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?

A 'free skate' on customer roles.

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.

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

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.

Are you grocery shopping, or sharing an experiential gift?

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.

Thanks for the follow!

Twitter is a service model build entirely on the strength of the relationships of the community. They’ve enabled the conversation with technology, and effectively stepped aside to let the users completely co-produce the experience. Very few companies have the courage (or the ability) to get out of the way and let clients produce the experience, and in that regard, Twitter (and social media) is revolutionary for us all.

But as with all co-creation efforts, if the co-creators have different agenda, they can subvert the experience, undermine its overall effectiveness and leave people feeling unsatisfied.

Ironically, it is the marketing people that are doing this on Twitter. The people who advocate building close, one-to-one relationships with customers, are, by their actions doing the opposite – resorting to the mindless bullhorn as an attention grabber.

When I choose to follow someone, it’s because they’ve either said something interesting or are mentioned or referenced by someone in my existing network. In other words, through direct advertising or word-of-mouth, I’m saying I’m committed to trial of what you have to contribute to my experience.

Sometimes I get followed back. Great. Reciprocity is a good thing, though it’s no loss if I’m not. Other times, I get an auto-generated direct message, something along the lines of “Thanks for following. I'm a tech blogger making money from blogging and tweeting. DM me anytime.” or, “Thanks for the follow, I look forward to Tweeting with you. Check out my website and let me know how I can help.”

That’s at least a warning sign, and depending on the message, may be enough to get me to unfollow. I haven't reported anyone yet, only because I've been too lazy to read up on the ettiquette. I'm sure I've had the opportunity.

Instead of purposefully building a relationship to contribute meaningful context in areas I’m interested in, they use automated tools to expand their reach, make themselves seem more personal than they are, and setting me up for what they're selling me next.

It’s the very behavior we rail against – marketers casting a wide enough net to live off of the trickle of relevant respondents, disregarding the flood of annoyed people who aren’t your consumers.

These people & companies treat Twitter like a popularity contest, hoping to build the biggest brand as defined by followers. But the dynamics of value creation in social media are pretty much the same as everywhere else: create your position – what value you have to contribute – and craft its message. Work at finding those people for whom that value and message is relevant, and then work at providing enough relevance to them that they find your offering compelling and engage you meaningfully.

Resorting to the bullhorn to create that trickle of relevance may seem like a shortcut, but it is counterproductive waste. It diminishes the service experience of my fellow cocreator customers, and is the sort of thin that turns people off to entire media.

Service Rant: Sprint Wireless

Some service companies are exceptional at making customers productive resources (Southwest) and some are not. I generally place wireless companies into the latter category.

So when I activated my wife’s new smartphone this week, I was disappointed - though not surprised - at the experience.

My intuitive first act to activate the phone was to turn it on and dial “0”, assuming that the network would recognize that the phone wasn’t active and connect me with an automated service that would help set me up.

As so often happens when I assume an intuitive service interface, I was wrong. The network recognized that my phone wasn’t activated, but rather than taking me through an activation process as I had expected, it pleasantly informed me that to activate the phone, I would need to call Sprint customer service. Of course, while I was told to contact customer service, the prompt didn’t give me the customer service phone number. I hung up, perplexed. Luckily, just before hopping online to find the customer service number, I notices a small message on the smartphone screen informing me that customer service is “*2”. Thinking I had the answer to my problem, I input *2, only to be met by my familiar autoservice voice. This time, however, it informed me that I couldn’t activate my new phone from that phone.

Bewildered at the unnecessary complexity, I called Sprint wireless from my landline, and spent the next 26 minutes with a live agent activating my phone.

It was completely inefficient interaction, needing 3 calls on my part, requiring me to have a different phone to activate the one I wanted to use, and taking almost ½ hour of live customer service time that could have been completely avoided with technology enabling the right engagement process.

Wireless companies are amongst the most criticized service experiences. As businesses, they routinely struggle to retain customers and maintain profitability. In a single interaction, there were several opportunities for the customer to serve themselves and increase success and satisfaction while decreasing cost. And that was just the first interaction.

Amazon: more reliable than a letter to Santa

Spent some time last night creating my 4-year-old’s Amazon holiday wish list for the out-of-country grandparents. For a family of expats, the combination of wishlists, universality of ecommerce, and the emergence of inexpensive / free shipping has been a lifesaver for people who care about us but can’t be with us for every holiday.

It got me thinking, however, about what a lifesaver wishlists are in general.

The holiday gift-giving traditionalists will say that wishlists are almost the copout that gift cards are. (and they’re right, to some extent)

Shopping for someone else intensifies every aspect of the retail experience, particularly for a major holiday event or a birthday. In these cases, our expectations as customers are reflective of the expectations of the people we are shopping for. We want the experience to go flawlessly, not only because we want the object of our gifting to be satisfied, but because the result of the service is a reflection on us as well.

Holiday shopping isn’t the only place this happens. Think of taking an out-of-town friend to your favorite restaurant and how heightened you are to every aspect of the service. Satisfaction and loyalty payoff in these situations is more that 1:1, as you get to satisfy two parties, one where the service expectations are at their highest.

More experiences than we realize are subject to these sort of heightened service sensitivities, driven by the expectations and perceptions of another customer present or downstream.

Much of Amazon’s success owes to consideration of the full consumer experience in the online retail environment. With service-enabling technology, they've solved problems of customer understanding that few retailers can in a bricks & mortar setting. The wishlist goes a step further, considering parties beyond the active consumer experience, using their input to improve the success of other customers’ retail experiences at the very time they have heightened expectations.

So many other service businesses would be benefited by taking a likewise step beyond the customer in front of us, to understand downstream consumers and others depending on the product of the service transaction currently taking place.

Why not survey your customers on how THEY did today?

I receive a couple of customer satisfaction surveys every week where the company asks me to evaluate the performance of the company and the overall experience along several lines of measurement.

But since service experiences require input from the customer to execute a successful experience, why don’t service companies survey the customer on their own performance?

This may sound silly, but it could lead service development in the direction of getting the customer to take on a larger part in production, recrafting of external communications around customer role, and ultimately, improvement of satisfaction from the direction of customer input.

Think of what your service business could do with quantitative responses to questions like:

• I clearly explained what I wanted the person serving me to do.
• I gave the server (company) proper information.
• I understand the process associated with this service.
• I understand my role in providing this service.
• I was friendly to the employee.
• The service was a pleasant experience overall.

If you knew the answers to those questions, what are the chances that you would spend additional time & effort on educating the customer on their role, or how to effectively interact with your service employees? What are the chances you might redesign parts of the service to be more user friendly, or have more personal contact at places in the delivery process where your customers are getting lost?

Forget it. I'll just have a coffee.

Standing in line at Starbuck’s this morning, I realized this morning that I wasn’t finished with the importance of recognizing the customer role in providing a successful service experience, as well as the impact that customers have on each other’s experiences.

Because I’m a regular, I forget that some people have anxiety about the whole ordering process. There’s the “Grande = medium” size translation, followed by the formatted ordering of what type of drink you want: how much caffeine, fat content, whether you want to add a flavor and what kind, whether you want whipped cream, and finally (I think), whether you are hanging around or taking your drink “to go”.

For some, the complex ordering process adds to the experience, as memorizing the order pattern identifies them as a regular.

For others, the ordering process is a complete turn-off – whether it’s the silliness of the pseudo language Starbuck’s has cultivated or the memorization requirement implied by the “regular” customers in line.

Again, consider what you want your customers to feel as they engage your service. Anxious? Confident? Like they’re participating in a game? Like they’re regulars? Like they’ll be ostracized if they don’t get it right? Like you’re expecting them to perform, regardless of whether they want to?

I Commit Ireland's Worst Crime.

I stole someone’s potatoes today. Actually, it was worse. I took away someone's option to buy potatoes.

I should probably preface that.

I sometimes eat breakfast in the cafeteria at work. Because most of the morning crowd are regulars, there are established norms that include, “unless you are requesting something made-to-order, you can serve yourself from the line”. Like most norms, it is not written anywhere, just tacitly understood. Customers that don’t want to spend unnecessary time waiting can serve themselves.

Of course, a newcomer wouldn’t have that tacit understanding, which is what I missed when I skipped past him, scooped up the last of the hash browns and made for the register. As I was paying, I heard the following exchange:

“You mean, I can just go ahead?”

“Yes.”

“Are there any more potatoes?”

“No.”

Two aspects unique to any service experience went unaddressed, and it made for a bad start to this guy’s day.

The first is that the customer has to know their role in co-production. If there was so much as a sign that told him to move ahead, he would have had his desire fulfilled completely.

The second is that, largely beyond the company’s control, customers will impact the service that other customers experience. This part was on me. I didn’t look to see if he was a regular. I didn’t ask if he was waiting for an order. I assumed he knew what he was doing, skipped to fulfilling my role in my own experience, and in the process, diminished his.

To “Man Without Adequate Starch”: I’m sorry. My Bad. If I see you tomorrow, I’ll buy your potatoes, hopefully provide a positive customer-to-customer interaction.

To everyone else: Do your customers know their role? Is this answer different from a trial customer to an experienced user? Is it possible that your regulars, because of their experience, diminish the service for new customers? Is it possible that first-timers frustrate regulars because their lack of knowledge gained through regular use? How could you change the experience to be more accommodating to each? How could you change the physical environment to do the same thing?

Hello, I'm the customer. How can I help YOU?

One of the most overlooked aspects of successful services is how well the customer knows their role in the experience and executes it. Sometimes it is an actual element of co-production of the experience – ordering your morning latte in that metered patois that baristas know as their second language. Sometimes it is just the attitude and energy you bring to the encounter. Either way, service providers usually fail grandly at taking this aspect of the experience into account.

You’d be amazed at the effect a little outward courtesy & friendliness has when you are the customer in a typical service experience. Try this exercise:

Next time you're a customer at a drive thru window and the voice of the front-line service provider behind the microphone chirps out a "hello" and asks for your order, ask them how they are doing before you rattle off your order like a West Point Cadet calling cadence.

Here’s my experience: The voice on the other end of the microphone perks up immediately. They often mention that no one has asked how they are yet today. Orders are quick and complete. At my favorite purveyor of coffee drinks, this simple question results in a free drink about 20% of the time. (It is unbelievably sad commentary that courtesy from a customer is so rare as to be roughly equvalent in value to the front line employee as a service recovery to a customer for a bad experience.)

It's easy to forget that even in routine service experiences, the customer has a role to play in making the experience a success. No one would dispute that a client that doesn't tell his lawyer the truth won't get very good representation in the courtroom, yet courtesy in initiating a service encounter at a drive thru is seen as unnecessary.

Before you complain about not getting “service with a smile”, ask yourself what you brought to the equation.

Today is Free Pastry Day at Starbucks. My requests are that you be legitimately courteous to the person serving you, and that you ask exactly why Starbucks needs to have a Free Pastry Day. (hint: There is a reason)