Restaurant reviews also help the reviewed.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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."

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?

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.

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.