by Shep Hyken
In their great book Service America (Grand Central Publishing, 1990), Ron Zemke and Karl Albrecht write, “If you’re not serving the customer, you’d better be serving someone who is.” Truer words were never written!
Some companies—Ace is one of them—have learned one of the central lessons of delivering truly amazing customer service: In order for external customers to experience amazing service consistently, internal customers must first experience amazing internal service consistently.
You may be familiar with the term “customer-centric.” This describes a company that operates on the principle that everyone who works for the company, and every responsibility assigned within it, should put the customer first. Everyone, everywhere, should put the customer at the “top-of-mind” level. How does a company become customer-centric? By recognizing the importance of internal service. I call such companies “employee-centric.” They have figured out that there must be internal amazement before there can be external amazement.
PRINCIPLE #7: THE FIVE STAGES
As we have just seen, some companies choose to amaze their customers first. There are some companies that create a powerful “brand promise” (what I refer to as a “mantra”) that works internally/externally. If you want your company to Amaze Every Customer Every Time, you want to be this kind of company. That means everyone in the company must move through five distinct stages (referred to as “Cults” in the book The Cult of the Customer [Wiley, 2009]) in relation to that brand promise on their way to experiencing amazement. Those stages are:
Uncertainty: The employee, also known as the internal customer, is not yet aware or convinced that the brand promise even exists or can be fulfilled.
Alignment: The employee understands what the brand promise is.
Experience: The employee experiences the brand promise and likes the results.
Ownership: The employee experiences the brand promise enough to be confident that it will happen the next time—and every time.
Amazement: The experience that the employee owns is consistently above average. As a result, he or she becomes an advocate and evangelist for promoting and fulfilling the brand promise.
Just as the employees go through these stages, customers go through the exact same ones. The first time customers do business with an organization they are uncertain, but hoping, that it will be a good experience. They may understand the brand promise, which means they are in alignment with the company, but they haven’t yet experienced it. Once they have experienced the promise, and they are confident it will happen again, they have ownership of the brand promise. And, if that experience is consistently better than average, they have been treated to customer amazement.
Only when an internal customer has gone through these five stages can he or she be expected to lead a customer through them!
It might not seem obvious at first, but once you think about it, you realize that truly great service companies are always employee-centric before they are customer-centric. One of the most important lessons you will learn in this book is that, in order to create a customer-centric company, you must first create an employee-centric company. What’s happening on the inside of an organization is always being felt on the outside by its customers.
Ace Hardware has built an employee-centric company. Does being an employee-centric company mean Ace is perfect? Of course not. But it’s got a mantra that everyone agrees on, inside and out. By now you know that its promise, its mantra, can be summed up in a single word: “Helpful.” It’s because Ace lives that mantra internally that it can deliver on the promise externally.
YOU ARE READY TO ROLL!
Congratulations! You now have the background you need to put the tools in the following chapters into practice. Let’s get started!
YOUR AMAZEMENT TOOLBOX
A Moment of Magic is when you receive above-average service.
A Moment of Truth is any time a customer has an opportunity to form an impression.
A Moment of Misery is what happens when a Moment of Truth is mishandled.
Moments of Misery can be turned into Moments of Magic with a good recovery.
In order for external customers to experience amazement (consistent Moments of Magic), internal customers must experience it first.
There are five steps to great service: uncertainty, alignment, experience, ownership, and amazement.
Employees must go through the five stages leading to customer amazement before they can be expected to lead customers through them!
Whatever is happening on the inside of an organization is being felt on the outside by the customers.
PART TWO
THE 52 TOOLS FOR CUSTOMER AMAZEMENT
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“People who lead—whether or not they have a title—strive to make things better for those around them. They increase what I call ROI. In this instance ROI doesn’t stand for ‘return on investment,’ but rather Relationships, Outcomes and Improvements.”
—MARK SANBORN
WHEN IT COMES TO customer service, it all starts with leadership. And believe it or not, everyone can, and should, assume a leadership role when it comes to building a culture of service. Leaders know how to deal with customers one-on-one and will take advantage of numerous competitive edges to differentiate their enterprise from the competition. Finally, leaders understand that it’s all about the relationship with their customers and willingly give back to their community because they value the loyalty the community has shown them.
These five elements—leadership, culture, one-on-one interaction, a desire to create and sustain a competitive edge, and a willingness to contribute to the community—are the recipe for success. You will find that recipe in the pages that follow.
CHAPTER SIX
LEADERSHIP
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“Leadership is not about titles, positions, or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.”
—JOHN C. MAXWELL
DON’T GET HUNG UP on the word “leadership.” When it comes to amazing your customers, everyone, regardless of title or responsibility, can be a leader—and that includes you, whatever your job title. The most amazing companies, in fact, are those in which everyone assumes a leadership role.
You really do have the opportunity to be a great role model for the customer, as well as for all the people with whom you work, in delivering an amazing service experience. What you will find in this chapter of the book are nine Amazement Tools that can make it easy for you to deliver that great example.
Leadership Tools
1. Act Like You Own the Place
2. Trust
3. Debrief on Both Misery and Magic
4. Befriend the Competition
5. Adapt or Die
6. Know the Value of Your Customers
7. Know What Drives Your Success
8. You Can’t Be Good at Everything
9. Play to Your Strengths
ACT LIKE YOU OWN THE PLACE
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Take so much pride in what you do that your customers think you are the owner.
AFTER A RECENT PRESENTATION on customer service I gave in Colorado, a young man named Clark, who worked at a pizza restaurant, came up to me and shared something with me that made me feel very proud to do what I do for a living. He looked me in the eye and said, “Shep, I want to be so good that my customers ask me if I am the owner!”
Wow! I hope he mentioned that aspiration to his boss, the owner of the pizza restaurant. If he did, I know that’s at least two people who feel proud of their line of work—me and the owner of that pizza restaurant!
If Clark follows through on that goal—and I have to believe he does, every day—his boss will pick up on Clark’s positive attitude, on the excellent service he delivers, on the way he treats fellow employees, and a lot more.
Obviously, Clark respects and admires the owner. And obviously, the owner of the restaurant has set a good example, one that Clark wants to emulate. That’s incredibl
y important, because amazement starts at the top. An owner must be a good role model, a good mentor, and a good leader, and so must anyone else in a position of leadership. If you’re privileged to lead your team, make sure that everyone who reports to you would want to emulate your actions and decisions! I’ve seen plenty of owners/leaders who don’t set good examples with their “do as I say, not as I do” management style. That’s a shame.
Typically, that’s not what you find at Ace Hardware. I interviewed dozens of owners for this book, and dozens of associates too. What I found, in every single case, was an owner who “walks the walk.” By that I mean an owner whose example is worth following, someone the associates want to emulate. Every single owner I spoke to or watched in action came across as someone who was friendly and accessible to employees, who embodied integrity, who was flexible in addressing challenges when they arose, and who was helpful, first and foremost. Guess what! That’s exactly the way Ace associates treat their customers!
If you are the owner, your job is to be so great at what you do that employees aspire to be just like you. If you are the employee, your job is to be so great at what you do that customers mistake you for the owner!
Regardless of the size of your company, regardless of who you are or what you do, act like an owner!
YOUR AMAZEMENT TOOLBOX
An owner (or manager) must be a good role model, a good mentor, and a good leader.
If you’re a leader, make sure everyone who reports to you would want to emulate your actions and decisions.
Regardless of the size of your company, regardless of your job title, and regardless of what you do, act like an owner!
THE DRILL
Who are the leaders in your company (whether or not they have the title)?
If you are the owner or manager, what can you do to develop leaders in your organization?
If you are an employee, do you take as much pride and “ownership” in your responsibilities as the owner or CEO? If so, share an example.
TRUST
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A little well-earned trust in employees and colleagues goes a long way in improving the customer experience.
BACK WHEN I WAS 21 YEARS OLD, I got myself a job working at Central City Auto Parts in St. Louis, Missouri. The owner and my boss, Barry Wolkowitz, must have liked my style, because he left me in charge of the place for a couple of days while he went off on the first vacation he had taken in years. I had only been working there for about two months, but there I was, getting ready to manage the entire business in his absence!
The very first day I was running the store on my own, I had to make a judgment call. A customer brought up a big plastic container of antifreeze, and the darned thing didn’t have a price tag on it. I suppose I’m dating myself by admitting this now, but this was back in the days before we could swipe barcodes over automatic readers or punch codes into an inventory system whenever a price tag was missing. Back then you had to manually look up the price in a large bank of merchandise catalogs, and as hard as I looked, I couldn’t track down the price for this antifreeze. So I guessed. I told the customer, “Look, I can’t find the price for this thing. Let’s just say it’s five dollars.”
The customer looked at me, nodded, said, “You’ve got a deal,” turned around, went back into the aisle where he’d found the original container, and came back with three cases of antifreeze.
He looked me in the eye and said, “Five bucks, right?”
What could I do? I’d made a deal. I sold him three cases of antifreeze at five bucks a pop.
When Barry came back, I told him exactly what had happened, and he was completely understanding about my mistake. He said, “Hey, you made a bad call, it happens. Don’t worry about it.” Then he showed me where I was supposed to have found the right price, which was in a whole different book. It turned out I was supposed to have charged twelve bucks a gallon. Oops! Although my boss wanted to be sure I didn’t make the same mistake all over again, he also wanted me to know that he knew that mistakes were part of the learning process. So he didn’t start yelling and screaming at me over my mistake. To the contrary, he said, “At the end of the day, Shep, I can’t be looking over your shoulder on every decision you make with a customer. I know you’re going to make a lot more good calls than bad calls.”
Here’s the point: He still trusted me, even though I had messed up. And the moment I realized that, I knew that I was very lucky indeed to work there. Because this man still trusted me, I was even more motivated than before to prove that I deserved that trust. And I think I did a better job of serving the customers, giving them advice that they could trust, as a result of that experience.
Regarding that same point, Ace’s CEO John Venhuizen told me, “Every time a customer walks through our doors, that customer is trusting our associates to help them to solve a problem, and to buy the right product. Possibly, that solution we come up with involves the home where their kids sleep every night. Now, whenever you accept advice from someone about what you’re supposed to do in order to protect and take care of your home, that’s a significant leap of faith. That means the level of trust and emotional connection that associate needs to be able to build up with the customer is huge. By the same token, the trust and emotional connection the store owner builds up with the associate has to be pretty huge too. So we know that, in order to win that high level of trust with the consumer, we have to establish a trusting relationship with the employee first.”
YOUR AMAZEMENT TOOLBOX
Empower your employees to make decisions on their own, even if it means making a mistake.
Once an employee has earned your trust, make sure the employee knows it.
Mistakes happen. The question is whether the employee learned enough from the mistake to keep it from happening again.
The level of trust you establish with your employees affects the level of trust your employees establish with customers.
THE DRILL
When was the last time a manager or a colleague entrusted you with an important responsibility, and how did it make you feel?
If you are a manager, what steps can you take to empower your employees, and how do you handle the situation when an employee makes a mistake?
DEBRIEF ON BOTH MISERY AND MAGIC
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Don’t just figure out how to keep Moments of Misery from happening again … figure out how to reproduce Moments of Magic.
IF I HAD TO PICK a single, easy-to-follow best practice that sets Ace apart from other service companies, it would be this one. I saw and heard evidence of it over and over again, at every store I visited and in every interview with every successful Ace owner I talked to. This best practice boils down to six simple words: Misery leaves clues. Magic leaves clues.
Some companies are already pretty good at the first half of this. When a customer makes a complaint about a Moment of Misery that he or she experienced, management will take a good, long look at that complaint. Sometimes, management will figure out that the problem was an employee who gave a customer a bad attitude. But sometimes, they’ll figure out that there was a problem of some kind in the system. Something fell through the cracks, and might fall through the cracks again. Management concludes that the company needs to change the way it does things. In that scenario, management will have a debrief meeting, either formal or informal, and figure out exactly what steps need to be taken to keep that particular Moment of Misery from happening again. That debrief meeting spots all the clues that point toward the true causes of the Moment of Misery, and it allows management to change whatever needs to be changed to reduce the impact of the problem or even eliminate the possibility of it happening in the future.
Where Ace goes a little further than most companies is in the second half of the equation. Ace knows that a Moment of Magic leaves clues too! Whenever a fan letter, meaning a letter from a recently amazed customer, comes in, they don’t just congratulate the associate, stick a copy in the person’s file, and
move on. They also hold a debrief session, just like the one where they tried to figure out what caused the Moment of Misery. Only this time, they are looking for clues to the Moment of Magic that caused the customer to want to write the accolade letter. What made it possible? What could make it easier to reproduce? What could make this kind of experience happen for every customer every time?
Ace is one of those great companies that’s committed to learn all it can from its happiest customers. You can be part of that kind of company too. Whatever role you play in your organization, you can try to engage, in greater depth, with your happiest customers. Talk to them to learn about the details that made this particular interaction successful. Go back to the team and analyze why things worked. Is what happened to this customer the norm? If not, could it be? Can it be improved upon? Can it be repeated? Why did this interaction stand out to this customer while others didn’t? Do other customers have similar ecstatically happy experiences?
We can learn as much from our successes as we can from our failures—if not more. Don’t just revel in success. Learn from it!