Service Rant: “Underpromise, Overdeliver.”

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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."

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.

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?

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

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')

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Mundane tasks: great opportunities to create unexpected delight.

I just finished a four-night stay at the Hilton Orlando. Overall, very good, but not spectacular. Clean rooms with modern amenities, good facilities, reasonably priced, and helpful staff - even if the concierge’s restaurant recommendations came directly out of my GPS’ index of national chains.

The remarkable thing from this stay: The bill.

Slid under my door undetected as every bill does, this one came much more elaborately than the tri-fold or single-sheet invoice. It was folded and placed inside a simple thank you card. It seems Hilton Orlando knew I was on a convention rate (good use of on-hand information to serve me better). They wanted to thank me for using the hotel and invite me to spend my own dime to stay there with my family during a 2010 holiday, offering me what I’m assuming is a modest discount to stay during a slow season for a convention-oriented property.

Every customer experience map has touchpoints that are so routine, they’re taken for granted.

“Slide invoice under door” is as mundane / routine a service task as they come.

This execution was a great reminder that by looking at all touchpoints – especially the ordinary ones – creatively, you can get much more out of them, using committed resources and processes to create an unexpected customer interaction that delights.