn’t always show up to Canucks games expecting to sing the national anthem. That built over time.

Ironically, customers’ ability to impact the result of their service experience is greater in almost every other type of service than entertainment. So how do you take a standard service environment and, like Mark Donnelly has done, create one where customers support each-others’ experiences? How do you develop, over time, the customer role in the production of the encounter?

Are we changing how we complain, or just how often?

2011-05-31T11:59:00.000-07:00

A New York Times article “Consumer Complaints Made Easy. Maybe Too Easy" sparked some dialogue yesterday on the nature of complaints, complainers and service recovery effort.

I joined Wim Rampen, Arie Goldshlager & several others to discuss whether social media has indeed made it too easy for customers too complain, and if this has led to “social bullying”.

My quick take: Social media hasn’t made customer complaints “too easy”. Instead, good service businesses are happy to have yet another way for a customer with a complaint to have that complaint heard and responded to. Companies suggesting that it’s too easy for customers to complain may not have the right service orientation in the first place, which leads to those scores of complaints that they’d rather not hear.

In a related post on Arie Goldshlager’s Posterous, he commented on the proliferation of easy, uncommitted complaints and “social bullying” as a potential resource drain on well-meaning service organizations that tried to serve all customers to their fullest extent.

With the rise of social as a venue for complaining, the ground may be shifting on this one. If a company responds to customers that are complaining for popularity reasons and aren't looking to engage them, they may waste valuable service resources chasing service experiences that can’t be recovered with customers that aren’t looking for resolution as much as they are a chance to use their social media bullhorn.

Pndering the issue for a few more hours, I’ve got one more issue to add to the body of work.

Complaining about failed experiences is easier with the availability of social media than it was before, no doubt. But in any service experience, customers themselves play a role in a successful outcome. When a customer with a failure complains directly to a company, the company has the ability to help fix problems that began with the customer not accepting their role or not playing it well. But when the interaction happens in full view of social media, there’s less opportunity for that type of customer coaching.

Will social media move companies toward limiting customer role in production of their own experiences, making service more servant-like & less collaborative?

I sure hope not. The customer, because of their unique knowledge of their needs, has the potential to be the most productive resource in the service experience, if & when we make good use of the shared effort. It would be a shame for businesses worried about the complaints that could be best fixed through better company-customer interface to design the customer out of the fulfillment process completely.

Old School CRM.

2011-05-28T23:59:00.000-07:00

For those skeptical whether a company wants or can have true relationships with its customers, here is the bulletin board of a Starbucks I happened upon in my travels:

A simple note, handwritten cards with customers' names, favorite drinks & details. The odd customer photo. How long do you think that it took to construct this mural? 30 minutes? 60?

The answer is on the blackboard. 4 years of investment in customer relationships, made 30 seconds at a time.

ANY company can have this kind of relationship with its customers. Only those willing to invest 4 years do.

(No, it’s not lost on me that it is really people that create and maintain the relationships. Service businesses are about people, and front line staff in particular. Front line people are the are “product”, the marketers and the customer service staff. Customers’ feelings about them are transferred to the company. Customers’ feelings about the company are likewise transferred to them.)

(One other note from this: Want to be the Mercedes of your industry? The Ogilvy of your local market? The Zappos of your niche? In service businesses, all three are represented by your front line providers. 3 functions in 1. Don’t tell me service businesses are inefficient.)

Saturday Night, Alive.

2011-05-26T13:59:00.000-07:00

I’ve been holding onto this one for a few days because I didn’t quite know how I felt about it.

On Saturday evening, we heard tornado sirens sound in our neighborhood, as they do anytime a tornado is sighted in our rather large county in northeastern Kansas.

It was late, and not wanting to wake the kids up unnecessarily, we quickly tuned in to the local television broadcast to quickly see what exactly we were faced with and whether we would have to beat a hasty retreat to the basement.

It turned out that the tornadoes were as far away and as small as they could be and still cause the alarm, but in our minds – as always with these things – better safe than sorry.

But here’s where the service encounter comes in. To broadcast the emergency, the Kansas City area NBC affiliate broke in on Saturday Night Live. Specifically, the season finale featuring Justin Timberlake and Lady Gaga.

As they did so, the meteorologist almost continuously apologized for preempting SNL, which to me seemed a bit unnecessary, in that I couldn’t imagine anyone who would be willing to forego their own safety or that of their neighbors for a rehashed version of dick-in-a-box.

At that point, I did a quick twitter search on “SNL Tornado”, and saw the vitriolic reaction that the weather alert was generating towards NBC.

At first, I didn’t consider this a service failure, so much as a group of irates voicing their displeasure at a very sensible action on the part of the network. But the idea stuck with me. I wrote a post about situations when one service experience (National Weather Service) interferes with another and another about cases where the customer isn’t right, taking the position that the Meteorologist shouldn’t have to apologize for keeping viewers safe by the best means available.

What I came back to, though, was that as much as I didn’t agree with their positions, this was a service failure in the eyes of the customers that were complaining. Their service outcome – namely experiencing the finale of SNL – was not fulfilled by NBC, regardless of how good the reason. The local NBC meteorologist was right to apologize. Better, their service recovery of pointing watchers to the broadcast streamed over the internet kept with a key element of good service recovery, providing successful delivery – either through the streaming video or a later rebroadcast – as a fair outcome.

NBC prioritized the service needs of its customers appropriately. Serving some caused an unavoidable service failure for others. But in recognizing it and offering an alternative, they provided each customer group a fair outcome in the service they wanted or needed in the first place.

Lessons in customer role, from a chainsaw company.

2011-05-16T23:59:00.000-07:00

In the summer months, I'll often throw my local Kansas City Royals baseball game on the TV to serve as background noise as I settle into my evening routine.

One of the advertisers on the local broadcast – Stihl – a chainsaw manufacturer, gets experience and customer role well enough to mention, even though I don’t own a Stihl chainsaw, nor am I likely to anytime soon.

The ad is for a dealership promotional period, but doesn’t offer a price discount. It doesn’t even offer suggestions on where they can be found beyond, "your local Stihl dealer".

Instead, it talks about the quality of the product, reinforces the quality of the product, and closes with the quality of the product. Somewhere in the middle, they mention that if a customer purchases a 6-pack of oil with the chainsaw, Stihl will double the warranty period.

Tremendous service marketing from a product company.

The logic is simple: If a customer buys the oil, they’ll either use it or they won’t.

Most people that buy a six pack of oil will likely use some, if not all of it. Doing so inherently lengthens the life of the chainsaw. So for those that use it, they get a customer who spends additional money upfront on a maintenance product and understands and accepts his or her role in maintaining the product.

The life of the chainsaw is extended by a well-maintained machine, the likelihood of needed repair decreases, and the customer’s perception of Stihl as a brand of high quality, (or at least long-lasting) chainsaws increases.

For those that don’t use it, the purchase of the oil at least partially offsets the warranty costs for repairs to the chainsaws that aren’t maintained.

As a side benefit – call it the Chris Zane corollary – any competitor that tries to match warranty terms without the added benefit of customer-provided maintenance may find themselves with a money-losing warranty.

The warranty is a service aspect of a product purchase. The customer role of maintenance is part of the product experience. Stihl may not be Zappos, but they know their service marketing. It’s a good promise. You do your part in maintaining the product, and we’ll guarantee that it will stay running for years.

I unfollowed @PV_at_SAP today.

2011-05-14T23:59:00.000-07:00

Along with @outdoorrussia, @CarinaAllen and 20 others. At least, so said a tweet from @PV_at_SAP caught by my mentions column yesterday afternoon:

“@Reaburn , @outdoorrussia , @CarinaAllen and 20 others unfollowed me today ... checked by http://fllwrs.com”

An interesting way to mention someone. Of course, it was entirely possible. I do unfollow people from time to time. So I checked, and actually, I had unfollowed @PV_at_SAP the day prior, making the mention ever so slightly inaccurate.

It's not the first time I’ve unfollowed someone. But it is the first time I’ve been called out for it, and I’m not quite sure of the purpose. My guess is that “PV” wants to alert the twitterverse that someone isn’t playing by the implied reciprocity rules.

Interesting take on the purpose & use for twitter. Yes, building one's self-perceived popularity through masses of followers is one potential source of value for Twitter, though it’s not where I find value, and in all fairness, I doubt PV does either.

For me, Twitter’s value is in engaging experts, leaders & interesting people on subjects I want to learn more about, contributing to the collaborative dialogue where I can, while creating a shortcut to exceptional content for which the search cost would be too high for me to ever obtain it on my own.

Right now, I’m near the magical 2,000 twitter followers, so Twitter demands that I watch my balance of follows to followers. I’m trying to break through that mark, not because I want access to legions of potential pseudofans, but because I’m pretty certain there are more than 2,000 people out there that I’m going to find interesting, and I want to be able to find & follow them with fewer restrictions.

PV isn’t following me, and so he’s limiting my Twitter experience by hampering that objective. I also don’t find much value in his content – nothing personal, it’s just not for me.

Any customer-customer interaction can change behavior in the service environment. In this case, unfollowing PV was my way of improving my own experience, since PV wasn’t contributing to it, and actually was limiting its effectiveness.

I’m sure PV would understand. After all, his bio reads “Its all about the Customer and the Experience at SAP.” It’s a sentiment I share (it was likely a reason I chose to follow PV in the first place), and exactly what I was practicing when I unfollowed him.

Homeaway.com (Pt II): Don't take a customer's need for assurance lightly.

2011-05-14T07:59:00.000-07:00

After reviewing their Super Bowl advertising as part of this year’s #BZBowl, I was intrigued enough by the Homeaway.com service model to give them a try, using their marketplace for vacation rental properties to book a condo for a future family vacation in an area of the world I've never spent much time.

I was blown away by the front-end, but there were some execution inconsistencies and assurance misses that could be improved to make the booking experience as tight as the search & engagement process.

Once I had potential locations down to a short list, I contacted the property managers to check specific dates, availability and to inquire further about the properties themselves. Not all of them replied, and of those that did, I had response times from a few hours to almost a week. It's difficult to manage any network of intermediaries responsible for fulfilling your service experience. A network of small business owners / property managers that spans the globe has to be one of the most complex intermediary networks I’ve ever encountered. Still, the variance between responses was a bit extreme. While I was down on the hotel experience in part one, I’ve never had a hotel not respond to my inquiry as to room availability.

Once the short list was narrowed down, I began an engagement with the manager of the property I was most interested in. The manager seemed extremely nice, wrote back to me in my first language even though it wasn’t his, provided detailed information on the property and included references – all great stuff. But it was when he - a service intermediary that I’ve never met, whom I know isn’t employed by Homeaway and operates out of another country - asked for my credit card information that my service encounter needed some assurance that this was a normal part of the experience, and that I could trust in the intermediary network.

To get that assurance, I checked with Homeaway, asking if this was common practice or if I should look elsewhere. In this case, Homeaway didn’t respond for 3 days. That may be acceptable for routine questions (or not) but certainly not for what was to me an urgent inquiry about information security.

Marketplaces like Homeaway, where networks of service intermediaries gather to compete for the aggregated demand of a mass market, are growing in number and breadth of the markets they serve. But they are fundamentally difficult service models to manage with consistency. Service quality basics such as reliability, empathy and expecially assurance have to be considered at every step of not only the engagement experience, but the purchase, service experience and post-experience as well.

Homeaway had me with the engagement, but a small fail at a critical point just about lost me at the exact moment I was willing to put my money down.

Homeaway: A refreshing un-hotel encounter.

2011-05-14T06:24:00.000-07:00

After reviewing their Super Bowl advertising as part of this year’s #BZBowl, I was intrigued enough by the Homeaway.com service model to give them a try, using their marketplace for vacation rental properties to book a condo for a future family vacation in an area of the world I've never spent much time.

The Homeaway accommodations marketplace provided a service encounter far superior to the hundreds of hotel and hotel aggregator sites I’ve used in the past.

With thousands of properties spanning the globe, individual property managers compete with each other for travelers' vacation accomodations experiences. They’re motivated to position their properties in the most compelling possible way – making their best promises as to the experience a vacationer would have. Users see extremely detailed information on the properties, surrounding neighborhoods - often including an insider’s information on local events. Property managers usually include property layout diagrams, a full suite of pictures, including video walkthroughs for prospective renters. Those promises are kept honest through user reviews, with past renters posting reviews of the amenities and the service for the properties where they’ve stayed.

By comparison, direct hotel sites typically give a generalized room category with some vague images of the accommodations style, and a price. Aggregators of hotel accommodations (like hotels.com and priceline) may offer even less, narrowing down to a neighborhood (not a specific property) a nebulous star rating for the property and a price.

With more space, more variety, and more decision information at every bit as competitive a price, the homeaway.com search and engagement experience is so much better than traditional hotels and site aggregators, it makes me wonder if the hospitality industry isn’t undergoing every bit the business model change that happened when the demand aggregators first arrived on the scene.

But while the experience of finding potential vacation sites was an exceptional experience, there are a few service experience missteps and inconsistencies that took place in part two of my service encounter, once I committed to using a property.

AT&T broadband cap gets a consumer wag-of-the-finger

2011-05-05T11:59:00.000-07:00

AT&T made news this week by announcing a cap on broadband for personal internet use. Based on my own (purely unscientific) review of the comments circulating through social media sites, the move wasn’t favored by consumers.

From Twitter:

JD_Wright: Broadband cap? I think our days with AT&T for internet service are very limited.

Joel_Turnipseed: @att added a cap and didn’t lower price, this is why I have moved internet providers "att capping broadband http://t.co/u9YrKmi"

kevinlam14: AT&T cap broadband usage! 150gig for DSL and if you go over, $10 is charge for another 50gig http://ow.ly/4NAAs This is a load of crap!

beermonkey: Time to switch providers out of principle alone. RT @News4WOAI: AT&T putting cap on broadband http://bit.ly/mGoiqT

But before committing to indignation about how this is a money extracting move by an evil cable company who doesn’t want to provide the service it’s loyal customers, consider this as a move that potentially protects the service experience.

According to AT&T, the top 2% of customers – those for whom the cap will apply – use a full 20% of broadband.

When one customer’s service experience adversely impacts the service experience of other customers, the company has a decision to make – protect the experience for the customer whose use is negatively impacting others, or intervene to protect the experience of the many.

In some cases, the decision is easier than others.

If the customer is improperly using a company’s service experience – think of a severely intoxicated passenger on an airplane – the difficult but appropriate response is often to remove them from the service environment, to be served in another way or not at all.

On the other hand, if a customer simply uses “more than their fair share” of the company’s service capacity, the company has the option to charge for the capacity-draining use to either modify the behavior and bring capacity use back into balance or ensure any continued extreme usage of the service is compensatory.

The AT&T cap on broadband (which isn’t a cap, as much as a charge for excess use) isn’t without precedent. In fact, it is somewhat similar to the intelligent traffic system IBM implemented in Stockholm, which concurrently solved a major congestion problem while increasing municipal revenue and was ultimately seen as a creative solution to a difficult problem.

What is interesting to me is that while both organizations made changes to preserve scarce service capacity to serve more customers more effectively (and make more money doing it), one is met with case studies while the other is met with catcalls.

Rating "Rate Our Chicken."

2011-05-02T23:59:00.000-07:00

Successful service encounters start off with well executed marketing as the process of making relevant promises that set the expectations of what will be delivered through the experience.

The Domino’s ad “Rate Our Chicken” is an effective one not just for the promises it makes but also for how it personalizes promise fulfillment for customers.

The ad makes that simple promise that is easy to evaluate - specifically that we’re going to like their new chicken product. But while most advertisements stop here, Domino’s challenges customers to evaluate their delivery of the promise by asking every customer to rate their chicken with a survey on the box the chicken is delivered in. If you’re a fan of Chip & Dan Heath's SUCCES formula for evaluating marketing, there aren’t many promises you’ll see that are more concrete than this one.

But because service encounters are about more than the tangible goods associated with them, and successful service marketing finds a way to express the intangibles of the offering. Featuring the people who make and fulfill the service promise in marketing is a usually a strong execution of the message and the brand.

In this case, Domino’s personalizes the promise by literally giving it a name. I don’t know if Tate Dillow is really the man behind Domino’s chicken, but putting him in front personalizes it as one person making a promise to customers. There’s a good chance customers will feel sympathy when Tate’s boss asks customers to rate the job he’s doing with the new chicken by putting a survey on the box.

As a service ad, “Rate Our Chicken” works because it is a simple quality promise well executed by making it easy to evaluate and including the people responsible for performing it in the service encounter.

Does a company's executive pay impact the service experience?

2011-04-25T13:59:00.000-07:00

Executive pay has been in and out of the headlines for some time now, but is there a consumer impact for companies involved?

Attention and public outcry peaked when executives of some of the financial industry companies bailed out by the U.S. government were treated to pay increases and large bonuses, even as millions were being put out of work throughout the rest of the US economy.

That outrage sparked change in the form of legislation, granting shareholders a larger hand in determining CEO pay through an up-or-down vote. While many are adopting the new standards (and many still have not) it is still being debated whether the shareholder say in CEO pay will have the desired effect.

These measures are interesting from a shareholder’s rights & corporate governance perspective, but I’m interested in executive pay from another angle.

As a consumer of service experiences, does CEO pay factor into your decisions to support or not support a business?

If you knew that CEO A received total cash compensation of 6.5M, while CEO B was paid one dollar, would it affect your brand choice if the service experience was the same?

If the company with the high CEO pay was a worse service provider than the one with low pay, does that increase your level of frustration with the brand / make you less likely to tolerate failure?

Theoretically, it shouldn’t.

The pay of a company’s CEO is not an experiential aspect of a company’s offering.

But does it enter into an evaluation of value when our sense is that an organization with a sub-par experience takes for itself through rich pay before it gives to customers through a rich experience?

Open question. I'm interested in whether this topic impacts our behavior as consumers.

The service quality air travelers refuse.

2011-04-22T23:59:00.000-07:00

When traveling, accompanying business associates tolerate my travel habits as much as I tolerate theirs.

See, most of my travelling companions are prototypical business pros when it comes to travel. You know the ones. You see them moving through the terminal like a mule train, with oversized laptop cases perched atop oversized carry-ons.

When I pick up my checked bags on arrival, they always grouse about the delay in getting to the rental car shuttle quickly. It’s about that time that I remind them that it was they, along with 50 similarly-intentioned travelers, who, in trying to fit a steamer trunk into the overhead bins, backed up the loading of the plane while they tetrissed their luggage into position, warped bin doors closed or had to have them gate-checked, inevitably making the plane late for departure.

Checking luggage is my own social contract. We can all take off & land on time much more frequently if we let airlines do a better job separating the loading of luggage from the loading of people.

Don’t believe me?

Check out this video from IBM about the baggage operation at schiphol airport in Amsterdam. 140,000 bags per day. 21km of conveyors. In-transit tracking. 50 million bags / year, expected to increase 40%. Runs like a Swiss clock.

Engineered service systems like this are making service processes more efficient while they are improving the likelihood of positive outcomes. Yes, this is an extreme example, but it has been years since I’ve had a bag misplaced or delayed. My track record for on-time flights is nowhere near as stellar.

You may not change your behavior (airlines imposing baggage fees are doing their best to make sure their operations continue to run as inefficiently as ever) but the next time you see a business traveler fight their carry-on for 3 minutes, only to give up and gate check, walking back up the plane aisle past 30 passengers waiting to board and unable to proceed to their seats, perhaps you’ll think about miles of conveyors and systems designed for the movement and loading of bags onto planes.

How much work would you ask your customers to do?

2011-03-27T23:59:00.000-07:00

On a recent trip to see a good friend, he and I went to dinner at a steakhouse he was excited to show me. The source of his excitement was their unique take on meal preparation. He described a flat stone heated hot enough to cook on and brought, with my steak, to me for tableside grilling. The twist: I get to do the grilling myself, preparing my steak to my own desired doneness.

This didn’t seem like a terrific idea to me as a customer. I go to restaurants to have professionals – better cooks than I – prepare my food for me. That I was going to play a significant role in my own service experience while I knew there was someone more qualified and paid to do it standing through a set of double doors didn’t excite me.

Still, I’m always up for a new experience, and I trust my friend completely. (military basic training followed by 4 years of college together tend to do that) So, I mustered up some excitement to accompany the anxiety that came with the prospect of cooking my own tableside meal.

An immediate benefit of this format was that I got to see the main ingredient raw. You can’t hide bad product when the inputs are raw, and this steak was spectacular. I grew a little more excited.

As I started searing my steak, I began to see the participation benefit. Rather than a distracting hassle, the experience let my friend and I share an experience along with each others’ company.
The quality of the product, the way every other detail was taken care of and the result created accomplishment satisfaction that surpassed what consumption satisfaction would have provided.

Customer role is often overlooked in development of the service encounter. Most businesses fail to realize the potential of the service-producing capacity that also pays the bill, and how in some cases, getting a customer to do more work may actually increase their satisfaction with the encounter.

As you way how to include the customer in producing your performance, be strategic, but don’t overlook opportunities to push the boundaries of how you can apply their service capacity. Like a restaurant owner that says, “I know! Let’s get customers to cook their own meals!”

More service than is reasonable.

2011-03-24T21:59:00.000-07:00

Give more service than our customers think is reasonable.

If you take one message away from Chris Zane’s new book “Reinventing the Wheel”, that’s it.

Service is fundamentally about making and delivering on promises. That means different things to different businesses. For Zane’s Cycles, that means the biggest, most audacious promises they are willing to make without scaring themselves. (And sometimes even when they do.) It also means delivering on those promises with exceptional reliability, continuously executing on fundamentals, finding defects and driving them out of the business. The promises that Zane’s makes are the kind that stretch well beyond customers’ own expectations. Its good theater and good business. The extent to which they’re willing to go amazes, but their ability to deliver on them wins them loyal customers while keeping the actual outlay on amazing promises to a minimum.

Zane’s pushes the envelope in providing service that others can’t or won’t deliver by using Customer Lifetime Value as their compass. As a service business, they make decisions based on the relationship - like we all say we should, rather than on the next transaction - like most of us do. One of the most refreshing aspects of the book is that they have chosen a service philosophy as a stern guide, but use trial and error more than a Fortune 500 would in finding ways to follow it. They don’t always get it right, but when it does, the results are spectacular levels of differentiation from their competitors.

There are other ways to run a successful service business - delight isn’t a strategy that anyone can or should follow. In fact, Zane’s Cycles relies on the fact that competitors that try to follow their service lead often hurt themselves financially trying to live up to a service level their people and processes aren’t prepared to support. Zane’s story demonstrates only how they did it and how they intend to continue into the future.

But while Zane’s success may not be a blueprint for everyone, the lesson that everyone can take from their story is that to develop true service business – customer relationships make service decisions based on the lifetime value rather than the profit involved in the next transaction. That logic applied consistently will make it feel to your customers (and competitors) like you provide more service than is reasonable.

What is Service?

2011-03-23T21:59:00.000-07:00

As the service community active in social media rushes to define terminology that supports still emerging business models, (where SCRM begins and ends, how to make CX & CEM meaningful for everyone, and “now that we’ve got one, what the heck is a Chief Customer Officer supposed to do?”) I’m spending some time on a simpler question.

It’s not new, but one I see peers, academics, industry experts, even the Twitter #custserv group struggle with from time-to-time. The confusion is partially born out of our deep bank of experiences as consumers, which gives definitions for "service" a Potter Stewart, I-know-it-when-I-see-it kind of fuzziness.

Adding to the problem is that service has three accurate and potentially concurrently applicable meanings. We use any and all of them, based on our own experience and perspectives from within the organizations we work.

It can be a business model that relies on a performance or process to satisfy customers. In this sense, service can be the rough equivalent to a “product line” of intangible goods, or even an revenue model for an entire company.

It can be the process or performance act itself – either the entire operation that delivers an experience to customers, or a part of it.

It can be the support provided to customers that interact with a company’s products or services – what we tend to consider when we’re talking about “customer service”.

The distinctions between them are important, but only to an en extent.

Whether you’re speaking about an enterprise or a customer encounter, whether you use it for internal or external audiences, the core idea is simple, and it is the same: Service is the process of making and fulfilling promises to customers.

You can put the act of making and fulfilling a promise into each one of the definitions of “service” that are typically used, and they not only work, but are made even more distinct from each other.

I’ve said here that service is important because every business is a service business. What I mean is that every organization is in business to make and fulfill promises.

If you want to get better at service, one way is to take a long look at how your organization deals with promises. How you make them to customers, how you make it possible for them to be fulfilled, and ultimately how - or how well - you keep them.

A performance diner misses a note.

2011-03-21T17:59:00.000-07:00

Traveling through Ontario last week, I unexpectedly came across a new restaurant location of a burger joint that served as a hangout in college. While it wasn't the original location from my youth, my wife (who frequented the same place in her collegiate days) and I stoppped in for some nostalgia.

The original was a great old diner with a vintage feel. Great food. The experience was made more unique by their tendency to sing out the orders in unison as they were taken from the customer. It wasn’t a necessary component of the experience, but it was a unique touch and a differentiator for those who appreciated the kitsch of the physical environment.

Fast forward ten years, and my college hangout has been somewhat successful. They’ve expanded goegraphically, including the location we patronized.

The experience is designed to be the same, but in a small single location remote from the original business, it didn’t come off as consistent with the original. The retro restaurant layout was similar, and the food was still exceptional. But the performance component of the experience that involved singing was half-hearted at best, and sometimes abandoned entirely. My guess is that remote location employees, who had never seen the experience effect of the original but been coached to execute it, failed to see what that aspect of the experience added.

Consistency of the experience is tough to maintain as a business grows and control over how the service is executed gets more & more remote.

As the business grows, revisit the service experience from time to time to see what components still fit with the overall service vision, which don’t and which, while they may fit, have become too difficult to execute.

If this business had done so, rather than just stamping out copies of the original model and expecting them to work in alternate locations with different management and employees, it would have noted that the singing component of the experience wasn’t core, that it was increasingly difficult to execute consistently as the business grows.

Its true that every service encounter is a performance. But if your performance contains elements that are tough to execute and are not critical to the experience, consider editing the routine to place more emphasis on elements that will create an impact.

Changing customer behavior? Choose carrot or stick carefully.

2011-03-06T23:59:00.001-08:00

I got an email from my insurance agent, informing me that I hadn’t signed up for electronic delivery of my bill. It turned out that I was still receiving paper bills and, sensibly, they wanted me to shift to paperless transactions.

But they didn’t just rely on an appeal to my sense of morality to get me to make the transition.

To motivate me to change my behavior, they told me that if I weren’t to change my billing to the paperless option, I would lose my 10% ebilling discount (that frankly, I was unaware I had.)

There are a lot of ways to get customers to change their behavior. In many cases, change is as easy as letting customers know what behavior you expect of them. In others, the only way to effect the change in customer behavior is align the customers benefit with it. Some companies gently make it worth the customer’s effort to change. Southwest Airlines is a master at this, for example, getting customers to the gate early through their unique boarding process and keeping them close by with comfortable chairs and electrical outlets.

Another way to align customer interests with the desired behavior is to punish the alternative.

In this case, my insurance company suggested that a benefit I already receive would be lost if I failed to act the way they wanted.

Whether the discount was real or not is almost immaterial. I was going to have to pay an additional 10% if I didn’t make the small change in behavior they were asking for - enough for me to go online and make the shift.

Both methods of changing customer behavior can be effective. Of course, Southwest’s behavior changes are subtle enough that most don’t even perceive them until they’re ingrained, and their efforts often win them fans along the way. My insurance company on the other hand? Well, the threat was definitely perceived. And while it didn’t upset me any (it might others) it certainly won’t endear them to me either.

Great Servicescapes: Shear Madness

2011-03-06T23:59:00.000-08:00

I get bored during haircuts. Maybe it’s the boy in me, but I still see my regular trip to the barber as a necessary evil, something to be put off for any good reason.

I can’t imagine being 5, or worse, 2, and having to endure twenty minutes in a barber’s chair.

Luckily, my boys have a great service environment to have their haircut encounters.

Shear Madness takes what could be an almost interminable half hour in a young man’s life and turns it into enough fun to ask for by name.

The experience was created as seen through the lens of its customers. Chairs are various forms of transportation, from a Blue Angels fighter or NASCAR replica to a Malibu Barbie Corvette. Every station has a dedicated TV that plays a variety of children’s programming all day, every day. Kids don’t like Dora & Spongebob? TV’s are Playstation-equipped so that young customers can play video games while their hair is cut. Because we don’t have video games in the home, my eldest son thought until recently that the barber was the only place they existed. “I wish I could get my hair cut every day” is not a phrase I have ever said, much less when I was five.

It’s not revolutionary.

But if you can remember the excruciating experience of going to the dentist when you were young, having all manner of pokes, prods and poor tastes and then being “rewarded” with a sucker upon leaving, you’ll admit that it is innovative.

They’ve picked their customer - I can’t overstate how important that is - and oriented the experience to them, making the experience consistent from the front door to the chair and back. Their focus is resolute enough that they get their testimonials from their child customers and the parents who share the experiences - and pay the bill.

They’re not catering to everyone. I suspect by the time my guys are ten, they won’t care for it any more. Maybe they’ll think it’s too childish. (Though I wish I had entertaining distractions while tending to my regular grooming even now)

But there’ll be a lot of haircuts between now and then, and they’ll get most of them.

"Dinner & a movie" gets a completely new meaning.

2011-03-01T23:59:00.000-08:00

Dinner & a movie.

You’ve heard the phrase. Likely been on a date that fits the description.

How did it play out? What were the steps?

For most of my adolescent / adult life, dinner & a movie has involved me accompanying someone to dinner. We go through the full service encounter of a meal. Maybe it includes drinks. At the end of that service experience, we then we leave the restaurant and go to a movie to engage in another, completely separate, service experience.

So why has it taken so long to put these experiences together in a single service experience?

AMC Theatres’ Fork & Screen is the type of in-theatre dining experience that is quickly becoming more common. It combines a small capacity theatre with a full-service restaurant & bar for in-viewing table service.

It’s service genius, but I don’t feel that it should have been. To moviegoers, it is a unique experience, but it simply combines two pre-existing experiences in a new way. Two experiences that have been linked since both have been in existence. So why is Dinner AT a movie only becoming more common now?

Because as business owners and service managers tend to be narrow in our definitions of their business model. On one hand, restaurants are busy trying to be the most successful restaurant on their block, in their category, whatever. On the other, theatres are trying to take share from the other local theatres - so much so that it takes a special brand of myopia to operate a movie theatre, knowing that many patrons are coming directly from a meal, have in your theatre a foodservice operation, yet never link that perhaps you could be stealing share from another industry entirely by viewing your business model a little more expansively.

Somebody looks a little more expansively at what customers do before and after their experience, and bring forward a new experience that either existing model are at a disadvantage competing against.

So what’s your industry’s “dinner & a movie”?

When customer service help is unwanted.

2011-02-26T23:59:00.000-08:00

On Saturday mornings, before the rest of the house wakes up, I do my weekly bills. Just me, a semi-dark house, ample quiet, the first coffee of the day, no interruptions.

So I was surprised and annoyed when my bank popped a proactive customer service chat into my bill paying session with an offer of help to find the financial services solutions I need.

I don’t know what I found more bothersome – the intrusion of someone popping in on me while in the secure section of my financial management site, or that because I was in online bill pay section of the site, it would have been unlikely that they could have assisted me in my self-service. (Unless they were offering to take the gas bill off my hands for this month.)

My reaction was so viscerally negative that the options to accept the chat or close the window didn’t seem enough – I wanted a button that said, “No, and don’t ever ask again.”

I know that customer service groups engage in proactive chat to route people away from customer service lines and to drive revenue from additional service purchases. And I'm aware that my bank knows what I have in my checking account. But I view this encounter like I would my doctor asking me when I'm going to schedule a prostate exam while we're in the health club steam room – I may need the advice, but the time & place is inappropriate. I’ll ask on my own terms, thank you.

Am I overreacting here?

In a successful service encounter, the provider knows when to play their role and when to step back let the customer play theirs. In this case, I feel the provider entered into a part of the encounter where they weren’t welcome. But is this where service encounters enabled by technology are headed? Is this the new service model, and in two years I’m going to be laughing at myself for stodgily refusing someone’s help?

Related, has self-service become pervasive and have we been so well trained as customers that we now get offended when someone offers help? I can’t help but think that if someone offered to pump my gas, I might have a similar reaction.

Be dramatic, but be real.

2011-02-21T11:59:00.000-08:00

On a date to a local French restaurant we’d been meaning to try for some time, my wife and I encountered a well-intentioned service touch that didn’t fit the experience.

Upon entering the restaurant, we were greeted by the host with a well spoken “Bon soir, Monsieur et Madame.” I thought it was a nice touch. My wife, a fluent French speaker, wondered aloud after we were seated whether she & the rest of the staff could really speak French.

When it came time to order, she followed the host’s lead, speaking only in French. The experiment didn’t last long, our server stopping her to repeat the order in English. The service miscue didn’t let either of us down - in suburban Kansas City, our expectation wasn’t of a fully authentic French dining experience - but it was an unnecessarily poor opening, given that the food was outstanding and the service was otherwise terrific.

As you craft the service experience, at some point you must decide whether that experience will be an exact representation of your vision, or the best possible experience you can consistently create.

In this example, the exact representation of the vision means that the owner would commit to finding French-speaking staff. But that decision has other implications. The market for French servers in Kansas City is relatively small. Finding and keeping an authentic French-speaking staff would likely cost more than for a comparable restaurant. They might have to increase prices to compensate for the authenticity of the experience, which then changes other strategic aspects, such as whether the location is appropriate. It is definitely more work, but if the vision is to be 100% authentic, you have to commit to it.

More frequently, service businesses take the alternate route. This one did, compromising on some elements, making the experience as close as possible to French dining as they could without taking on the additional work and cost of finding French-speaking service staff. This choice is perfectly acceptable, and strategically may be the better of the two. It’s true that people have an expectation of the experience even before they try it, but you have the opportunity to set appropriate expectations through each service encounter.

The one choice you should not make is to fake the experience you want people to perceive you will give them. Whether your vision is to be consistent in every little detail of the experience or to provide an experience that sacrifices on some touchpoints, but has a more broad appeal, always go with the reality of who you are over the falsity of who you think people may wish you were.

If the experience is good, people will forgive the little stuff that is out of place.

Alex Trebek's Service Innovation Contribution.

2011-02-16T06:59:00.000-08:00

The IBM Jeopardy challenge is captivating technophiles and game show fans alike this week as Watson – IBM’s artificial intelligence designed to answer natural language questions – competes against two all-time Jeopardy champions. Reactions to the highly televised demo have ranged from outright wonder to outright fear – the latter based on an idea that Watson may somehow show up tomorrow to compete for a job you’re applying to. (If that is the case, I’d suggest working on your trivia skills for the interview.)

The demonstration also has drawn me in. Not because of trivia or tech inclinations - both of which I may have - but because I’m a service geek.

In the last six months, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing two Senior IBMers talk about the Jeopardy Challenge, which we now know as Watson: first Nicholas Donofrio at the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce Innovation Conference and then Robert Morris, keynoting at the WP Carey Compete Through Service Symposium.

Both speakers shared a vision of the Jeopardy Challenge algorithm intelligence initiating a service quality revolution similar to what we saw in product quality in the latter half of the last century.

It makes for good strategy that the world’s largest service business positions itself to lead in a global service economy that for some countries already approaches 75% of GDP.

In the IBM view, service quality refers mostly to the ability for service encounters to produce a successful outcome. It's these service consistency & reliability problems – the type for which understanding of solving problems expressed in human language is critical – that are the future for Watson.

It makes sense. Variability among front line service employees, customers and in the service environment make for results that are more difficult to replicate than in product businesses. Putting Watsn-like technology on the front line of service would help reduce variance in the experience customer interaction-to-customer interaction.

But service quality isn’t just about reliability. Successful service experiences may be based as much on the less concrete experience dimensions of responsiveness, empathy and assurance as they are on outcome reliability. Because of this, prudence needs to be used in applying the technology. It carries the risk of improving reliability of outcomes, while at the same time reducing the ability to provide the less tangible responsiveness, empathy and assurance aspects of service quality that many service encounters are ultimately judged by.

While Watson is gaining praise for its second day dismantling of a pair of Jeopardy Hall-of-Famers, I’m still more interested in what it's going to do next.

Homeaway.com wants to save me from hotel stays.

2011-02-03T21:59:00.000-08:00

In preparation for #BZBowl, I’m experiencing as many of the SuperBowl advertisers’ products & services as possible, comparing whether my service encounter lives up to the promises they make through marketing. Today’s #BZBowl Week post involves CareerBuilder.com.

Homeaway.com is back for the SuperBowl in 2011, after last year’s ad featuring Beverly D’Angelo and Chevy Chase reprising their roles as the vacationing Griswolds. They pre-released the 2011 ad, featuring a representative of The Ministry of Detourism, a government agency committed to saving vacations.

Interesting about this ad is that Homeaway that isn’t trying to compare favorably to their category, rather trying to convert vacation travelers from a different accommodations services category to a better option.

To pull it off, the ad empathizes with the traveler, both showing and explaining how hotel stays can cramp and otherwise ruin a family’s holiday and paid off with the line, “Space! Privacy! Freedom! Why hotel when you can home away?”

The ad promises that Homeaway will provide a superior experience to what you would find in a hotel at comparable cost., explaining that the Ministry of Detourism is committed to saving vacations by preventing families from “getting swindled because hotels hate your guts.” The reliability message is continued as the family moves down a moving walkway, surrounded by flat screens showcasing the multitude of accommodations options available.

Interactive marketing users find homeaway.com consistent with the service promises made in the ad. Reliability and empathy are reinforce through claims of “The world’s most trusted vacation rental site”, “The world's largest selection of vacation homes, condos, cabins & villas” and reinforcement of the favorable comparison to the hotel experience.

The user experience reflects the same themes and carries them a step further. Browsing for a European rental property for a future vacation with my wife, HomeAway offered more than 17,000 options in Spain alone, sortable by property type, location type, and travel style.

The experience provides further assurance to the quality of the properties they represent through detailed reviews of past travelers, tons of images of the properties and videos showcasing the accommodations and their surroundings.

Homeaway isn’t competing to be the best in their category, they’re trying to redefine their category and compete against what they position as an inferior experience. For me, at least, it was effective. For vacations, I’ve always consumed hotel experience. Homeaway has me considering the vacation rental alternative for the first time. As the company that made the alternative viable, they’ve got the inside track for my business.

"Why yes, Ms. Fossey, we do have a job for you"

2011-02-02T14:59:00.000-08:00

In preparation for #BZBowl, I’m experiencing as many of the SuperBowl advertisers’ products & services as possible, comparing whether my service encounter lives up to the promises they make through marketing. Today’s #BZBowl Week post involves CareerBuilder.com.

CareerBuilder is bringing the monkeys back to the Super Bowl. It carries on the line of prior Super Bowl ads, and since simians are comedic gold, I’m sure this one will win rave reviews on Monday. But what is CareerBuilder promising with the monkey ads?

A line from a previous version exclaimed, “It’s tough working with monkeys, and we’ve had enough.” A pretty clear play on empathy with the jobseeker - that CareerBuilder understands what it is like to work in an environment where coworkers are non-supportive, disengaged, and even dumb - and that they can help match a jobseeker with a company where all ones coworkers aren't monkeys. Personally, I’ve never worked with monkeys. (Something Matthew Broderick can’t say.) Sure, there is the infrequent gorilla in my midst, but in my experience, anyone convinced that they work in an all monkey environment is usually the person displaying the ape-like behavior.

Their other tag lines promise a little more, but not much:

From the candidate side, “Want a new job? We’ve got the most.” and from the employer side, “Need better candidates? We’ve got the most”. Abundance is a clear promise, but it conflicts with the monkey theme. If you have both the most candidates and the most jobs, it seems that CareerBuilder would be the most likely congregating place for monkey candidates looking for monkey jobs.

They also add “A better job awaits” onto the line. If you buy the “I work with monkeys” theme, this is a much more meaningful promise, that using CareerBuilder services will improve the quality of your work life by reliably finding a better job fit, or at least one with less flying feces.

The interactive marketing on CareerBuilder.com continues the volume promise, claiming 1.6 million jobs on the site. After I registered, I immediately started receiving updates of positions – both on the site and emailed to me. The quality of fit for almost all would have been suspect, but the activity reinforced the promise that, “hey, there’s lots of stuff here for you to be interested in.” If I were looking for sheer volume of postings, I might be very happy with CareerBuilder. It’s possible I’d still be working with monkeys – just in a different barrel.

Empathy and assurance are key service aspects to a job seeker. So is reliability. Through advertising and interactive marketing, CareerBuilder offered little of any. What they promise, and deliver on, is volume. It’s a flexibility promise that implies because we have the most, we MUST have something for you.

You may just have to get used to monkeys.

GoDaddy makes ads people love to hate, but how’s the service?

2011-02-01T11:59:00.000-08:00

In preparation for #BZBowl, I’m experiencing as many of the SuperBowl advertisers’ products & services as possible, comparing whether my service encounter lives up to the promises they make through marketing. Today’s #BZBowl Week post involves GoDaddy.com.

GoDaddy.com is a Super Bowl mainstay. Every year, they prominently feature a tacky ad featuring one of the GoDaddy girls that everyone claims to dislike, yet everyone will be talking about the next day.

But are the ads effective? Before you answer, quickly name 2 other web hosting sites.

I don’t question their efficacy. When I began consuming domain registry and web hosting services, I went straight to GoDaddy without considering anyone else. They were the only provider I was aware of, and so they got my business.

Purchasing top-of-mind awareness can be an effective strategy for gaining customers, but if it isn’t accompanied by quality service, it can be an ineffective one for keeping them.

The first in the Jillian Michaels series of commercials gives some insight into the promises GoDaddy makes through advertising, placing emphasis around the purchase process, describing it as fast, easy and low priced. Only after these purchase benefit promises are made do they mention quality of their hosting services.

If the ads are a tacky way to gain eyeballs, the website is a tacky way to convert them.

Yet the promises made in the ads are consistently reinforced through the interactive marketing. The site is a mess of deals, claims, exclamation marks and asterisks, mostly messaged around the purchase process being fast, easy and inexpensive. The only departure in their interactive marketing is the promotion of a variety of GoDaddy services, which may be more by accident of trying to sell every service on the home page.

Godaddy makes few promises through their ads, and those they make are consistent with their interactive marketing and paid off in the experience. But while they make purchasing easy, my own post-purchase service experience has been less than ideal due to a confusing interface, made more confusing by near-constant up-selling of additional services. Godaddy never made any promises in that regard, so I can’t criticize the advertising for making promises the experience didn’t fulfill.

But due to the ongoing service experience I’ve, chosen an alternative provider for domain registry & hosting. Improvements in the Go Daddy service experience might increase customer retention to the point where all of that expensive customer acquisition isn’t necessary.

But then again, they may be too having fun acquiring customers to care.

Telefora experience delivers more effectively than their Super Bowl ad.

2011-01-31T11:59:00.000-08:00

In preparation for #BZBowl, I’m experiencing as many of the SuperBowl advertisers’ products & services as possible, comparing whether my service encounter lives up to the promises they make through marketing. Today’s #BZBowl Week post involves Teleflora.

I had completely forgotten that 2011 that Teleflora advertised in the Super Bowl in 2009 and 2010, which is to say that it hadn’t been effective, at least on me.

Both ads were intended as humorous jabs at boxed flowers as inferior products that get inferior results with recipients. The main promise was around experience reliability, that hand-arranged, hand delivered Teleflora arrangements would result in a successful reaction from the recipient. There’s only so much you can do in 30 seconds, but Teleflora tried to go long on humor and missed much of the opportunity to make a complete and meaningful brand promise to potential customers.

But when I used the Teleflora site to purchase flowers for my wife, I noted that the promises made through the interactive experience were different and much more extensive.

They started with the same “fresh flowers, personally arranged and delivered daily” message that reinforces reliability of the experience. However, they placed a heavy emphasis on responsiveness, making a promise of same day delivery on all orders and offering floral suggestions flowers for all occasions. (“Just Because” & “Thinking of You” categories overlapped about 90%, so they may have tried to force the “every occasion” angle a bit. Much)

Teleflora shows empathy with the sender, offering help to those who may find it difficult using their own words to elicit the right emotion. (I decided to rely on my own masterful prose, leaving my spouse with, “Just because I’m thinking of you.”)

The post-order process was full of assurance that my service experience would be executed as I had requested it. A confirmation page & email reiterated the order and set specific expectations about the service to be performed. When the flowers were delivered, I received delivery confirmation from Teleflora even before my wife called to thank me.

At the end of the experience, Teleflora reinforced the commitment to reliability by soliciting my feedback for a product review.

I’ll be interested to see what Super Bowl ad for “The Collection” by Faith Hill brings, but for the 2009 and 2010 versions, the Teleflora interactive marketing and service experience vastly performed the promises made by Super Bowl advertising.

Welcome to #BZBowl Week!

2011-01-30T23:59:00.000-08:00

While the nation (world?) readies for this weekend’s Superbowl festivities, I’m readying myself for #BZBowl, the multichannel evaluation of SuperBowl advertisements that plays on Twitter while the game plays in Dallas. The Brainzooming Group acts as host to a terrific set of marketing & advertising experts-fans-geeks who watch the ads with more zeal than the play on the field.

Given that the single day SuperBowl has creeped its way into a full week of activities, I’m doing the same thing in advance of #BZBowl, with a series of Service Encounters posts based on recent experiences with SuperBowl 2011 advertisers.

As a service experience guy, my angle on #BZBowl is to evaluate the gap between the promises advertisers make through external communications & interactive marketing and the service delivery that customers actually receive.

I invite all to follow #BZBowl during the game, participating in the formatted evaluations or just giving feedback on which of this years’ ads you like or dislike.

Will the Rewards be 'Rapid' for customers or Southwest?

2011-01-30T10:59:00.000-08:00

In a past post, I complimented Southwest for the simplicity of the Rapid Rewards purchase frequency program. As far as programs that create fiscal bonds with customers go, theirs is one of the most tangible, credible ones I've seen, and one of the few that delights with unexpected surprises. In the airline industry in particular, it stands out as differentiated and unique in value.

So when Southwest announced program changes, including a move from the simple 8 round trips = 1 free flight formula to one that grants points for flights based on the price of the fare, I wasn't initially enthused. I tend towards clarity & simplicity. One of my long standing criticisms of other airlines' programs (several of which I am a member) was that 15,000 miles was as vague to me as 25,000. I never have a sense of how close or far I am from attaining the next reward. With Southwest, however, I always knew whether I was 2 flights or 4 flights away. While I would look for a reason to get that last Southwest round trip, I've never looked for an opportunity to travel an extra 1,500 miles to gain another carrier's reward. A flight is more easily characterized as an experience (transaction, if you must) than an aggregated distance.

Gary Kelly's comments in announcing the changes were one of the few instances I've seen corporatespeak supersede customerspeak for Southwest. He discussed how much time & money Southwest spent on developing the new program ($100M over 5 years) and how the new program should expand revenue and put it on par with American and Delta programs. It was also the first time I've ever noted Southwest outwardly aspiring to a status of the legacy carriers. It draws a stark contrast to ads where Southwest portrays the protector of travelers' pocketbooks, while the legacy carriers are the personification of greed.

The idea that the new rewards program will open rewards purchases up to Hawaiian, Alaskan and international travel are intriguing. One of Southwest's operational and marketing strengths has been how they have maintained resolute focus on the domestic US traveler. To serve them, Southwest created a terrific rewards program that kept customers flying the airline. If Southwest customers aren't interested in international travel, it could be a an additiona benefit without much value.

Still, Southwest has a history of delighting me. When they've made changes, they've often been ones that put more burden on the customer in terms of helping their operation, but that also bring additional customer value, even beyond planes that take off and land on time.

Because of a terrific track record, I'll stay open to these changes as they become more evident. But if the program deteriorates value for customers, Southwest will find itself judged, maybe not in competitor ads, but in the very real court of customer opinion.

Word-of-mouth? I practice word-of-wallet.

2011-01-15T23:59:00.001-08:00

Cleaning out my wallet over the weekend, I noticed something unintentional about how I organize information.

My wallet is my tool for my most premium word-of-mouth marketing.

It’s filled with some of the best people I've done business with in my personal and professional life - people who have taken care of me, provided exceptional service, and worked hard with me to create successful outcomes.

I keep their information in my wallet because they're people that make me look better when I link them to others. They're responsive, reliable, and they will take care of anyone I send them as well as they did to me.

Some happen to work for companies whose business reputation is benefited by these outstanding employees. Some work for themselves, in which case their reputation is their business. All of them are front line service providers in whatever their field happens to be.

I carry their information in a distributable format - usually their business cards - so that when I meet someone needing the type of service they provide, I can hook them up with the best I know. In service encounters, a recommendation can establish a high expectation of an experience even for someone who has never had it before. I know that each of my "wallet contacts" embrace the high expectations I have of them (and that they've set with me) and that they are comfortable taking on the equally high expectations of the referred customers I send them.

I'm reasonable at keeping track of all the partners, peers, & clients I’ve worked with over the years. They’re in my address books, my phone, my social networks. While they may enter and re-enter my conscious at various points, they're never gone from my electronic subconscious.

But if you’ve provided exceptional service, to me or to others while I’ve been present, there’s a good chance I keep you close at hand, so that I can make myself look good by introducing people I care about to the best servicepeople I know.

I'm guessing that while others may not use the method I do, most people use a form of reference shorthand that accomplishes the same thing, and I'd be interested in hearing how others spread word-of-mouth about the exceptional service encounters they've experienced.

Core & opportunity customers: never the twain shall meet?

2011-01-15T23:59:00.000-08:00

I came across this sign in a Panera Bread yesterday afternoon. It’s a great example of a business attempting to manage the variations in service demand.

In my area, Panera is a highly patronized workplace / hangout for corporate escapists and the self-employed, likely more so than the local Starbucks. Wi-fi access is free and unlimited, excepting the period between 11:00 AM and 1:30 PM, when it isn’t available at all.

Why?

11:00 AM to 1:30 PM is the lunch rush. Its prime time for the core service experience of preparing & serving sandwiches and soups to diners - who likely don’t want to compete with businesspeople nursing a coffee for an hour and a half.

Panera knows that their business runs on the mealtime rushes, particularly lunch. But it also knows it can improve profit by increasing demand in the “off-peak” times, and to attract them, it offers a business-friendly environment to people looking for a place to have a coffee and do some online work (or non-work).

Yet it is interesting that while they accommodate the coffee & wi-fi crowd when they have capacity to spare, they make it clear that this business is not preferable to the full meal purchasers that come for lunch. The steps they take – making the restaurant uninviting by turning off free wi-fi – sends a clear message to the as to their relative value as customers.

My questions are these: As a strategy for filling off-peak hours with incremental demand, Panera’s use of free wi-fi seems a good fit. But by clearly rejecting this group in favor of diners during the meal times, do they damage their experience to the spurned segment, and by extension, do they do their brand and long term damage? On the other hand, is this segment preference forgivable by the people who use the coffee and wi-fi experience? If it isn’t, should Panera care?

Domino's shows me my pizza.

2011-01-09T23:59:00.000-08:00

Domino's may not yet be considered complete, but I’ve been a fan of the move to quality they've made in full view of their customers and the public.

Quality improvements are often made by companies that have had these issues, but Domino’s has addressed their public perception with a humility and sincerity that we can identify with and cheer for.

Whether through its public apologies for “the video”, public solicitation of feedback via showusyourpizza.com, or the dramatization of their willingness to win back customers one at a time through their advertising, Domino's has demonstrated transparency, personality and a connectedness with its customers trhat few service brands are (sadly) willing to risk.

Yet while I had admired Dominos' recent track record in addressing service quality, I still hadn’t used them in a couple of years, until my wife called me at work with an emergency, “we-left-the-baby-sitter-hanging” situation.

The selection & ordering process at dominos.com was simple. The menu was completely customizable and - even better - I didn't need to register as a frequent customer just to order a pizza.

But what happened after I ordered made me a fan and, more importantly, a returning customer.
After the order submitted, a timeline popped into the order confirmation screen, showing the order preparation & delivery process and the status of my order as it moved. The tracker might be dismissed as gimmicky, but it personalized the service in a unique way, particularly when stage 2 informed me that "Stephen began custom-making my order at 5:12 PM."

Adding a tangible personalization of the experience in the form of greater visibility to the service process, (including using the names of the people involved), are elements of the domino's experience that gave me more assurance over the quality of the outcome. It demonstrated in a for me that their responsiveness to their customers over the quality concerns is not just a marketing or social media response, but a strategy consistently carried out across service touchpoints.

Iconic Brand, Generic Experience

2011-01-08T23:59:00.000-08:00

Starbucks got a lot of press this week after announcing changes to their logo.

But it’s the changes to their experience that tell more about their future aspirations.

Last week, I pulled into a Starbucks drive thru to keep myself caffeinated for the last hour of a long drive.

“Thank you for choosing Starbucks. Please order when you’re ready.”

As soon as the words came through the speakerbox, I felt a letdown.

I’ve seen a lot of changes in the Starbucks experience over the years, but the scripted generic greeting broke a part of the service experience for me.

Starbucks’ brand was built in the tradition of the Grateful Dead – not by being the best, but by being “the only ones who do what they do.” Not long ago, I went to Starbucks' (at least partly) because I didn’t believe there was a viable alternative.

By saying that they’re happy we’ve chosen them, they acknowledged (before I was ready for them to) that there are alternatives. That over the years, they moved to the mainstream as the mainstream has moved toward them. That now, they really are just a fast food chain (albeit still one with good service) that happens to sell coffee, rather than “The American 3rd Place” of Howard Schultz’ original vision.

Branding expert Mike Brown (amongst others) pondered over whether the rebranding represents a push toward the iconic, needs-no-words, brand imagery of McDonald's, Nike, and Apple.

Perhaps, but Starbucks was already iconic. For what its worth, so was The Grateful Dead.

The Dead chose to serve a smaller customer base than “the largest market imagineable.” The evolution of the experience, on the other hand, shows Starbucks’ rejection of its large & profitable niche in favor of a much larger customer base made available through the strategy of moving to the mainstream in food retail.

It has had many signposts: The automated espresso machines were the largest change for me, but the gradual extinction of the baristas’ personal expression, the move into grocery stores, the evolution of the food menu, the adoption of drive thru locations were all indicators of a gradual move toward the food retail mean.

Rebranding may be the notice for some that they intend to move, but the experience had begun packing long ago.

It might be a tremendous success - who knows how many records The Dead might have sold if they made a truly commercial pop album - but abandoning a hard-earned base for an attempt at a larger mainstream audience doesn’t always work out.

I'm (Accidentally) an Incompatible Customer.

2011-01-02T17:59:00.000-08:00

Our family was in the unfortunate circumstance of traveling over New Year’s Eve. I say unfortunate because we while were staying in a normally reasonable downtown Sheraton, our accompanying two small children made for a poor fit between the hotel and our family as its customers.

Not surprisingly, hotel guests were active well into the night. The room next to us had a loud celebration going, but location wasn’t the issue - it was that way throughout the hotel.

My wife, who always has the needs of our children (and our own need for sleep) in mind, was not pleased with the noise, and thought that we should demand the hotel take action.

After about 2 minutes of frustration, we laughed at ourselves & our suspect plan. We didn’t call the front desk, knowing that there would (and should) be little responsiveness on the part of the hotel. This was a case where we were in the wrong.

It’s fairly well established that people stay up and celebrate on New Year’s Eve, and likely more so in the downtown hotels of any city. Given that we were looking for a quiet environment for small kids and a restful night for ourselves, our family was the incompatible customer in this scenario.

We made do through a relatively loud evening, yet my sympathies were with the hotel on this one. After all, New Year’s represents an extreme for their business in managing customer diversity.

Then, as I was checking out, I stood in line behind a bewildered, until-recently-celebrating young woman whose requests of the front desk included, “Can I get an extra key to my room?” and “Do you happen to have my shoes?” When I moved to the front of the line, the desk attendant shook her head and said to me, “Happens every year.”

That’s right. It does happen every year. Slowly, my sympathy for the hotel began to fade a little. The complete mea culpa turned on my part into some shared blame.

If the incompatibility issue happens every year, then the excuses become less acceptable. With a venue the size we were in, there were any number of things that could be done to minimize the incompatible customer groups. Block out a floor, or reserve corner rooms, for families. Since most reservations are booked online, modify the customer mix by charging more for families, or even refuse a reservation from a family guest. If you do accept the incompatible customer groups, warn at any of several points that their experience may not be ideal this time around.

Incompatible customer groups represent an issue faced by almost every service business. In this case, we were the incompatible customer type that created the service problem. All the same, not planning for a recurring service event places at least some of the blame back on the organization able to note that it “happens every year” but haven’t done anything to change.

Gratitude.

2010-12-26T23:59:00.000-08:00

A partial list of Twitter friends, acquaintances and personalities I’m grateful for having had the benefit of 2010. Each enriched my experience in social media, business, marketing, leadership, and life to an extent I can only hope to ever reciprocate. I’ve listed them by their Twitter handles, but they also have blogs, businesses, speak, write and are generally present in the business and social media communities. The commentary is a rough copy of what I tweeted about them under the #100PeopleImGratefulFor hashtag.

@briansolis, @danielpink, @unmarketing: Terrific work I would not have discovered in 2010 without Twitter.

@KetelboeterPR, @dawnamaclean, @JenKuhnPR, @aimeelucas: For your passion discovering & promoting great service!
@VIVAssistants, @PhaseWare, For some of the best commentary I hear every week in the #custserv chat.
@sokoloffharness: For being a terrific friend and the surrogate jewish mother everyone deserves.

@theroasterie, @johnnystavern, @nelsonatkinsmuseum, @henhousemarket, @boulevardbeer: Kansas City businesses engaging in the social media conversation.

@ZapposD_Rob: for evangelizing a worthy culture in a way that can be applicable to every culture.

@PricingRight: For having the service orientation, but also demanding the data.

@barrypeters, @choypw, @jen_reyna, @jeanniecw, @chris_bailey, @Lisa_A_Ford, @CoCreatr, terrific customer experience leaders!

@mjayliebs, @ralph_ohr, @JohnFMoore, @btemkin: For exposing so many to terrific service design content.

@WPCCSL, @AliciaHatCSL: For hosting the Compete through Service Symposium and advancing the Science of Service. #ctss

@Brainzooming: Terrific mentor. Better friend.

@customers_shoes, @yourcustomers, @ecocustomers: For your passion discovering & promoting great service!

@Jeannebliss, @ChipRBell, @EYellin - some favorite service biz (and it’s all service biz) authors.

@zappos & @bonobos: For leading your peers in joining the dialogue about your brand.

@mannysdeli: For the best damned sandwich I’ve ever had. (I’m a sandwich guy)

@josephmichelli, @saltpeppergroup: customer experience allstars and terrific writers!

@tompeters: classic, but willing to evolve to the world we face today and the one we’ll face in 10, 20, 100? years.

@amandakaufmann, @gregortbach, @action_jay, @ty_sullivan: great weekly commentary in the #custserv chat.

@artduservice, @sarah_gore, @stephaniethum, @jowyang: For your passion for promoting great customer service!

@SybilQSM, @bcarrol7, @KristinaEvey, @ScottMcKain, @9Inchmarketing: some of my favorite service blog posts of the year.

@TalentCulture, @MeghanMBiro: For collecting such a talented group of servant-leaders, innovators, and change agents.

@guy1067, @knowledgebishop, @richardnatoli, @EYellin, @geoff_snyder: some of the best commentary weekly in #custserv.

@chriszane: For the living & proving the business philosophy of giving more than seems reasonable.

@frankeliason: For true leadership in making service social.

@bsdalton, @DeliverBliss, @ericjacques: outstanding service business kindred spirits.
@royatkinson, @marshacollier, @JeffreyJKingman: creating, hosting, leading, giving themselves to the #custserv group.
@ariegoldshlager, @wimrampen, @prem_k, @GrahamHill, @ekolsky: for being my window to the best service design content.

@jedlangdon, @LindaIreland, @meannie, @kevinstirtz, @jon_ferrara, @chris_bailey: Some of my customer experience allstars!

@tedcoine: For being one of the few standing at the intersection of C-Suite Avenue and Common Sense Road.

@WriteTheCompany: For demonstrating humanity (or lack of it) in corporate communications, making us laugh while doing it.

My deepest thanks to all this group has brought the service business community, and me personally, over the last year.

How do you show your promises?

2010-12-06T23:59:00.000-08:00

A nice surprise from CVS this weekend. On my way to pick up a prescription for my under-the-weather wife, I noted a small note at the top identifying prescription ready time by the word, “promised”.

They could have used different verbiage to describe when they told my wife her prescription would be ready. (In fact, they could have just called it “prescription ready time”.) I’ll bet very few people even notice this text on the top of their package.

But they specifically use “promised”.

It’s both a reminder to front line employees about what they’re making and to customers about what CVS and its people are delivering.

I’ve said in this space that all businesses are service businesses. A corollary to that is that all services fundamentally are promises that are made to be fulfilled.

Making those promises explicit – as CVS does – makes the expectation clear for everyone involved, and when it is fulfilled, reinforces the performance in the eyes of the customer.

Many companies have made high art of being noncommittal on what they will deliver to customers. It’s a malady that keeps them from being exceptional. If more businesses made their commitments clear - easily identifiable for front line employees and easily measurable for customers - we wouldn’t have nearly the chasm between the service that companies have the opinion they're providing and the service customers percieve.

Service Rant: How are you doing today?

2010-12-04T13:59:00.000-08:00

I was boarding an American Airlines plane yesterday, and as I passed the flight attendant, I offered a hello and asked how she was doing – something I do in every service encounter, and likely a hundred times a day with great friends and complete strangers.

Her response, unfortunately, was not atypical: “I’m at work, so what does that tell you?”

What does that tell me?

Actually, a lot. For starters, that you don’t like your job, and that I’m probably not going to enjoy this experience. (I didn’t.) That your leadership is doing some fundamental things wrong that, while not your fault, present themselves in the way you serve customers. That, on aggregate, your company’s experience is likely inferior to someone else’s. Maybe many “someones”.

The truth is, for front line employees performing a service experience, there is really only one response to the question, consisting of some form of, “I’m doing great, and I’m ready to perform for you.”

And because staffers’ sole purpose is to support (i.e./ serve) the line organization, it should also be the answer for anyone not in a front line service role.

Is it okay to have an off day?

Of course it is – we all do.

But who wants to hear it? Not your customers. Not the front line employee facing more customers than she can handle. Not your reports. Not the project team you lead. To ALL of these people, the answer includes “I’m ready to perform. To get this thing (whatever it is) going, to not waste everyone’s time and create an outcome we can all be proud of.”

Not convinced?

Imagine you’ve shelled out a hundred bucks or so for tickets to a Broadway show this holiday season. At the intermission of a poor performance, you make a wrong turn while looking for the restroom and end up running into the lead actor doubled over a garbage can, who, recognizing you as a patron, says, “Hey, sorry the show isn’t going so well today. I caught a bug a few days ago and I’m just not my regular self.”

Would you be disappointed? Pissed off?

Don’t think the analogy applies?

You’re probably right. The plane ticket cost more than the Broadway show, the front line service performers had a smaller audience to attend to, and a greater ability to connect directly and more tools to do so.

Black Friday Lessons in Experience Adaptation

2010-11-27T12:59:00.000-08:00

Black Friday provides terrific lessons for anyone looking to see service businesses at their best and worst, given the extreme conditions for all involved. On Black Friday, no one involved in a retail service encounter is their normal selves. Customers and the retailers that serve them are stressed, tired, and have sky-high expectations of success from their respesctive points-of-view.

From midnight through about 10:30 am yesterday, I hit walmart, Target, Costco, Best Buy, Toys ‘R’ Us, Office Depot and Office Max to see how some major retailers changed their behaviors to cope with the demand extremes while staying true to their service promise.

In too many cases, retailers reacted to their highest-stakes day without regard to experience component of the event – unresponsive to the extreme variances in customer composition, behavior, and the volume of demand for every service a store offers.

Most retailers approached the experience with the strategy of doing the same thing they do every day, only more: placing higher stacks of product in the normal locations and employing the “throw bodies at it” method of handling demand increases for all service types. They used the same check out process, just opening the maximum number of checkout lanes, forcing customers into lines literally hundreds deep. A number of major retailers could have taken a page from an airport Starbucks, and at least changed their checkout routine.

But there were some examples where companies changed their everyday service processes to adapt to the environment they faced:

One retailer had premium product handed out through a manual control point. It instantly created an in-environment event, with the floor employee handing out high value electronics from a cage like he was Santa Claus himself. Reception to the tactic was so good, the retailer could have created an even grander spectacle. After all, he was already on a figurative stage; why not give him a literal one?
Another retailer created an in-store Disneyland routing pattern, cordoning off some aisles, sticking arrows along the floor and reserving the route for shoppers as they checked out. Once in the line, the rest of the experience was blocked out by row after row of product not on sale.

Most evident whether in the midst of a good experience or a bad one, was that delivering on promises is even more important in periods of high customer stress & expectation than it is every other day. More than a few brands that tout everyday reliability were conspicuously short of product when customer expectations were at their highest. Retailers that won hearts were those that had sufficient quantities of the promotional product to ensure that no one felt like they lost out.

In short, they didn’t disappoint on their core service promise.

How well does your experience respond to its environment?

2010-11-20T05:59:00.000-08:00

I see my share of airport terminal Starbucks, and always marvel about their dramatic demand variance. It seems I’m just as often to walk up to am open counter with three baristas attending to me alone as I am to join a line fifteen deep.

It’s the latter scenario where I tend to pay more attention, watching how teams react. Often, they’ll send one member, equipped with a headset and note-pad pre-printed with drink options, out from behind the counter and into the waiting line. She / he will then walk the line, taking orders, relaying them back to the counter via the headset, writing the Starbucks shorthand on the pad and handing the waiting customer a ticket to give to the cashier.

It’s an operational change that allows them to increase throughput, using time spent in line taking advance orders to eliminate the exchange that usually happens when the customer reaches the counter. I’ve heard a few fellow caffeine “enthusiasts” scoff at necessity of the high-tech headgear, but it’s great practice for both its real and perceptual effects.

The real operational impact is that the process makes Starbucks faster, allowing them to serve more customers (and take in more money) in a shorter amount of time. This in itself likely makes the practice worthwhile.

As tangible as those impacts are, the perceptual impacts may add up to something just as significant.

The approach divides the time between service activities and makes the line wait seem shorter. I don’t notice I’ve been in line 7 minutes if my order was taken 90 seconds ago.

They demonstrate process flexibility by modifying their operation to fit their demand minute-by-minute. While doing it, they provide tangible proof of their order customization by involving the customer in a direct role - providing the formatted order sheet to the counter staff.

Starbucks’ flexibility shows their responsiveness to their customers. Responsiveness is tough to measure at the best of times, usually incompletely measured as how fast a request meets a reply. It is that, but flexibility and customization also factor into responsiveness, and in modifying the service experience during heavy demand periods, Starbucks wins on all fronts.

Internal Service Themes from the 21st Annual Compete Through Service Symposium

2010-11-08T19:59:00.000-08:00

I had the pleasure to spend last week at the 21st annual Compete Through Service Symposium (#CTSS). It’s been a few years since I’ve been back, and the experience has gotten even better since I last attended. Speakers as diverse as Fortune 500 CEOs, CNN Money’s Smartest People in Tech, a folkhero entrepreneur, a Cultural Evangelist for arguably the world’s hottest service brand, and the President of a professional sports franchise got together to talk about what makes services businesses successful.

While there was great diversity of perspectives and material, a number of themes remained consistent throughout. I have to caveat that #CTSS attendees generally don’t fall into the typical command & control model of organizational leadership. They’re a group that not only believes in the service profit chain that begins with internal service and ends in customer loyalty and long-term profit, they live it. In formal presentations and informal discussions, there was wide agreement on the principle that exceptional service starts with meaningful engagement of employees, and that only once the internal investment in employees has been made can the meaningful customer engagement occur through exceptional service.

Some other themes around internal service that remained remarkably consistent across speakers:

Successful service businesses are made up of employees with a shared vision, understanding of and belief in the culture and the freedom (and responsibility) to make business-impacting decisions. In no fewer than three organizations, employees had a hand in creating core values through some consensus exercises. In one organization, they also prioritized those values.
Best-in-class service organizations recognize the linkage between internal satisfaction and external satisfaction. They’re measuring internal customer satisfaction and loyalty and linking it to (and in some cases have successfully established it as a predictor of) external customer satisfaction measures across service touchpoints.
We often talk about infusing voice of the customer into service design and experience management. Just as frequently at #CTSS, we heard leaders talk about putting the voice of employees into service design and experience management, though a challenge common to all organizations is to get employees to consistently advance those ideas.
Despite being service industry leaders, many of the companies presenting faced financial challenges in the recent economic crisis. Each discussed as a separate topic the challenge of maintaining employee engagement through periods of financial trial and necessary force reductions. Not all approached it the same way, but all addressed the issue as though it was the most important challenge facing their business.

A few select highlights from a terrific week spent with some of the best in service business. Next, I’ll cover the external themes on service, customer satisfaction and loyalty that were present throughout the week’s speakers.

I want my “OpenTable” for appointed services.

2010-10-25T18:59:00.000-07:00

I need a haircut. People can gauge my mood by the height of my unkempt coiffe. (If you wonder whether this is possible, ask @Brainzooming. He’s seen done it.)

It’s 10:00 on Sunday night, and I want to schedule an appointment now, not leave it until tomorrow, when I get into the swing of a busy week and forget about it until I’m sitting here again next Sunday night.

Problem is, my hair place (salon, if I must) isn’t open. Though it should be.

Why can’t I go online or use a smartphone app to schedule an appointment with my regular service professional at a time of my preference? My place has a website, and while it is good at telling me where they are and when they’re open, it has no scheduling application. Nothing that would allow me, during a time when they’re not open but that I have some time, to see my hairdresser’s schedule, pick a time that works and confirm it without having to call anyone.

While we’re at this, surely my dentist could also pick up on this need and stop giving me appointment cards that get lost in my wallet never to be seen again, or at least until call to tell me I’ve missed my appointment and they’re going to charge me for it.

A rule of business (maybe not the “first rule”, but still pretty important) is, “make it easy for customers to buy from you”. Being open online when customers are looking for you extends your ability to take orders and fill your schedule with paying customers. Better, it does so in a way that works to customer convenience. Better still, it does all this without needing an “appointment desk” to be staffed.

If you aren’t available to your customers when they want you, maybe they’ll call you when you are. Then again, maybe they’ll just find a service provider who is.

Managing service at arms-length.

2010-10-23T17:59:00.000-07:00

This week I used Home Depot for some installation services. Of course Home Depot doesn’t come to your home, they use local companies to execute the service encounters as intermediaries.

Since the purchase was a relatively large one, I solicited some opinions before choosing. Those that had tried HD had universally good feedback, while some that hadn’t felt I might do better finding a local contractor on my own.

In the end, I chose the Home Depot brand for an intermediary-provided service for reasons most people choose brands in general. They may not have been the least expensive option, but they eliminated the search costs of finding and evaluating a set of service contractors. While I might have found a better quality through my own search, I could rely on their protection of their own service reputation and brand to ensure I would be satisfied.

They delivered on their promise.

The service was performed efficiently and well. As proof of their concern over the quality of the service encounter, I received 2 survey opportunities, 4 follow-up calls (2 from the provider, 2 from Home Depot) and a thank you letter as opportunities for me to provide my feedback on the experience.

Product companies & retailers are expanding into intermediary-fulfilled services (Turtlewax Carwashes, Scotts Lawn Service, and Tide Dry Cleaners as examples). They are often a logical extension of the brand, provide another source of revenue, and the service-based model generally carries higher margins than the product business. But managing intermediary-fulfilled services is tough. Companies lose a measure of control over the customer experience, and need to ensure that their brand isn’t compromised by an encounter they don’t provide but are accountable for.

Some might think that 7 post-transaction requests for feedback is overkill – and in fact my wife asked me when they were going to leave us alone. Home Depot is managing a service encounter, and an experience with their brand, at arms length. The cost and the fact that someone is in their customers’ home makes it a high risk / high impact experience. In addition to managing the shared service fulfillment process, solicitation of feedback on the encounter, is the best way to ensure these encounters are positive ones. For me, it also showed that they put the additional effort (and money) into ensuring the experience is a positive reflection of their otherwise strong brand.

Compete Through Service Symposium: A source for services thought leadership.

2010-10-17T06:59:00.000-07:00

I credit two early sources for much of my perspectives on service and leadership – formative years spent as an officer in the Canadian Navy and in a program associated with the Arizona State University Center for Services Leadership.

The Navy is the sort of place that, once you leave, you really can’t go back to refresh your perspective - at least not formally.

The Center for Services Leadership, its objective in bridging the business & academic communities to compete strategically through the profitable use of services, is much more accommodating. They offer array of continuing programs, including service business webinars, cutting edge research & resources, and a series of events capped by the annual Compete Through Service Symposium.

Symposium is the venue for some of the best service content I’ve ever taken in, and year-after-year is a veritable who’s who of businesses engaging in service excellence. This year, Avnet, DuPont, Marriott, IBM, Zane’s Cycles and Zappos, and others are represented as content providers.

Symposium offers any service business great lessons with practical application for:
- Service design & innovation
- Use of technology to facilitate the service experience and service environments
- Transformation product-based companies into services oriented companies
- Creation of lasting customer loyalty
- Service process improvement by mapping the service encounter
- Service recovery
- Service culture & values
- Service differentiators for B2B

This year, I’m proud to be not just an attendee, but a contributing member of the social media team. You can look for updates on Twitter under the hashtag #CTSS, in the Center’s official blog, and in this space.

This post preaches to the converted, but I know hundreds of service business professionals that care deeply about creating customer value and want to continue to get better at their craft. Regardless of level or organizational function, the Compete Through Service Symposium has content, experts and opportunities to help any business or individual differentiate on service.

A 'free skate' on customer roles.

2010-10-12T16:59:00.000-07:00

This weekend, I watched my 5 year-old cruise easily through skills test his first formal skating class.

I wasn’t surprised, but not because I see in my son a budding Gretzky. He enjoys skating and puts effort into the activity – in formal practices, when we skate together recreationally and on his own. (An aside, I highly recommend Talent Is Overrated for terrific reading on where "innate ability" actually comes from.)

I mention all this because skating lessons, like any form of education, represents an experience where the customer role is generally greater than the role of the service provider. It’s the extreme example that proves that while different services have varying levels of commitment, all have a role the customer must know, accept, and be willing & able to perform. Without these, the ability to create successful outcomes is substantially diminished.

Proper attention to customer role is one of the more neglected aspects of service businesses. Companies invest in employee training, employee process and employee-enabling technology, but too seldom make the same investments in customer training, productivity & quality.

The result: companies know their role exceedingly well. They execute their role in the encounter, and feel that their outcomes are generally successful. From this vantage point, when failures occur, it is usually because the customer hasn’t performed in their role correctly.

To begin understanding the gap between customer role and performance, start by asking (and getting customers to help answer) questions like:

What is the customer role in delivering a successful service experience?

How well do customers know the impact their role has to a successful outcome?

Are customers willing to perform their role?

Do they have the knowledge, tools and abilities to perform their role reliably?

Answers to these questions help guide us to decisions that make customers higher performers on the part of the encounter that they fulfill, whether it be educating customers on their role, giving them tools to fulfill it, redesigning processes to make their role simpler / smaller; or making the outcome more appealing.

My son’s skating lessons are a successful service experience because he knows his role (mainly practice) and has the tools to perform it (mostly ice time). He values the outcome highly and performs his role accordingly. Understanding customers' varying knowledge, willingness and ability to perform their service roles helps make improvements that lead to more successful encounters.

Who makes your promises?

2010-09-27T17:59:00.000-07:00

Who is responsible for the promises your business makes to customers? Marketing? Sales? Operations? Customer Service? Is it a collaboration effort? And when promises are made, are they accounting for differences in importance of each attribute to overall success of the encounter?

Two recent examples:

This week, I opened a bank account online. The website proudly claimed, “Open an account in 5 minutes.” I love a challenge, and with fingers flying, I attempted to get the account opened under the promise time. As it turned out, I cruised through the experience, but was at 11 minutes, on the final screen, when I was prompted to call customer service. (The account open activity ended up taking just over three days) But I don’t engage financial services with speed as my primary objective, and so while I was critical of what was clearly an overexaggerated promise, the failure didn’t dissatisfy me.

In another recent encounter, failure happened on a much more important attribute promise. It’s recreational hockey season again, and my skates need new blades to prevent me from falling down even more than usual. I asked the arena’s pro shop how long to get them replaced, referencing that I thought a nearby hockey shop could do it if they didn’t have the parts. “Should take no more than 5 days” was the reply, and I gladly handed my skates over for the change. That was 15 days and 4 outings on borrowed skates ago. In this case, the delivery date was a critical aspect of the promise. If the answer had been, “A little over two weeks” I would have gone somewhere else.

In too many cases, the service encounter fails before it even begins, when the business opens its proverbial mouth and makes a commitment it can’t consistently keep. The effect is compounded when the promise is made on a critical aspect of the experience

Two lessons on setting appropriate expectations from these experiences:

Know what service attributes are important to customers before making promises on them as part of your positioning. If a customer doesn’t value an attribute, consider whether you have to make a promise on it at all.

Once you understand what attributes customer value, set appropriate expectations that can lead to satisfying service encounters, rather than stretching your promise to its absolute maximum. While it is possible for skates to be done in 5 days and an account could be opened in 5 minutes, your everyday promise shouldn’t reflect your performance on your best day.

Just what am I deciding on?

2010-09-13T23:59:00.000-07:00

Self-service can be incredibly enabling for a businesses.

It can increase access to your business beyond the customers and markets you currently serve, improve your number successful outcomes by putting control in the hands of the customer, increase satisfaction through self-gratification, and decrease your service costs.

No wonder most service businesses have been quick to jump on the self-service bandwagon and continue to make self-service investments a priority. Unfortunately, cost impact is too frequently the driving force behind self-service processes and technology, and is widely attributed to much of the vehement dissatisfaction customers have with service in general.

When implementing self-service processes, the critical considerations are in providing customers sufficient knowledge, tools and empowerment to successfully serve themselves. The same service processes you consider when deploying your own labor to serve the customer are the ones that need to be considered when you are using customer labor.

I came across this imperfect execution of self-service process at the local Conoco.

It is clear that they’re giving me choices. I can select between 5 different gasolines with differing octane levels when I fill my car, and Conoco will charge me 5 different prices for them.

Unfortunately, that’s all the support I get. No decision support, no education, no sources for more information. What should I use? What is better? I assume that what costs more is better, but is something that costs less more “right”. Is 88 really better than 87? Is it 1% better, or proportionally more?

Variety is good, but in this case, they’ve left me with a choice without supporting how I would make it.

And so, in a self service situation such as this most customers will do what I did – choose the lowest price and hope for the best. Yet many times I’ve driven away wondering if I should be paying more for a different product in order to take better care of my car.

Most companies would blanche at not providing their front line enough information to make informed decisions, so why would they provide lay customers with less information to make similar decisions?

Better information in customers’ hands yields better self-service decisions, more satisfaction at having performed their role correctly, and in this case, likely more revenue & profit for Conoco.

Crowdsourced service: Not whether, but how.

2010-09-12T11:59:00.000-07:00

A debate in the regular Tuesday #custserv chat on whether or not customer service activities should be crowdsourced spilled into the customer service blogosphere last week.

One side was enthusiastic about finding a way to enable customers to help other customers, while the other was reluctant to yield control of the experience to customers.

While it was a spirited debate with a lost of great supporting points made on both sides of the issue, I see it as an unimportant question, though it does lead to some very important questions.

Whether or not to involve customers in the provision of customer service is moot. It already happens. Companies may not be aware of it. They may not control it, may not have the resources to take advantage of it and ultimately, they may decide that they do not want to support it. But it exists, nonetheless.

Brainzooming’s Mike Brown recently told me an air travel story where a gate agent could not help a customer with a new gate assignment because they hadn’t received the information. A bystanding customer armed with a smartphone successfully retrieved the correct gate information from the airport website and provided it to the inquiring traveller. While there are several things wrong with a service environment where a customer is more enabled to provide service than an employee, in the end, a need existed and was filled.

With accessing accurate information becoming easier for customers to do themselves, variations on this encounter happen more every day.

In every service encounter – from legal defense to customer service call – the customer has a role to play. The important decisions revolve around what role you want the customer to play, and how you get customers to embrace the role, and how you support that role’s success.

The customer role absolutely can (and does) include serving other customers.

As such, the choices companies have to make are more fundamental to strategy than, “should customer-to-customer service interactions happen?”

Your customers are already making service promises, on your behalf, to other customers. Are those promises accurate and relevant? Could they be made better with your input? What would that look like?

They also help you fulfill those service promises through their own effort. Should that effort be supported? Will it lead to better outcomes for all parties? Will it lead to lower costs?

Increasingly, companies need to examine what role they will play in their customers’ tendencies to provide service to other customers.

While the answer varies from organization-to-organization, my general view is that this type of service is becoming too visible to be ignored or left alone. That companies increasingly look uncooperative or incompetent by disregarding customer-to-customer service, and would be better served by finding ways to channel the energy that already exists within their customer bases, harness it creatively, and use it to provide better service than they could relying only on their own (paid-for) resources.

Happy birthday to...who exactly?

2010-09-10T17:59:00.000-07:00

Relationship marketing is getting better.

Well, maybe just, “more prevalent”.

Every year, my birthday provides my very own “Big Mac Index” measure of the growth of relationship marketing, as service companies use show their CRM investment by sending me a birthday card. It was novel when I received my first one more than a decade ago. Truthfully, the novelty hasn’t worn off much, though I’m getting to the point where company-initiated cards are competing with the number I receive from friends & family.

But while more companies are showing me that they are using information to monitor and respond to important events in a customer’s life (though no one has ever asked me if I consider birthday important) the use of that information for relationship-building activities – the part requiring human thought and creativity – still has a galaxy of room to improve.

Cards I recieve generally fall into one of three categories, with my utility for them decreasing below zero by the 3rd:

A card accompanied by a genuine gift. The gifts are usually token, $5 - $10, sometimes much less. But these small recognitions of the relationship without any expectation of reciprocity get my greatest response. They fit with the birthday theme of gift giving, and usually get me to engage them in a service encounter in order to “redeem” my gift, where I likely spend in excess of the gift amount.

A simple birthday greeting. These represent a majority of the cards. Not much in terms of tangible benefit, but recognition of the event representing a genuine appreciation for the business I do. Even though I know how little effort this type of program requires, the fact that any effort is taken, without the express objective of corporate gain, makes me appreciate them.

A birthday greeting including a promotional offer. These often come as a 10% / 20% / 30% off coupon – “because it’s my birthday” – on an upcoming purchase. Of course, 10% off means than I’m still likely spending hundreds in the redemption transaction, and doesn’t consider whether I need the service in the promotional timeframe. These create an almost viscerally negative reaction, and have caused me to speed ending a relationship with a company that, not surprisingly, was not a very good service provider to begin with.

Companies talk almost constantly about developing “relationships with loyal customers.” What surprises me is how many of those same companies execute their relationship communications with their own benefit as the sole objective. When I see a “birthday wish” conveying 90% of the benefit back to themselves, I am capable of little sympathy as a company grumbles about their customers being “price-driven”. When all customers have seen through the false-intentioned rhetoric, the only ones that remain are those you've conditioned to be price purchasers.

In company customer relationships, like interpersonal ones, it is wise to remember that we reap what we sow.

On Encounter #2, Zappos Delivers. Early.

2010-09-07T11:59:00.000-07:00

I wrote in a past post that my first Zappos service encounter, while good, didn’t exceed any sort of expectations I had going in. Having heard so much about their corporate culture and noting the cult-like service following they’ve developed, I engaged the initial experience with heightened expectations that would have been very difficult to surpass.

While they didn’t “wow” me, they did offer an experience that scored high on some service quality dimensions – a user-empathetic experience that was easy to interact with, name brands backed by good prices assuring the overall value, and most of all, reliably delivering on their promise.

It wasn’t enough to get me to sing their praises the way others do, but it was enough to turn me into a repeat customer and give them another chance to make me an outspoken advocate. Of course, the second service encounter began with expectations reduced at least a little by the first.

This time, they exceeded those expectations.

I made a fairly routine purchase, replacing the wallet I lost while on vacation a few weeks previous.

After receiving the usual order confirmation email, I quickly received another email from Zappos. Usually when this happens with an online retailer, someone is telling me that the item I ordered is out-of-stock and resetting expectations for when my purchase will arrive.

In this case, however, Zappos was informing me that the shipping on my product would be upgraded to expedited, free of charge.

I know that my service upgrade was an opportunistic move for them. It came at no additional charge (depending on fulfillment costs, potentially even a savings) to them. Still, the consideration that goes into evaluating the service promise and committing more than was asked is worth noting. It knowingly creates a potential dissatisfier if the commitment is unable to be kept, but also builds in the customer the sense that Zappos is empathetic to customer desires, responsive in finding and executing on opportunities to surpass their commitment and is confident in their reliability to perform.

For encounter #2, not only did Zappos retain a repeat customer, they also created someone willing to advocate their commitment to service.

What should companies & customers commit to each other?

2010-08-22T23:59:00.000-07:00

In response to “Decency is a Customer Role,” Wim Rampen introduced me to the company customer pact – an open call for companies and customers to share responsibility for building “long-term relationships that lead to trust, strong communities, and sustainable businesses.”

While it is an intriguing idea, I’m still undecided as to whether I’m in favor of this version of a company / customer pact, or any such pact for that matter.

I’m a fan of standards in the service environment as sources of performance measurement and shared expectations. This includes standards for dialogue between company and customer. But something tells me that in the service environment – the type of business the Company-Customer Pact is most intended for – there are too many heterogeneous inputs across industries & companies, among differing customers & service providers, and in highly variable environments to make it practicable.

This pact has limited scope, addressing primarily company-customer dialogue. Much attention is paid to respectfulness, responsiveness, good intentions and clarity, and provides a good foundation for mutual respect. Missing, however, is mention of pther important company commitment characteristics, such as reliability, empathy, and assurance. In fact, the pact may actually undermine loyalty, as so much of the important company-customer interaction lies in non-communication service aspects not covered by the pact.

Finally, in committing to a conservative standard, companies may actually be limiting their ability to delight customers on all attributes.

In the end the company / customer pact may just not matter much. In any company / customer relationship, companies have the short-term leverage and customers have the long term leverage – it’s a good balance. Companies that exert the short-term leverage without consideration for customers’ ability to vote with their feet eventually get what they deserve. Good companies are going to live comfortably above the minimum standards, while bad companies will live comfortably below it, which may beg the question whether such a pact is needed at all.

So how about it – am I being too hard in what is a generally agreeable initiative between companies and customers to establish a baseline for their interactions quality? Should the pact be expanded to cover a broader range of the company / customer relationship? Should it be abandoned altogether?

Time Warner Cable wants my help.

2010-08-21T23:59:00.000-07:00

It’s renegotiation time with Disney, one of their largest suppliers of programming content, providing ESPN, Disney, & ABC family channels. Time Warner doesn’t want to pay more for content, and Disney is threatening to cut them off. So they’ve appealed to their customers to help support their renegotiation efforts through vocal opposition to their suppliers’ demands.

Using a multi-channel media campaign, they're informing customers that their options are now reduced to “roll over and raise prices to customers” or “get tough and risk losing the programming customers love.” 1 million people have visited the rolloverorgettough.com, leaving some 300,000 comments. TWC has supplemented the site with TV and radio ads, suggesting that not only will they have to raise customer prices if they lose, but that switching providers won’t help, as similar renegotiations with other cable providers are inevitable.

As member of the Customer Service Hall of Shame from 2007-2010, Time Warner playing the role of consumer advocate may seem disingenuous to some.

I'll table whether TWC has the reputational capital with its customers to ask for help for another time. My question in this is whether this represents an appropriate role for TWC to expect its customers to play.

On one hand, the personal financial benefits are obvious if Time Warner, with my help, is successful in its negotiation with Disney – or any other supplier for that matter.

On the other, supplier negotiation is about as internal to Time Warner as who gets Jeffrey Bewkes' coffee. If customer leverage can be used on a programming supplier, why not a supplier of TWC employee healthcare benefits?

Southwest Airlines built their culture around getting the customer to do more to directly support the service operation, with lower prices and better service as the perceived payoff. But a service company is involving its customers in supplier negotiations feels like we might be crossing a line.

Am I wrong? Is use of customer purchasing leverage where the company / customer relationship it going, or is this example an inappropriate solicitation of customer effort?

Decency is a customer role.

2010-08-16T11:59:00.000-07:00

While the commentary on the Steven Slater incident is already overdone, this story has clearly captured the public attention, perhaps because and the deteriorating state of customer behavior and the customer / service provider relationship in general represents a social aspect most of us have sensed first hand if we haven’t been guilty of participating in ourselves.

I won’t offer an opinion on whether or not Slater was justified, but will cover a needed fix for the source of his actions.

It’s a paradox in service businesses that the employees most responsible for the company / customer relationship and that most personally reflect the brand are front line service employees ranking among the lowest paid in the company. We place these service professionals in front of customers and entrust the encounter, and our brands, to their care. Their success is a direct reflection of the support they receive – training, service processes, enabling technology, and management backing they perceive as they do their jobs.

Some companies are exceptional at providing the needed support for front line providers to be effective. But when you look at the worst service companies and even entire industries, their shortcomings are usually indicative of a lack of support for the roles of front line providers.

As the airline industry has cut customer value, so too has it reduced the tools available to employees to serve customers effectively. Fewer benefits & less support have created one of the most antagonistic service environments – in some cases verging on customer mutiny. In most cases what you get is a bare minimum, where FAA-required service components are retained at the expense of relationship-building opportunities.

But decency is customer role and a service provider right. While it would take time and resources, why not spend some time in every flight reminding / setting expectations with both the service provider and the flying public about the role of each in the successful encounter?

The poor-quality image above is the customer bill of rights posted in the back seat of every Chicago taxi. As a passenger, it lets me know what I can expect and reasonably ask for in any encounter. (Yes, I have invoked my rights a time or two) It also reminds me of driver / service provider rights, and what my role is in providing that environment. This could easily be done in the airlines. A seat-back card, some language inserted into the pre-flight brief that lets customers know their service rights, and what environment the service providers can reasonably expect.

It is valid to say that such an effort shouldn’t be needed, that people should know how to act in public. Perhaps, but setting role expectations in the service environment is never wasted effort. More to the point, if people need a reminder not to be a jackass to someone serving them, companies should be willing to provide that as process support to the critical teams of professionals that steward their customer relationships and their brand.

Does your service celebrate new customers or bemoan them?

2010-08-13T08:59:00.000-07:00

On a recent trip, I unexpectedly needed to rent a car. The company I use almost exclusively was out of stock, and faced with limited options, I went with Dollar as a first-time user. As new service encounters go, I came away extremely frustrated by the experience.

I’ve been a National customer for years. Their Aisle services were truly innovative in a stagnant space, and I was an early adopter. The “skip the line” rental process is so familiar, I don’t know how the standard rental process works, with National or any company. For the occasional lost receipt, I also signed up some years ago for automatic email distribution of all receipts. I’m a high-productivity user of National services - convenient for me and lower cost for them.

The first noticeable difference with Dollar was the price – unbelievably high, no doubt driven by their dwindling stock. While a company has a right to re-price service capacity as it becomes scarce, a customer’s first experience with your brand shouldn’t invoke reverse-nickname irony.

If the price was a turn-off, the experience was worse. Already annoyed at having to re-learn the counter check-in process, I was greeted by a service agent equally annoyed to be serving me.

Because I wasn’t a returning customer, he had no prior information to use in setting up my rental. Our annoyance build together as he asked enough questions to buy a house and he entered my endless details into their system. Asked when I would be dropping off, I replied that it would be about 5:00 AM the following day. My agent replied they wouldn’t be open, and that I would have to use the overnight drop box, a process I asked for clarification on.

As he dismissively handed me the keys and motioned me to the lot, he quipped that I must not rent cars too often.

It amazes me how companies treat a new customer.

Some roll out the figurative red carpet as if to say, “Thank you for giving us a try! We’re going to make this go as well as possible in the hope that you return.”

Most, however, provide a more or less extreme version of what I encountered with Dollar. Annoyance at having to create a new relationship, a lengthened initial service process, the highest possible price because they’re not a returning customer, and an overall experience that is singularly unspectacular.

Ironically, Dollar will see the profit from my one encounter spend resources trying to determine whether they can create a loyal customer out of me. They’ll likely conclude that I’m not worth pursuing because I don’t book cars that often, not sensing that I have a biweekly relationship with the company 3 counters down.

Most of it wouldn’t be needed if they put energy & process into new customer indoctrination, rather than treating it like a new customer is the last person they’re happy to see and ensuring a first encounter memorable for the wrong reasons.

You're such a lovely audience, we'd like to take you home with us.

2010-07-25T07:59:00.000-07:00

Some entertainment acts I’ve experienced are among the best service providers I know. Last night I had the opportunity to see Paul McCartney in concert, a tremendous player and a businessperson committed to connecting with his audience (we, the customers) by delivering on expectations, involving them in co-production of the experience, and showing gracious appreciation for their choice.

It would be easy for someone who holds the titles of “Knight of the Realm” and “Beatle” to be self important and disconnected from his customers. I’ve seen far lesser acts disengage completely as if to say, “Your inability to appreciate what I’m doing is your problem.” (Does that sound like a company or two you may know?)

Sir Paul ended a near-perfect evening perfectly, playing an amped-up version of Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, working special emphasis into the stanza thanking the audience. The audience reciprocated the appreciation, singing and well & as loudly as they /we could.

Throughout, the elements of a successful service encounter were present – the reliability that the band would play to (and above) audience expectations, the empathy to understand that most in attendance would hang on stories from his Beatles days and the tributes to John & George, the responsiveness to sense the crowd and involve them in co-producing the event.

But in the end, the most striking element of the encounter was the appreciation that an act that needs no adulation had for his audience, serving as a reminder for the rest of us that work in less high profile - but no less important - service businesses.

He ended the concert with the famous line “The love you get is equal to the love you give.” As a provider of an entertainment experience, that is exactly what occurred.

A friend in need is a friend in deed.

2010-07-23T11:59:00.000-07:00

Which services you use are equipped to handle emergencies? I mean, really handle them? Recognize the state you’re in. Empathize and understand what you’re going through. Act responsively & flexibly to deal with the emergency. Provide the assurance that everything will be alright and the reliability to make it happen.

I see customers in emergencies of varying degrees almost constantly. The signs are unmistakable. A customer enters a service moment of truth flustered, rushed, sometimes angry, in near panic and not thinking clearly at all. What customers want at that moment are the things that a customer wants in every interaction – empathy for their plight, responsiveness to the situation, assurance that they will be taken care of, and the reliability of a solved crisis.

What surprises me isn’t how often I see customers in emergencies, but the completely standard way they are treated by the companies they’ve reached out to for help.

Responding effectively in a customers’ time of greatest need is a strong loyalty builder as a creator of positive memories. It providesan execution-reference halo for a company’s standard-level service. Depending on the urgency behind the request and willingness to pay for a solution, emergency service experiences can also be a tremendous source of profit.

Yet most companies fit emergency customer experiences into their standard operations, using the same process and people to resolve an encounter with higher stakes, more urgency and more emotion than standard processes are designed for. Worse, I hear front-line service staff using policy as an excuse not to help when a simple act outside of the established rules would fix a problem without detriment to the company.

It’s worth considering development of a separate emergency process, perhaps staffed by emergency service employees with a different skill set, to deal with customers in emergency situations.

Maybe even consider turning effective emergency resolution into the main business line.

How about a plumber whose main business is responding to weekend & holiday emergencies? She doesn’t charge the double time other plumbers get for emergency services, but still gets a premium on what is for her the “standard business line”. Her business is configured to cater to the type of work her peers avoid, but for routine work, she schedules prudently around the days she’d like to take off.

Process and people are critical elements of the service encounter, and much thought obviously has to go into providing effective service to customers interaction after interaction.

But for emergency situations, examine closely whether the process and people you have performing it fit the emergency, or if your service wouldn’t be better suited with its own emergency response capability.

The Wrong Tool for the Job.

2010-07-16T07:59:00.000-07:00

I left my drycleaner for Tide Cleaners, and haven’t regretted it in the least.

Master of the product world, Proctor & Gamble also knows how to produce a service encounter using process, people and the physical service environment as effectively as they use promotions in a retail environment.

Still, when my old cleaner sent me a handwritten note to let me know that they have missed my business and asking that I call, I felt compelled to talk to them – to give them a chance or just some advice.

My conversation with their district manager was pleasant. She wanted to know why I had left and what they could do get my business back. Solid business fundamentals - when previously loyal customers leave, work to understand why they did and try to win them back.

I told her I wasn’t dissatisfied with their core service or price, but for me, Tide was providing a better experience by putting more convenience into a service I see generally as an inconvenience. I referred specifically to using the drive thru, as well as the off-hours drop box for times when my only available time was after close-of-business. She was aware of Tide improving on the convenience aspect of the experience, and told me she was looking into ways they could be more convenient themselves.

Then as we wrapped up, she offered me a store credit if I’d use them again.

I reiterated that I wasn’t dissatisfied with their prices - that I was looking for something else - thanks but no thanks. Still, she insisted they apply a store credit in the event that I would try them again. I told her what I really wanted was improvement on attributes not related to the price or the actual drycleaning service.

At its most basic, value is what you perceive you get, relative to what you perceive you give. A company can improve it for a customer by increasing perception of what they get or by decreasing their perception of what they give.

My ex-drycleaner did what so many businesses do when competition changes a customer’s perception of their value. Almost reflexively, they improved value in the easiest way possible – by reducing price, even when it wasn’t merited and wouldn’t be effective.

When someone tells me how difficult their business is / industry is and how tight margins are, I can’t help but wonder whether things really are that tough, or whether they choose to make it tough by following the easiest-yet-most-vulnerable path to gaining or keeping a customer.

Zappos is just Okay.

2010-07-10T07:59:00.000-07:00

I know, heresy.

Zappos is the example of the modern enlightened organization, held up by service & leadership experts as the first company to tap into the service profit chain and the original inventor of outstanding service.

At least it seems that way, with legions of raving employees and fans & the success they’ve had merchandising their culture - the leadership books, the blogs, maybe the Amazon merger itself. They’ve turned into a social media-enabled service industry legend, extending to reach or even surpass the fabled Nordstrom experience and the Ritz-Carlton credo.

Like those examples, I’d guess that Zappos has many boosters that have never actually experienced their service. Full disclosure, I counted myself amongst them - until recently.

I'm a fan of Zappos’ position. They say the right thing about internal service & employee engagement, and how these lead to a superior customer experience. More than once used them as an example of how a good service business should be run.

But I've refrained from commenting on the actual experience, as I had yet to witness it firsthand. Recently, I decided if I was to hold them up as representing what a modern service business act like, it was time for an encounter of my own.

The experience went off without a hitch through every moment of truth. The registration-through-purchase experience on the site, the in-process updates, and the fulfillment were as expected, and I ended up having a good experience buying a good pair of shoes for a good price.

The entire experience was good – pretty much exactly as I had expected.

And there's Zappos’ problem.

Because of considerable build up – much of it self-produced – on what a wonderful a service organization they are, Zappos would have had to absolutely rock my service world in order to be notable.

In all fairness, my expectations were sky high for a first time service use. Sensitivities were heightened to every aspect of the service encounter, as though by having it, I would come away with a different perspective on how a business should be run.

For companies that set high-level of expectations, it is extremely difficult for a service business to exceed them. Unless something goes monumentally wrong and is spectacularly recovered, it’s unlikely the experience will seem more than adequate.

But in a time when many businesses seek to establish & perform to an adequate level of service expectations, Zappos seeks out a higher level of criticism. That in itself says that much of what we read about their culture might actually be true.

I'm not a fan of the "underpromise / overdeliver" ethic that has swept business culture, and while Zappos didn’t “knock my service socks off” with my first encounter, I respect them for trying, and I’ll likewise be giving them another try.

Service like a highway with no fast lane.

2010-07-07T07:59:00.000-07:00

Stopped in to Costco on Saturday of the holiday weekend.

In a hurry. I had a small gathering to host, and I was under orders to come home with two platters of various vegetables, meats & cheeses, or to not come home at all. (The departure call of Spartan wives, updated for 2010 suburbia)

But Costco is no place for a person in a hurry, especially on a holiday weekend. Long, winding lines of cargo ship-capacity shopping carts stacked to adequately resupply a 50’s-era bomb shelter, and there I am, standing with two items.

The self check-out line helped, but not nearly enough. At a point, I would have gladly paid to skip the line. Not double, but maybe as much as 25% more.

For large-format retailers, (such as Costco, Sam’s Club, Home Depot) I wonder why an premium express line hasn’t been created for the busiest times to help serve customers in a rush. It could definitely be done, though they would have to set some rules. For example, no more than 5 items. No cash. No coupons. No price checks. They would also have to provide assurance. “Out in 60 seconds, or your 20% up-charge turns into a 10% discount.” I would have used it, and looking around, I wouldn't have been alone.

The warehouse format retailers perhaps didn’t intend a single-item shopper, but they get them. Forced to serve customers that don’t fit well with other customers, the company can either stick to the efficiency of the basic model knowing some customers will be dissatisfied, or serve customers with different needs differently, perhaps taking the opportunity to make a premium margin on a premium service level.

No customer can be characterized as shopping solely based on speed & convenience or solely on cost. If your standard service model trades these characteristics off to best serve the regular customer, look for ways to serve them in those times they need a different kind of delivery. It’s likely they’ll gladly pay a little more, and you get to provide service to your best customers along more than one dimension.

A 3-legged entry in the 100M dash.

2010-06-26T06:59:00.000-07:00

I ran into an interesting capacity dynamic yesterday when I stopped to run a few errands on the way home at the end of my “official” work week.

My favorite time for an extended grocery run is late Friday afternoon / early Friday evening. Everyone else is on patios, in restaurants, bars or dens unwinding from the work week. Few are thinking about how bare their pantry is or how the fridge only contains condiments – that is a problem for Saturday.

On Friday evening the grocery store(s) I support offer few competing shoppers, though all of the weekend sales are already posted, and scores of people to help should I need something in particular.

Yesterday, however, I also walked across its parking lot to a liquor store. Same time & place, completely different result. The liquor store was a madhouse. The narrow aisles completely cramped with carts not designed for the space, store employees at a near sprint trying to attend to every customer with a question or and keep stock on the floor, every check-out line seven or eight customers deep.

Why don’t these businesses just team up?

They really don’t compete. The grocery store sells little beer, and the only items the liquor store sells that could be found in the grocery store are lemons, limes & Red Bull.

They could be balancing their service capacity with demand much better if they would take the Friday afternoon excess grocery store employees and apply them to the shortage of help in the liquor store. On weekend days and during the week, the flow could reverse to accommodate busy times for the grocery store.

Take it a step further. Move the liquor store from the place across the street into the adjoining retail space, knock out part of a wall and provide an experience where two patrons can sell complementary products through a single shared experience, supported by employees that know their stuff in both, able to offer suggestions on pairings, even “cross the transom” to support a single customer’s shopping experience.

Matching service capacity with demand is tricky in any environment. The natural flows of these businesses are too great a gift to be overlooked. A business can try and make it on its own, staffing for service & knowing full well they’ll have times with both excess capacity and times when they’re dissatisfying customers with inadequate staff. Conversely, they can partner to expand their formats & share labor cost, to make the most of the customer experience and approach the capacity problem creatively.

...but you can choose your business partners.

2010-06-20T05:59:00.000-07:00

I wonder if AT&T is feeling the heat.

The best thing to happen to the company in years – exclusivity on a consumer market phenomenon – is breaking the back of it’s ability to deliver on service promises.

First the network problems and the complaints about service coverage. Then the 2GB data plan limit following shortly after the iPad release, effectively decreasing its experience value. Then the botched support on the iPhone 4 release, including inability to fulfill demand for the phones, inability to process orders, inadvertently cancelled orders and unintentionally shared private consumer information.

You have to wonder is AT&T isn’t considering asking Apple to introduce another provider (a competitor), just to prevent a complete service failure. Too much demand is a good problem to have, unless your business is a network-based service, and that demand is both abundant to the point of damaging the experience and comes at a pre-negotiated rate.

I also wonder if Apple feels like it has lost control, and a once-in-a-generation opportunity is being limited by a partner of their choosing.

Most complex services need networks of business partners and intermediaries to manage delivery. Whether it’s iPhone service or the fulfillment of online retail purchases to your home, most businesses put a portion of their customer promises in the hands of someone else to fulfill.

I don’t know specifics on where issues lay between Apple and AT&T, but I have to believe Apple is not seeing their vision of quality & consistency fulfilled by their exclusive partner.

While the selection process is critical (and it is possible that this is where Apple failed) the day-to-day management is much more important. Conflicts are certain to arise over objectives, performance, costs and rewards.

The easiest way to resolve these conflicts is the mundane stuff that most innovators don’t want to suffer through – establishment of expectations, measurement & review of performance – these are key activities businesses should must employ when using another party to be their face to the customer, or even a part of promise fulfillment.

If these are insufficient, sometimes the service owner has to engage more – helping the intermediary provide service the way they expect through standards & training on what it means to serve the customer in their intended. In extreme cases, they may even have to front service enabling technology to make the relationship work (or in Apple’s case, prevent it from failing).

It probably seems unfair that Apple may soon get to the point where it has to invest its own resources in the development of AT&T service capabilities, perhaps even going so far as to own a part of the network

But fairness doesn’t matter when you’re talking about the detrimental impact to the brand that stands on its flagship product that right now is dangerously close to falling far short of its ability to deliver on its substantial promise.

Hohm Improvement.

2010-06-18T07:59:00.000-07:00

I’m trying hard to use Microsoft Hohm, but someone is making it difficult.

Hohm is a home energy management service with a lot of potential to help people understand more about their energy use through measurement & analysis and change
their behavior to save money & be a better steward of natural resources.

What makes it “work” is data – specifically a periodic intake of the electricity & natural gas usage information from your home.

The theory goes that Microsoft connects with your local gas & energy supplier, who feeds monthly usage data to the service, and the analysis begins.

The problem is, neither my energy nor my gas provider is linked. When I first signed up for an account, I got a message that Hohm was connecting with new providers by the day. All I had to do was wait and mine would surely get onboard. Half a year later, they’re still not connected, and wanting to see how the service works and realize its benefits, I’ve started inputting my own bill information, manually.

I emailed each of Hohm, KCP&L (my power company) and Atmos Energy (natural gas) to see whether they were working on a linkage that would enable the service to work for me. I received only one response, from KCP&L, stating that they were evaluating a linkage, but had no commitment planned. They pointed me to some helpful energy-saving tips on their website.

There’s plenty of blame to share on this one. (Even ingnoring the fact that hat two of the three inexcusably declined to answer me at all.)

Of course, there is no incentive for my natural gas and power companies to link to a service that allows customers to analyze reduce their energy usage – it represents customers tracking their usage and making better decisions - essentially money out of their pocket. I don’t know which is worse – that the regionally monopolistic utilities so blatantly ignore the desires of their customers or that Hohm didn't have the foresight to see that the main value their new service provides required input of outside parties and working with them ahead of launch to gain their support.

I’m guessing I’m a lead user of Hohm – at least in my market. Microsoft should know that lead users of services aren’t typically as forgiving as they are for software products, where they’ll often tolerate, point out and even help fix problems. With a service, if the process doesn’t work and the customer has no way to fix it, there can’t be a successful encounter. If the failure looks unfixable – as it does in this case with the providers unwilling to connect – the customer will likely abandon it entirely, rather than live with something substandard while they “work out the bugs”.

If your service depends on an intermediary or a 3rd party for fulfillment, make sure that it offers more than a reduction in revenue for them, and if you haven’t fully worked out connectivity processes, don’t launch beyond where you have.

“Internal Revenue” I get, but “Service”?

2010-06-06T18:59:00.000-07:00

I made a call to the IRS Friday, having received one of those, “we believe you made an mistake, here is an amount of money owe us, + interest” letters.

My service expectations were low – somewhere along the lines of the 7th level of IVR hell, followed by someone who either couldn’t or wouldn’t respond to my question.

I was pleasantly surprised when my call was answered, by a human, after about 45 seconds, which unscientifically put the IRS in the top 5% for shortest customer service call wait times on this past month.

The answering agent took a minimum of information & quickly found find my case. (Their customer indicator is this handy 7-digit “social security” number. Based on the ease of use, I’m thinking others may begin to adopt this as a standard record locator.)

We exchanged some information, and having identified the source of the confusion, the agent stated, “If that is the case, you don’t owe anything at all.” Some direction on next steps ensued – steps that exactly corresponded to the letter I was sent – and she pleasantly sent me on my way after a total of about 5 minutes on the phone, or, about a half hour less than I was expecting.

Views on fairness in what we pay in taxes & what they’re ultimately used for may vary greatly, but in my encounters, I’ve experienced great service levels from the IRS.

Believe me. I paid taxes for years in Canada. As a civil service organization, the Canada Revenue Agency is far less courteous about it they taking a higher percentage of personal income. While I’ve never compared the codes (too geeky, even for me) my perception through years of use are that Canadian forms are longer & less intuitive than the U.S. as well.

There is power in words used as brands or labels. Perhaps their treatment of customers stems from the differences in their names.

“Canada Revenue Agency” provides their exact purpose & intent. They’re an Agency. Whose purpose is getting Revenue. For Canada.

The IRS has no different an objective.

Yet by adding “Service”, they not-too-subtly remind themselves that the organization is far more likely to be successful by being competent, empathetic, and responsive to the people they take money from, and whom they ultimately serve.

The theatre gets a stadium-style seating upgrade.

2010-06-05T06:59:00.000-07:00

I went to my local AMC Theatre for a rare mid-week date with my wife. Its been months since we’ve seen a movie, and we were surprised to be treated to a new part of the box office experience when the attendant has us pick assigned seats from a touch-screen theatre layout.

My wife asked whether ticket price changed based on what we picked, and when the attendant replied that it did not, she openly wondered why the theatre would bother installing this expensive-looking technology and changing the service. AMC claimed it as improvement to the experience, but I think my spouse correctly sensed a coming change, with movement to a pricing method that varies ticket prices by theatre section.

Truthfully, I’d be alright with it, and I’m surprised theatres haven’t made this change some time ago.

The theatre is improving their service process for their own benefit - extracting consumer surplus from the seats they believe people will be willing to pay more for. Sports & concert venues long succeeded in segmenting their audience by willingness to pay for various levels of seating. (Though scalpers do better at understanding & extracting consumer surplus. I’m waiting for the day when the venues "in-source" the scalper business model to gain even more revenue from scarce commodity seats.)

It’s well accepted that mid-theatre seats, centered on the rail seats are the best in the house, while the front row, side angle seats are the worst. Personally, I’d be willing to pay a buck or two more to sit in an area where I won’t have to call a chiropractor the next day.

Will it dissatisfy some? Of course. A majority of customers will be paying more for the same level of service as they received before the change. It may even offend the egalitarian sensibilities of those who prefer the model that rewards personal time investment with the best seats in the house.

But it is fair. Based on what a customer is willing to pay, AMC undercharges for some seats and overcharges for others. Changing the pricing of the seats to gain that revenue isn’t draconian, its good business.

Now, when I start seeing scalpers outside movie theatres, I may reconsider...

Service Rant: “Underpromise, Overdeliver.”

2010-05-31T06:59:00.000-07:00

Under promise, Over Deliver.

One of the most common business refrains, it often goes by its alias “undercommit, overdeliver”, which is the same thing.

I hear it all the time, as a consumer of various B2B services, as a manager of service businesses working with other service businesses, and as a customer in my personal life.

As a management philosophy that doubles as a service philosophy, I hate it.
At its best, it prevents companies from providing the kind of mind-blowing experiences their people want to. At its worst, it is a major contributor to big-corporate groupthink ruining customer service overall.

Underpsomise / overdeliver originated as a way for managers to advise their reports to manage expectations as an internal CYA, ensuring neither they nor their bosses would ever have to face the embarrassment of a missed commitment - a self-protective, “how to fulfill what is asked without failing / casting a negative light on our silo.”

But it has extended as a way to manage customer relationships, and service promises. External application of the credo is as big a mistake as it is internally.

The problem is that the first part of the equation gets fulfilled. Under committing is easy – it just means that you don’t promise to do as much as you know you’re capable of. But faced with someone not complaining about the level of care they receive, they forget to over deliver. Conserve resources. Get satisfied (lazy) delivering what is “good enough”. Ride the self-created perception of satisfaction rather than putting forth the extra effort to delight & surpass what the customer is expecting.

As they deliver a level of service best described as “tolerable enough not to complain” these providers tout how they “exceed expectations”, when they’re truthfully only exceeding adequacy.

The entire premise of under commit / over deliver has become a source of pervasive mediocrity. It’s why 80% of companies believe they provide an superior service experience, yet only 8% of their customers agree.

The solution:

Invest – time, effort and money – in understanding what the customer expects, and how different that is from what he / she truly desires. Start by committing to no less that what they expect. (it shames me to say that in many cases, businesses commit to less than base expectations) Deliver. Use the learnings to improve. Commit more. Deliver on that promise. Repeat the cycle until you’re delivering in the neighborhood of customer desires, stated or unstated. Maybe even beyond desires.

There are other ways to get there, but undercommitting provides no path to exceptional.

Is Zappos the Anti-United?

2010-05-28T07:59:00.000-07:00

Both companies have had service experience foul-ups that became publicly visible throughout the social media sphere.

United involved a single case of a damaged guitar handled poorly, but that spawned a video since played virally over 8 million times and chronicled as a case study by Harvard Business Review.

Zappos involved thousands of customers impacted by an incorrect implementation of a pricing change and ultimately the temporary shutdown of the site.

In recovering service, providing a fair outcome for the customer is the key, but almost as important is the speed with which the company reacts, usually driven by the ability of employees to make good on their service promise after it has initially failed.

United is literally a case study in how not to approach service recovery. By refusing to pay $3,000 for the damage to Dave Carroll’s guitar because he failed to file the damage claim within 24 hours, the company provided no fairness of outcome. They acted slowly, hiding behind process & red tape, hoping the customer would eventually tire of the claim process and simply give up. Along the way, they repeatedly showed their insensitivity through employees not empowered to act on the behalf of the customer.

Zappos, on the other hand, handled its service encounter miscue with fairness, honoring the purchase price of all items at $49.95, regardless of what they were supposed to sell at – a move that instantly cost the company $1.6M. They acted quickly in doing so, announcing within hours of the occurrence that they had made a mistake, that the mistake had been corrected, and that the purchase prices on the transactions would be honored. One could argue that as the CEO, of course Tony Hsieh is always empowered to make decisions. But part of empowerment is the ability for the line to make critical issues visible to leadership, so that they can act quickly and appropriately. (It’s likely that an organization without that kind of upward information unempowerment is the culprit behind the millions of gallons of oil still gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.)

If you ever wanted to draw attention to your fledgling luxury site, there are worse ways to do it than spending $1.6M in what amounts to free advertising that reinforces the offering, the service integrity, and the brand. On the other hand, while the ultimate cost of United’s flawed customer service wasn’t likely the 10% of market cap claimed by The Times, it probably cost them more than Zappo’s $1.6M in negative reinforcement.

We often speak about the power of word of mouth. With over 8M hits and an HBR case study, the negative WOM is evident. I still feel like we’re a viral video short here, but “Zappo’s Honors its Purchase Prices” is harder to fit to a rhyme.

Pearl Jam: better service marketers than most.

2010-05-17T23:59:00.000-07:00

A problem service providers have with their good experiences is that they are, by nature, intangible. After it is over, you have no product to hold and often nothing remains but the memory of the event.

The challenge is to extend the emotion & feeling of the experience after it has ended. Often, this can be done through creative use of physical evidence – a tangible good the service provider gives or sells the customer that serves as a reminder of the experience and – in the best cases – a driver of desire for a repeat engagement.

Having attended one of their shows earlier this month, alt-rock pioneers Pearl Jam grasp this concept fully.

The Pearl Jam experience starts with value. They played 26 songs themselves, providing almost 4 hours of entertainment, counting the opening act – much more than you get at a typical concert.

They added tons of local customization to the experience, including hometown / Midwest nods to the Kansas City Royals, a local Iraq war veteran, and capped by Curt Tomasevicz, Nebraska native and member of the 4-man US Olympic Bobsled team joining the band for the final song in the ultimate fan dream fulfillment.

As an intimate, customized entertainment experience, I found myself almost immediately wanting to relive it. Fortunately, Pearl Jam knows this and makes it possible, through the production and release of every one of their concerts on an official concert “bootleg” endorsed by the band. I just picked mine up. Of course, I had to wait a couple of weeks for file processing & printing, but really, it’s a very quick turn on providing a quality live recording as memorable physical evidence of the experience that 20,000 people shared.

Start with value, provide customer-specific customization and extend the experience with physical evidence that helps customers relive the best part. Think of how many Fortune 500 service providers could learn from an anti-establishment rock band.

Tide takes competition to the cleaners.

2010-05-04T23:59:00.000-07:00

I love the idea of consumer packaged goods masters getting into the service arena. Long considered the worldwide leader of the consumer packaged goods industry, how would it turn out if Procter & Gamble were to package a service experience?

The Tide Cleaners slogan is “A brand you trust. Quality you’d expect. Service you’ll love.” They’re right. As a trusted product brand, expectations of a Tide-branded cleaner are high. But the execution level-of-difficulty is higher in a service environment than for the product offering. The service delivery operation is more complex, while the experience is delivered through hard-to-control intermediaries.

Fortunately for Tide Cleaners, they're up against some easy competition in the drycleaning services market. The cleaners I’ve used provide the same service out of nondescript locations in strip malls, usually looking more like the failed business they’ve been converted from than any concerted attempt at a service environment. It always surprises me that as far as service environments go, drycleaners are amongst the least clean – not exactly confidence instilling.

Tide takes the traditional model and gives it a much needed infusion of service and brand experience.

The environment is clean, well-lit and with a fresh, coordinated paint scheme that reflects the brand colors. Signage makes the location look professional and provides a physical separation between backstage and service areas. Service employees are consistent with the environment, similarly branded and presented in Tide orange.

You can already see what we know about P&G at work. While I’ve always assumed my drycleaning service options included “clean”, “please see if you can remove that stain” and “light starch”, Tide has branded their experience with trademarked “Spotlift”, “Freshscent”, and “Color Guard”, while offering premium drycleaning services for restoring faded clothes of all types to their original colors.

Like every other dry cleaner in the local area, Tide Cleaners also has a rewards program. Unlike every other cleaner, they tell me what I receive beyond the free drop bag and a modest discount, to include special access services, members-only promotions and a “birthday gift”.

They’ve also advanced some service innovation, with a 24 hour drop off box, and 24 hour access lockers for after hours pickups in addition to their premium cleaning services. I don’t know how many times I have wished for both of these capabilities, and I can’t wait to use them. Finally, they commit to searching out and replacing broken or missing buttons free of charge. Missing buttons have been happening on my clothes for so long that I had come to accept it as a part of the cost of having clothes professionally cleaned.

The Tide brand carries heavy expectations as to what an associated service experience should feel like. On all counts, it delivers on those expectations in a way that not only reinforces my perception of the Tide brand, but has also resets what I expect from an experience with every other cleaner I might ever come into contact with, assuming I ever need to.

Things to tell people who give you money.

2010-05-01T06:59:00.000-07:00

My Saturday routine starts by paying bills.

Regardless of whether I pay online or send a check in the mail, the companies I give my money to are missing an opportunity to send an important message.

A bill is another customer touchpoint, but one with a unique opportunity to reinforce the value that the provider brings me on a monthly basis.

Because they represent a personal cash outflow, monthly bills are seen as necessary negatives. But because cost of the services I use is tangibly quantified, it is a great opportunity to also quantify the value I’m getting out of the experience.

Why don’t companies do this? Because they’re afraid I’ll begin to question the value I receive? Because communications dollars are spent on attraction of new customers rather than improving the experience for existing ones? Or just that the billing process isn’t within the purview of anyone responsible for reinforcing the customer experience.

There are some easy ways companies could be using the billing process to reinforce the value they’re providing me:

Tell me how you performed. If the cable / internet were up 100% of the time for the month, tell me. If it has now been 13 months since I’ve had a power outage, let me know.

Provide some comparative analytics. Power & gas companies have started to do this, but not nearly enough. Power companies should have owned the space that Microsoft Hohm now occupies in energy measurement and assessment. They could still benchmark me against the rest of my street / block, or against similar houses in my neighborhood. Tell me how I should feel about how much energy I’m using, and I’ll likely modify my behavior and start using less.

Remind me how much you’re there for me. If I made a customer service call, remind me of the usage and ask me to rate the outcome.

Reinforce my role as a customer. If something I did led to a higher cost than I might otherwise expect, reinforce the behavior you want out of me.

The monthly billing cycle is the necessary interaction by which your company makes its collective living. Use the encounter creatively and positively. You should be proud to talk about the value you provide, and equally proud to collect money for it.

The kind of physical evidence you hide.

2010-04-28T06:59:00.000-07:00

An important but oft-overlooked aspect of experiences is the role the physical elements of the service environment play in facilitating the experience, setting expectations and providing cues as to quality, while sometimes serving as a post-experience reminder of the recent service.

Lamar’s, a popular donut chain in my hometown, has a loyalty program called the “Lamar’s Lovers for Life”. Like most frequent purchaser programs, they register repeat customers with a program number, and give them a card or key chain tag to swipe with every visit, so that customers can conveniently accumulate rewards based on purchase frequency.

A significant problem in using this common execution of the purchase card concept is the negative perception created in many users minds by owning & displaying a key tag with a giant icing & sprinkle-covered donut on it, scribed with “Lover for Life”.

Now, the good people of Lamar’s have a passion for their craft, and they make terrific donuts. But if I'm conscious of the message I send others via the brands I wear & carry with me, “Power Consumer of Donuts” is not likely one that I’m going to choose, regardless of the truth that may or may not lie behind it. As a loyalty program, Lamars’ may be the greatest on earth, (And it is pretty good) but if I’m embarrassed to have the tag, I’m not going to have it on my keychain, and so not going to use it.

Something to consider when developing loyalty programs for services with potentially negative associations is how they should be executed through the recognition, physical evidence and redemption encounters.

In this case, I would consider using a more subtle recognition mechanism. The "Lovers for Life" name should be changed, and the physical evidence downplayed or eliminated, so that we “donut lovers” don’t have to be so declarative every time our keys come out of our pockets.

Not your fault, but your failure to recover.

2010-04-27T04:59:00.000-07:00

On a busy travel day today, the lines everywhere were longer than expected – at the parking lot, at check-in, (though Southwest reacted well by bulking up on agents to service the rush) and at security. (The TSA contractors were not responsive to the unexpected demand level)

Planes flew on time, but travelers had to hurry more than they usually would, and those that usually had time to spare found themselves rushed.

As I sat in my “cattle car” seat in row 2, one of the last exasperated travelers boarded the plane in a sour mood.

When he was greeted with a pleasant “Good Morning” by the flight attendant, he looked past her, down rows of full aisle and window seats, and grumpily replied, “It doesn’t do any good to pay for premium boarding when there’s 900 people in the security line.”

A great example of how, in service environments, the mere presence of other customers can impact the experience.

In this case, a customer played his role, paying $10 for premium boarding so that he didn’t have to check into a flight at 6:15 AM on a Sunday to get the seat he wanted.

In this case, he found himself foiled by variability of demand for the service he was using. The unexpected volume of travelers (though not quite the 900 he claimed) put him far enough behind schedule that he wasn’t able to take advantage of the premium service he asked and paid for.

This led to a negative outcome that Southwest didn’t create. Still, the customer’s perception was one of unfairness of outcome. In his eyes, he paid for something and it didn’t work.

What is a service provider to do in this case?

Most hide behind fact that their process was fair, replying to these complaints that the service success is contingent on the customer playing their part in arriving early enough. Since he was late to the gate area, they couldn’t hold the seating option he desired and proceeded with boarding. In this case, the Southwest attendant hearing the complaint didn’t react at all.

Of course, whether the process was fair or not doesn’t much matter.

The customer has a negative perception of the value of the offering, and will be less likely to use it in the future. Given that this traveler is likely a reasonably frequent traveler, this is an opportunity to create long-term loyalty (and revenue) by delighting him - recognizing that although it wasn’t the fault of Southwest, the traveler started his day with a negative perception of the experience.

Extra care & attention to his needs while en route, a book of drink tickets, heck even a 5-pack of free premium boarding upgrades – given that their cost is essentially $0 – all likely would have improved a negative perception about a service failure southwest didn’t create.

Even though your service process may create fair outcomes, remember to pay attention to how you respond to customers who have negative results – whether you caused the issue or not, these are still your customers to help recover and delight.

Are you grocery shopping, or sharing an experiential gift?

2010-04-22T13:59:00.000-07:00

As consumers, we love giving recommendations.

Even more, we love sharing our outstanding service experiences with others, as an experiential gift, so that people who haven’t tried the services we love can experience what we do.

Of course, a shared experience changes the dynamics of the encounter completely, particularly when an expert customer is accompanied by one experiencing it for the first time.

The expectations of the expert increase as they want to show off their recommended service experience at its best. At the same time, the productivity of the expert declines as they have to explain details and nuances of the experience to the novice. Most often, however, the enjoyment level of both parties is extremely high, the expert satisfied in giving the gift of experience and the novice satisfied with a new experience.

So it was when I took my mother to Whole Foods for the 1st time this week.

Faced with the abundance of quality ingredients, in no time she had me running up and down aisles looking for obscure items for the week’s meals. I’ll admit with no shame that I had to stop mid-process for a coffee break.

She was clearly enjoying the experience, but I tensed just a little when she sent me to the butcher with the instructions, “see if they’ll bone a couple of chickens.” I love customizing the experience, and Whole Foods does it routinely and well. Yet I was anxious, given that I didn’t know whether they would or could fulfill this special request. My anxiety level increased when the butcher claimed she was willing, but had never boned a chicken in-store in 15 years of work. Still, I wanted to help Whole Foods deliver a special experience to someone I had brought to them, so we decided it was worth a try.

Of course, when I triumphantly returned with 2 two fully boned chickens, my mother proclaimed, “Impressive. At home, my butcher would never do that.”

On the way out, after an hour and a half spent on what would usually be a 20 minute trip, she declared Whole Foods to be her favorite store in the whole world.

Shared service experiences are tremendous gifts for the giver, the reciever, and the company providing the new service encounter.

What I seldom see are examples of companies effectively making customers want to share their experiences with others, making the shared experiences more productive, and creating delightful outcomes in these special, but frequent, types of encounters.

Big companies should learn to fail like the little guys.

2010-04-21T08:59:00.000-07:00

In hurry between work and an evening engagement, I called my favorite local pizzeria and ordered pizza from my car. The order was taken, customized when I was asked whether I wanted thin crust, double dough, or pan, and I was given a 30-minute pick-up time.

Arriving roughly 30 minutes later, I met with the counter server and had the following exchange:

“Are you Chris?”

“Yes I am.”

“Just pulled your pizza out, realized it was thin crust when you ordered double-dough. I’m sorry about the mistake. I knocked $5 off the order, but I can get them to fire you another one if you don’t mind waiting.”

“No thanks, that will work.”

There was a service failure, but it was effectively recovered when the provider handled it by:

• Identifying the problem himself, rather than waiting for me to discover it.

• Offering an apology.

• Proactively providing service recovery with an outcome that exceeded my level of dissatisfaction.

• Despite providing recovery, recognizing that I may want the initial promise made good upon, and giving me a reasonable outlet for full recovery of the initial promise.

• Displaying an attitude that made the interaction, though a failure, a pleasant one.

In less than 50 words of dialogue, he took full ownership for the failure and provided a fair outcome and a clear process for full remedy, all before the failed service ever became an issue.

Small service businesses have an advantage over larger ones. They’re closer to the customers they serve, smarter about what commitments they make to whom and enable front line providers to keep the service promises they’ve made.

If big business was able to execute on the 5 simple components of recovery my pizza guy did, they’d spend less on service, less on recovery, and less on replacement of revenue from lost customers.

Form follows function, even for experiences.

2010-04-14T09:59:00.000-07:00

The service environment plays a lot of roles, giving tangible cues about the experience about to occur. In the most effective environments, the servicescape facilitates the experience itself, contributing to successful service outcomes.

I was at my semi-frequent local sandwich stop to pick up some lunch on the go. They make great sandwiches, and as part of the experience, have given them pithy names based on geographic origin.

A large menu board and several smaller signs provided the name of each sandwich and identified the ingredients in them. But they recently changed the signage, leaving the sandwich names but removing the ingredient listings.

It’s a bad idea, unless your products are universally known to the market you serve.

We’ve all developed enough familiarity with the Big Mac that you seldom hear someone standing at the McDonald’s counter ask what’s in one. But until you’ve sold a billion of them, list the ingredients.

Worse than just a marketing problem, in a service environment, lack of product awareness adversely affects the interaction.

Before the removal of the descriptions, I could order my sandwich, have the order taken, prepared, pay for it and be on my way.

Now in the same interaction, I ask the server the ingredients because I can’t remember whether a “Siciliano” or a “Toscano” should rightfully have pepperoncinis. The server spends extra time explaining the sandwiches, and gets visibly frustrated with the added step to the process, a product explanation that she seldom had to conduct when the signage did the work for her.

Marketers fall in love with their products, want them have a recognizable name. More important than universal recognition is to use names to facilitate the service experience, describe to customers what they should expect, how it should work and how they should feel using it.

Likewise, the signage and other environmental aspects should be looked at not only for what they add to the ambiance, but more importantly how they can be used to facilitate the service encounter and make it operate more smoothly, remove steps, or improve quality.

Evaluating experiences beyond "I know it when I see it."

2010-04-12T07:59:00.000-07:00

I’m in the middle of an awful service experience with my local Volkswagen service location, one that has left me without my main mode of transportation for the last seven days and counting.

Though it hasn’t yet concluded, I’m taking a few minutes to go frame-by-frame through the experience in preparation for a debrief with the service provider. As I’m doing so, It’s obvious that if they were simply better at keeping me informed on the status of the ongoing experience, my perception of the entire engagement would be dramatically improved.

Quality of the services we produce and consume is difficult for all parties involved to measure.

Because of their intangible, emotional nature, consumers often use the “I know it when I see it” method to judge whether their experience was a good one or a bad one. Regardless of whether the evaluation was conscious or not, they’re evaluating their experiences on five service quality dimensions companies also need pay attention to:

• Assurance: the ability of the company / provider / experience to inspire trust in the consumer

• Empathy: the emotional labor, or caring, behind the actions of the service or its provider

• Reliability: the ability to perform the promised experience accurately and consistently

• Responsiveness: the willingness of service providers to help, and the availability of the offering

• Physical evidence: the appearance of the service environment and the tangible cues that the experience is adequately performed

In seven days of mistakes and omissions on the part of my Volkswagen service center, more than half of the quality deficiencies are of responsiveness. Their lack of follow-up or proactive information management eliminated any assurance I might have had, and I started evaluating everything else more critically, resulting in further failures on empathy, reliability and tangibles I might not have otherwise noticed. A failure on one dimension led to avoidable failures on the others.

Good service businesses know the relative importance of assurance, empathy, reliability, responsiveness and physical cues to their customers’ perceptions or the experience. They measure and manage performance across them, knowing that a deficiency in one leads to perceived deficiencies in others.

For service, dial the wrong number.

2010-04-09T09:59:00.000-07:00

Ever dial the wrong number into a company looking for service only to get passed around from department to department as people who “aren’t responsible” for serving you struggle to find the individual that is?

Worse, have you ever dialed that wrong number, only to be asked to call back in, been routed back to a main service line or “accidentally” cut off?

This happened to me this week, as I called a company I do business with and ended up being transferred into the voice response dead letter office.

In most cases, it’s a telling sign of the level of service you can expect to receive from front line providers in that company.

As mentioned in this space yesterday, a front line service team will only be as good at keeping promises as the central support structure is at making the right promises and in enabling them to be kept. The mark of an organization that realizes this and fully supports their front line providers is where employees not in direct service roles know several correct paths to a service provider, or even better, are capable of owning a customer problem through resolution.

The Army makes a point in training that every soldier is an infantryman first. In your organization, is every employee a service provider first, or would most staffers look upon a customer call with confusion and embarrassment at not being able to serve them? If they don’t have direct service skills, are they oriented enough around internal service that they are capable of getting a customer problem to someone that can help in a single step?

Consumers don’t distinguish between parts of the organization that serve customers directly and parts that don’t. The company is the company is the company, and anyone should be able to address my need, answer my concern, and in return, take my money.

That is the standard that your company is being held to, whether you realize it or not. With fewer barriers than ever to “protect” internal employees from the need to interface with customers directly, companies that can’t provide service from inside will be penalized in the market for their lack of all-organization service orientation.

Employees first or customers first?

2010-04-08T06:59:00.000-07:00

It is hotly debated whether it better business to serve customers as the company’s #1 priority or treat employees right and let them do their best work. Rather than frame debate as a conflict of service management philosophy – impossible to argue to conclusion – the timeline for executing any service experience provides the answer.

The answer is “yes” and “yes”, in that order.

A company’s ability to serve its customers is a direct reflection of the internal service those charged with providing front line service themselves receive.

Service businesses are fundamentally promise businesses.

Front line employees are in the business of fulfilling promises. But while front line providers are responsible for fulfilling promises and creating the experience, they don’t often carry the full responsibility for making service promises. These come from many sources, but they’re mostly made by the company through sales and marketing efforts.

After the promise is made, the support organization is responsible for enabling those promises to be kept by the line providers. Starting with leadership, through staff organizations in marketing / technology / service operations support / finance / human resources, and ending with line managers, all have as the primary objective (though staffers often forget this) of making it possible for line service staff to keep the right promises to the right customers.

Think about the last time you were agitated enough to raise your voice in a conversation with a front line provider who knew what to do in order to give you the service you expected, yet still wouldn’t.

It most likely wasn’t that they wouldn’t so much as they couldn’t. A lack of enablement – a failure of leadership, centralized support, line management or all three – produced that result and your reaction.

The debate will rage on about whether it is better business to make customers the #1 priority or whether it is better to treat employees best. But customers cannot be the #1 priority if the people designated to keep the promises the company is making aren’t enabled to make them #1 by world class support.

Signs we love: 5 Guys Burgers & Fries

2010-03-30T23:59:00.000-07:00

Servicescapes – the physical environments where experiences take place – give the customer cues about the service encounter about to be performed. What actions will take place, what role the customer themselves must play, and what quality they can expect. Good ones also take an intangible experience and use physical evidence to make it more tangible.

It’s not officially “burger week”, but today’s example of the service environment giving a tangible cue to the quality of the experience comes from 5 Guys Burgers & Fries.

Like In-N-Out Burger, the 5 Guys experience relies heavily on exceptional execution of a simple experience.

To communicate their simplified service model and their commitment to quality inputs, they proudly display the location the potatoes come from that will become today’s serving of fries.

Customers get a reassuring sense that 5 Guys has a simple enough service model that they both know where their ingredient inputs come from and care about their quality. That kind of volunteered accountability provides customers up-front confidence in the quality of the experience. It also makes the experience more tangible. They may not know where Shoshone, ID is, but the information creates in customers' minds vivid imagery of the life of their produce on an Idahoan potato farm.

Think about your physical environment, and what cues it provides about the quality of the experience you’re about to provide. Do you have a Mercedes experience in a Yugo wrapper? What could you do to enhance how customers perceive the quality of the experience they are about to receive? What could you do to make it more tangible? Could you, like 5 guys, promote the high-quality inputs to your experience as proof of the service quality they can expect from you?

In(siders')-N-Out(siders')

2010-03-30T05:59:00.000-07:00

In-N-Out Burger may not be a household name, but it's as close as possible without being a national chain.

Their business model is based on keeping everything unbelievably simple, from their supply chain, to their service operation, to their marketing.

They execute relationship marketing simply and well, having identified a base of committed, profitable customers, and focusing almost every communication on this critical group. But their core customers have been highly leveraged by In-N-Out, making them a national cult brand by spreading positive word of mouth.

What you’ll notice at In-N-Out Burger is that the experience is different for their base than it is for casual or new customers.

Where Outsiders see a small menu with few options, Insiders see familiarity. They feel trust in their adherence to a basic menu and confidence built by years of consistent service. In-N-Out has never compromised on quality ingredients, and never tried to sell their customers a pizza or a snack wrap.

For Insiders, In-N-Out provides social familiarity and the perception of special treatment provided by their “secret menu”. Like the Starbucks customers who recognize in others the ability to properly order a complex coffee beverage, In & Out customers acknolwedge an informal social circle for customers who order “animal style” or recognize a “Flying Dutchman” when they see one. The secret menu provides an experiential privilege to Insiders able to customize their experience using knowledge in a way that Outsiders who simply read the menu cannot.

In-N-Out treats their core well, and in their core returns the favor through loyalty, profit and word-of-mouth advertising. They pay nothing to market to me. In fact, they're completely absent from my market, yet they're top-of-mind as a meal destination when I travel to California because of their ability to get paying customers to be their word-of-mouth marketers.

As far as experiences go, I don’t appreciate In-N-Out to the level that their many raving fans do.
Yet I still stop every time I’m in California, mostly because of the word-of-mouth and the promise of a consistently good experience. With enough of these consistently delivered experiences, social benefits and special treatment, I too may in time become an Insider.

Kindle douses flame for sharing.

2010-03-26T09:59:00.000-07:00

My father knew promote desired behavior through incentive. As a youngster, like many kids, I had an allowance. But Dad had always wanted me to read and be interested in books and learning. To provide incentive to acquire books (we lived in a small farming community with no public library) and read, book purchases didn't count against the allowance. Since they were "free currency", I indulged often, and a lifetime love of reading developed.

It is because of that background that while I have purchased and owned many books, I possess relatively few. When I read a book, I'm usually only a few chapters in by the time I decide whom I'll give it to when I'm finished.

Which brings me to the experience issue I’ve developed with my Kindle.

I received a Kindle a few short months ago at Christmas. I love it. I love the weight, love the readability, love the interface which makes the Amazon bookstore open to me 24/7/365, regardless of whether I'm riding my couch or riding down the actual Amazon.

(As an aside, the downside of the Amazon Kindle bookstore is that the long tail of the internet got shorter. BA (Before Amazon) I was limited by the inventory of the bookstore. If I wanted greater selection, I needed to find a bigger bookstore. Amazon gave me limitless access to every title - new, used, or out-of-print. AK (After Kindle) my selection has been reduced again, with not every title available.)

What I don't like about my Kindle experience, is that I'm no longer able to share the joy of what I read with others the way I used to. Sure, I can recommend that someone read a book, or buy them a credit or a hard copy version, but it's not the same as finishing a book and giving it away with my regards to someone I feel will appreciate it.

I'm guessing that this scenario was well evaluated by Amazon. After all, with readers not able to give away their product-based books, logic would suggest that revenue would rise as the would-be recipient of a free book has to buy one themselves. I’m skeptical, thinking it more likely that a positive reading experience from a gifted book (essentially giving away a product being the highest form of word-of-mouth advertising) leads to future purchases from the same author.

Either way, when considering a dramatic change to an experience, particularly one like the Kindle that turns a product experience into a product-service hybrid, you have to consider all possible touchpoints of the product model and where value might be added through the experience, whether it was intended or not.

An alternative? How about the ability to gift a title once? The argument against is that a grey market for digital books develops, but truthfully, this already existed when books were tangible products. The difference is that now, Amazon could use the gifting information to refine its customer-preference sensing algorithms and promote relevant product suggestions in an entirely new way.

Books & literature are turning into an exclusively paid for experience and we’re unable to either receive or create surplus value through enjoyment and learning. The economic incentive my father so ingeniously used to foster a love of books and a thirst for knowledge has been greatly diminished for those unlucky enough to have the otherwise excellent e-reader experience.

Does GEICO need a newsletter?

2010-03-25T11:59:00.000-07:00

I’m a GEICO customer. Not because of geckos or cavemen, but because I had been referred by several other customers on the basis of what they described as exceptional service. Luckily, I haven’t ever had to experience much of it, other than bill payments and renewals.

As a customer, they send me a regular enewsletter, entitled “GEICO Connection”.

Trapped on the tarmac in between flights this week, I read it for the first time in my relationship with the company.

The content made me question whether the organization I was doing business with was as customer-centric as I had heard:

A quiz on recall of the television ads. I’ll dismiss the value of the quiz out of hand.

A new site for educating teen drivers on safety, complete with blog, YouTube channel and Facebook fan page. I can appreciate that educating teen drivers is a major factor in keeping them out of accidents, keeping GEICO expenses and my premiums as low as possible. But is this the way to promote the customer behavior they desire? How about a discount for successful completion of an online test (putting that quiz technology wasted on the gecko to good use) or a service premium for those that don’t complete it? Rather than trying to make automobile safety a hip topic for teens (I can just imagine the social pariah one becomes once their Facebook updates that they’ve just become a fan of GEICO Safe Teen Driving) appeal to the real decision maker – the parent footing the bill for insurance.

A chat with some of GEICO’s most loyal customers – 43 year policyholders that have been with GEICO so long they lack perspective on auto insurance alternatives and what makes GEICO the best alternative for them or anyone else.

A sales plug for the American Express Auto Purchase Program, a 3rd party vendor for which GEICO surely gets some referral revenue.

I’m not saying a service provider shouldn’t work to develop a dialogue, or even a relationship with me.

But spending valuable touches on activity that doesn’t create financial incentive, social / relationship, or service customization bonds with me is a waste of resources that could be better used in other retention development platforms.

If GEICO just wants to remind me that it is still around, the gecko and the caveman fill in what reminders my monthly bill leave wanting.

Sit back, relax, and enjoy the service.

2010-03-22T11:59:00.000-07:00

I took two flights today on the same airline, but the cabin crews were dramatically different service providers.

I heard an early, subtle indicator of the difference between the experiences the two teams provided.

Upon departure of the first flight, the flight attendant, while giving her standardized exit speech, concluding by saying, “Enjoy the flight”.

A completely different speech was delivered on the second flight. Almost all of the same words were used, yet it was delivered in a with feeling and humanity that told us that we would be taken care of. The only difference in verbiage between the two, was that on the second flight, the flight attendant didn’t ask us to enjoy the flight, substituting instead, “Enjoy the service.” The experience matched the early promise

It’s a small change with a dramatic difference.

No one enjoys the necessary physical act of airborne transportation - at least not commercial transportation. The in-flight service associated with it, however, can be enjoyed or not, and it’s the most significant attribute a cabin crew can control that causes travelers to choose one airline over another.

The words we use are physical evidence, every bit the cue to the coming experience as a rusty aircraft with broken seats would be. While you can only script so much before the delivery becomes impersonal rote, focus instead on how you talk about your experience internally, when no one else is around.

Are you managing flight ops, pushing tin, or are you putting care teams in operation to serve traveler guests?

Are you measuring revenue passenger miles, arguing that it's standard industry convention, or are you measuring the number of traveler guests served and their net promoter score?

They way we talk internally, when no one else around, absolutely comes through in service delivery.

It's the difference between the unlikelihood of enjoying a flight and the possibility of enjoying the service.

Welcome to the age of co-creation.

2010-03-19T06:59:00.000-07:00

It was hardly coincidental that a 140-character message from like-minded service tweep Barry Dalton launched a post on co-creation of service experiences.

He had suggested risk in the proliferation of customer communities for products and services, in that they potentially put the message, delivery and operation of the service out of ‘corporate control’. Further, inaccurate usage information from the customer community could actually create service / product failures.

Barry’s astute observation is part of a developing shift, with both tremendous risk and opportunity, around the experience co-creation that the web in general and social media in particular has enabled.

Customer co-creation is a critical part of any experience. Whether it requires a low level of customer input or deep co-production on the part of the customer, the critical component for a service experience to work is that customers both know their role and are enabled by the service provider to perform it.

In that regard, the internet and social media is almost entirely about co-creation.

Internet channels were first used as ecommerce channels and self-service sites – simple forms of co-creation of a purchase or service experience. But co-creation has developed beyond those simple applications, with service / product user communities, on-demand video “how-to” capabilities, and deep product & service reviews assisting pre-through-post-purchase interactions. With help now everywhere, customers are developing a better understanding of their role than ever before.

At the far end of the spectrum, Twitter and Facebook enable the experience directly through their technology and the aggregation of the networks. Then they get out of the way and let the customers do the rest. Users self-align based on shared interest, debate & advance knowledge subjects self-chosen, and largely self-police the community. With a large number of social media outlets, customer co-creation is the product (service).

The result? Social Media is enabling experience co-creation in ways never before thought of. Customers are becoming higher performers through self education, peer-assisted education through vast user communities, and the proliferation of online service channels.

This shift can be scary. The company now hands a large portion of control back over to the consumers, where the product or service usage information may be incorrect. But tightly linked user communities mean that the information is fairly contained. If it isn’t self policed by other users, the opportunity still exists for the company to monitor and correct misinformation. It makes the product or service stronger to have a user community of 3rd party commentators, even if not every comment is positive.

This shift can also be liberating. Users are developing self service capabilities never dreamed of. As customers become more highly productive in their use of services, they make the company more productive. As their part in delivery increases, so too can their level of satisfaction with a successful outcome. Users have more of a direct hand in the service / product development than ever before, enabling the companies to inexpensively tap into the collective knowledge of those who care most about it.

Customers are already moving on this, so co-creation of your experience is not a choice. The only decisions companies face is how much they can enable, how productive customers can be, and what development they can take away to make the experience that much better.