Public servants deliver great customer service

Friday night, Myles and I arrived at our ski house around 10 PM.  This was several hours later than our usual arrival time as his third grade basketball team had the honor of playing during the half time of the Brookline vs. Wellesley High School game.    The good news was that leaving at 8 meant very little traffic and we made the drive without delay.  The bad news was we heard a beeping noise when we entered our home.  It sounded like a smoke detector in need of a fresh battery, so I headed to the check the usual suspect on our second floor.  To my surprise the noise was coming from a box on the wall I had never paid much attention to. Turns out it was the CO2 monitor and the indicator light was blinking yellow.  Not realizing how dangerous a CO2 leak could be (until my wife explained it to me in no uncertain terms a few minutes later), I casually pushed the reset button and the noise stopped. At least for a few minutes until it was replaced by the shriek of the alarm, which sent Myles running outside and dispatched a couple of fire engines to our home.

Within minutes, Andrew Vermeersch, Adam Trayner and Brendon Oriordan arrived at our house, happy to see the two of us out front and no one passed out inside,  They proceeded to enter the house and check all levels with their hand held CO2 detector.  Finding nothing, they concluded the false positive alarm was caused by a faulty detector.

The fact that the officers were incredibly nice and friendly despite being called out in zero degree weather at 10 pm on a Friday night was impressive, but what happened next really impressed us.  In addition to checking the air and the alarm, they went on to check for a weak battery in the CO2 detector and even replaced a wall anchor when the mounting screws came out, checked all of our smoke detectors and replaced a battery in one, and finally politely asked if they could see the rest of the house.  This request was so they would know out layout if there ever was a real fire emergency, they would know how to get around and where we might be sleeping or trapped to facilitate a rescue.

Myles and I both thanked them for their help and I asked if we could pay them for their trouble, or make a contribution to the fire department.  They replied, “No, just tell our chief we did a good job.”  So, to Waterville Valley, New Hampshire’s Chief of Police Dave Noise and Fire Chief Chris Hodges, your guys did a GREAT job!

A Christmas Eve shout out to two dedicated, empowered employees putting customers first

At one of my final annual all-company meetings as CEO of The Loyalty Group, I showed three clips of Michael Jordan, one of my all time sports heroes.  The MJ trait I loved most was his tremendous work ethic.  He was truly one of the most gifted athletes of all times, but he was also one of the hardest working.  One of the clips I showed was from a 1997 NBA finals game, where Jordan played despite being incredibly ill for most of game day.  Although he kept making shots, you could see how painful it was for him to play that game and he nearly collapsed at the end.  The example to our employees – when you believe in yourself, your team and your opportunity to win, push yourself – even when it hurts a little.

Monday night I was doing my usual last minute mad dash otherwise known as Christmas shopping and closed the Chestnut Hill Mall near my home, being politely ushered out of Bloomingdales at 9:55 PM as they were closing at 10:00.  A few minutes later, I was driving past a local Barnes & Noble store.  Although a few minutes past 10:00, the lights were on and I could see customers still in the store.  Excited by the chance to continue my late night shopping, I pulled into the lot.  As I entered the front doors of the store, I realized an employee was holding open the inner door and letting customers out.  I asked if they were closed, and she replied, “yes, but you can still come in.”  Appreciating the opportunity but not wanting to abuse it, I quickly grabbed a couple of tennis magazines for my wife and a “Nun Bowling” stocking stuffer game for my daughter Jordan, who was playing one of the Nun’s in the Boston Children’s Theatre’s production of The Sound of Music.

As I checked out, I told the employee who let me in how much I appreciated her staying late for customers.  She told me the store had needed to close early a few days earlier due to the severe snow storms and she knew many people were running out of time.  What I knew was that she, like almost anyone who works in retail the week before Christmas, was likely exhausted and dying to get home to her own family.  Not hurting as bad as Michael Jordan in the 1997 Finals, but she pushed herself a little further than others when it would have been easy to call it quits for the night.  Her name is Kim, she is an Assistant Manager at the Chestnut Hill Barnes & Noble and a great example of an empowered employee putting customers first.

One more quick example before I go back to wrapping presents.  This morning, my nine year old son and I went to our favorite snowboarding shop, Mothership in Lincoln New Hampshire looking for a new snowboard and bindings.  Myles had outgrown his original board and was ready for a new one.  Trevor, who runs Mothership (a store within the lager Rogers ski and snowboarding shop) helped Myles pick out a very cool Nitro board in UP black and white colors.  He then did something I found impressive. He told us that the bindings on my son’s old board were “better than anything we have in his size” and suggested we simply move them to the new board.  As Mothership’s prices are great, and Myles had gotten a ton of use out of his old setup, I would have gladly bought whatever new bindings Trevor recommended.  But he put us first, passed up the sale and increased our loyalty to Mothership in the process.  (By the way, Lincoln is twenty minute drive from our ski house – we go to Mothership despite having alternatives at our local mountain and another ten minutes from home.)

In a recent For Immediate Release Podcast discussing the Forrester research that found a low level of trust for corporate blogs amongst those who read them, host Neville Hobson posed the question, “How do you define trust?”  Although I didn’t feel the panel ever answered this important question, I have been thinking about the definition of “trust” in the context of Web 2.0, customer service and loyalty.  One of the ways I believe businesses and business people build trust with customers is to resist the urge to oversell them.  I always appreciate it when a salesperson says “you don’t need that” as I wrote about in an earlier post about my experience buying the Dell E6400.

So, as you wind down 2008 get ready for the New Year, are you empowering, recognizing and rewarding your employees for extraordinary acts of customer service to maximize long term loyalty or are you pushing them to oversell customers and extract maximum short term profits?

Response from Dell

Just noticed this response from Dell manager. Bonus points for finding this new blog and post and for the very candid response on how Dell’s culture is still evolving to embrace customer and customer service collaboration. His comments:

Good points on social media in the enterprise as a whole. Thanks for the write-up. While we at Dell place social media as a top priority, clearly we have room to improve.
To be honest, even though we consider ourselves leaders in the PC business on social media, our “corporate culture” is still evolving. We implement changes based on what our customers tell us on IdeaStorm, Direct2Dell corporate blog, and our own Dell Community Forums constantly.
This is clearly an area where we have some work to do- getting front line tech, care, and sales agents steeped in social media concepts like ratings and reviews.
I thank you for pointing out our shortcomings in this area, and will make sure to pick up the “Read your own ratings and reviews” baton myself, and get the word out.

Don’t abuse your best customers Part I: Amazon Case Study

I have a love-hate relationship with Amazon.  Love their product selection, user reviews and especially the ease and price savings of Amazon Prime.  Hate the fact that for some reason Amazon refuses to use the data they have about their own customers in the most simplistic “pre-web 1.0″ ways.  We wrote about this in the white post “The 4 R’s,” but here’s an even better example.

I love the Amazon Kindle (e-newspaper, blog, magazine and book reader) so much that I recently sent my own glowing review of the product to everyone I know, something I had never done before, despite my genetic need to tell people about great products and services I encounter.  My wonderful wife bought me a Kindle for our August wedding anniversary and within days I had uploaded 5 newspapers, 10 blogs and 4 books. I am clearly one of Amazon’s better customers and even became an “Amazon Associate,” so when friends buy a Kindle after reading my review, Year Up, my favorite nonprofit, gets a 10% rebate.

Despite all of this data that Amazon has telling them I am a Kindle owner/maven, look what Amazon greets me with when I recently logged to their site:

Amazon is using perhaps their most valuable online real estate – their home page – to tell me what a Kindle is.

But wait, there’s more:

What happens when you don’t use the data you collected to recognize and reward (or at least don’t abuse) your best customers.

A few weeks after I received my beloved Kindle, I fell asleep reading it.  When I turned it on the next morning, the screen had several thin lines running across the top.  At certain points, the cumulative effect of the lines was to block out almost ½ inch of text.  Up until this point, I had good experiences with Kindle customer service: their number is easy to find; the service agents speak English well; and they had been able to answer several questions, including helping me find an AC adopter in NYC when I forgot mine on a recent trip.

So, I called Kindle service with high expectations.  I volunteered that I had fallen asleep with the device and most likely rolled over on it and damaged the screen.  I asked if there was a program to replace, repair or offer discounts to “clumsy customers.”  To my surprise, the agent responded:

“We have many customers who have slept on, stepped on and even dropped their Kindles in the bath tub.   Amazon used to have a program to replace damaged Kindle’s, but we are not running that right now.”

Somewhat stunned, I asked for clarification, asking something like;

“Are you saying that if I had broken my Kindle at another time earlier in the year, Amazon would have replaced it or at least offered a discount?

He confirmed this was the case, but went on to say:

“If you would like, I can have your name added to our email list and if we bring back that program, we will contact you.”

Only then did he ask for my email address, which could have and should have alerted him to the fact that I am heavy Kindle user and also spent over $10,000 on Amazon last year for business and family purchases.

So, despite having the data to identify me as a very good Amazon customer, the customer service agent was not instructed or trained to use that information to at least recognize and thank me for being a loyal customer.

Not only did Amazon fail to recognize me as a good customer, they added insult to injury by telling me that I had to spend another $350 to replace the Kindle, something other – and presumably less profitable customers – did not have to do, due entirely to the unfortunate timing of my clumsiness.

In the white post “Amazon, Facebook, Eons and the 4 R’s of Relationship Marketing,” we introduced the concept of the 4 R’s using a hand written version of this virtuous cycle:

We believe that companies who collect information about customer purchases through their direct sales businesses, reward programs, or “convenience” programs like Amazon Prime or Hertz Number 1 (see Part II) need to recognize that they are rewarding both the purchase of the good or service and the sharing of information by the customer to the business.

Customers are sharing information about what they buy and when they buy it.  We also believe that customers know businesses are collecting that information and will increasingly expect those companies to recognize and reward them for their loyalty.  At a minimum, they will expect to be treated as well as other, less profitable customers or will become highly susceptible to being poached by a competitor.

Questions:

• What data do you have on your best customers that you are taking advantage of today?
• Are there similar examples of “best customer abuse” happening in your company?

Are you “waking up dead people” or “killing a culture?”

One of the great byproducts of Web 2.0 is that I often hear from friends and colleagues I have lost touch with.  I am sure you too receive the “I found you on the internet, Facebook, Linked In, …” email from time to time, hopefully from people you actual want to talk to.

Last week I caught up with two friends – one who was on the Alliance Data Systems (ADS) deal team when they bought The Loyalty Group and later joined the team at US Loyalty/Jaz Rewards, the 2001 start up that attempted to develop a coalition loyalty program in the US.  The other was a dear friend from my freshman year at college whom I had not seen for almost 30 years.

Jim Sullivan, my former ADS colleague told me about his new business, Built to Lead, which as best as I can understand it, provides executive and organizational coaching to help  “build sustainable, high performance individuals, teams, and leaders in work and life.”  While I haven’t studied their web site, materials, exercizes and – most importantly – customer testimonials and case studies in sufficient detail to be able to recommend their services, I can tell you that Jim is very enthusiastic about Built to Lead.  I can also tell you that his elevator pitch/mission statement was one of the most break-through I have heard:

“we wake up dead people”

That one got my attention.  But it also got me thinking as Jim went on to talk about how many people are going through the motions at work, without anywhere near the passion they could have for their work and therefore likely under-performing on a daily basis.

A few nights later I had a wonderful dinner with my college friend.   She was working at a company that shall remain nameless, but it’s a fast growing retailer with over 800 outlets, a cool brand identity and  a name you would recognize.  She had read some of our writings about the importance of customer service and engaging “the employee sphere” in the creation of business value.  She went on to tell me about how her company’s culture was changing. Like most high growth businesses, the company found they needed larger space to accommodate their growing HQ staff and recently moved to a newer building.  A few things bothered her and most likely many other employees:

• No one asked the employees what they liked most about their current space or what they wanted in the new offices. (They may have had a cross functional team with representatives form various departments,  but there clearly was no attempt to use a blog, wiki, an online survey tool like Survey Monkey or even a good old fashioned email survey to get the broader employee community’s input.)

• The one thing that my friend thought everyone wanted was showers in the rest rooms, as the company is located in a part of the country where most people are highly active and fit and many either bike to work or go running or riding at lunch.  But no one asked what they wanted most and the employees arrived at the new office to find “huge new restrooms that could easily have accommodated a couple of showers”, but did not have even one.

• One of the things she liked best about the old office was they almost everyone in her group rode their mountain bikes to work and parked them besides their cubes.  Anyone with a new bike received notice from others and “user reviews” were requested. Within a few minutes, test drives were taken around the office.  It was a fun way for people to take a break and do a little bonding. It sounded like mountain bikes had become the new water cooler or – probably more accurate – the mostly pre-kid employees version of sharing baby pictures.  All this changed at the new office when they arrived on the first day and were told “no bikes allowed on the elevators or in the office floors.”  Big surprise and at least a small bummer for the bike loving employees.

So what’s happening here?  At Underwood Partners, we have been working to develop a graphic that illustrates our belief that:

…asking employees, business partners and customers to contribute in the enterprise value creation process sets in motion a virtuous cycle of engagement, collaboration and contributions. (see The Philosophy & Approach of Web 2.0.)

Here’s our latest version:

We would appreciate any comments, suggestions or references/links to a better graphic than this one.  To us the formula engagement + collaboration = contributions/results/impact is consistent with our core beliefs and representative of our experiences from leading companies.  Recognizing the the contribution and its impact on the business can turbo-charge the cycle by taking everything to a higher level.  The only thing we don’t like about this graphic is that the boxes should be getting bigger with each revolution, but our power point skills need some expert assistance to do so.

We also believe that a corresponding “downward cycle” can be created by not engaging employees in the business outside of their functional/departmental roles.  Part of the cost of non-engagement is the lost opportunity of the creative ideas that come from cross-functional engagement.  But as this small example illustrates, the failure to listen to employees desires and ideas can  be de-energizing to committed members of your team and turn the water cooler (or mountain biking) conversations away from “isn’t this a cool place to work” to “our culture is changing, and not in a good way.”

Given the ubiquity of low cost, easy to implement social media technology tools designed to engage your stakeholders in your business, there is no excuse for not doing so.

What actions or non-actions are you taking today that will either “wake up dead people” or begin to kill your culture?

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