by Shep Hyken
That’s not a customer talking. That’s a neighbor.
YOUR AMAZEMENT TOOLBOX
When we choose to change the words we use, we can change the service culture of the entire organization.
What we say affects what we think, and what we think affects the way we treat each other. Language changes behavior!
Is there another word you can use to describe your customer, such as Guest or Neighbor? How about a word to describe your employees?
Calling someone across the counter a “neighbor” rather than a “customer” can make them feel special.
THE DRILL
How do you refer to your customers? Do you call them customers, or members, or guests, or neighbors? Is there another positive word that you could use to refer to your customers? If so, what would it be?
ADOPT A CUSTOMER-FIRST MINDSET
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Everyone—and I do mean everyone—in your organization affects the customer experience.
IN TODAY’S WORLD, you are courting disaster if you think that the customer service department is the only area involved in customer service. Each and every individual in your organization is, in reality, his or her own customer service department! The trouble is, not everyone in the enterprise always realizes this.
Whether you are a clerk in the accounting department or you are a sales rep on the floor or you are making a contribution anywhere else in the organization, you have customers, and you are involved in customer service. Something you do affects a customer—whether that customer is internal or external. Jan Carlzon of Scandinavian Airlines said, “If you’re not directly servicing the customer, you are supporting someone who is.” So if you take your eye off the ball and ignore your service responsibility for too long, some external customer is eventually going to defect to the competition!
And now you also run the risk that the disappointed customer will head to Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, or whatever new channel has just opened up, and use that platform to tell everyone on earth exactly why he or she defected!
Can you see now why everyone in your organization has to adopt a “customer first” mindset?
Years ago I attended some courses offered by Disney. They teach that every employee (Disney calls them “cast members”) at a Disney theme park has three jobs:
To do the job they were hired to do.
To take care of the Guest. (This is the one that makes every job a customer service job, regardless of someone’s responsibility.)
To keep the park clean.
This can apply to every company. Maybe you don’t have to worry about No. 3, keeping the park clean—the word “park” being a metaphor for whatever your business is. But, the other two strategies are rock solid. Everybody has at least two jobs: Do the job they are hired to do and to take care of the customer.
The people at Ace, like the other great service organizations out there, are masters at this concept. They know that everyone, regardless of job title, ultimately affects the external customer experience. That means everyone has to deliver on helpful, every time, in every interaction, with everyone else. No excuses. No kidding. That’s just how they do business!
My favorite expression of this value comes from Ace owner Matt Dowdell in Montana, who tells everyone on his staff, “We’ve got a lot of fancy machinery in the front of the store, and we’ve got a lot of fancy machinery in the back of the store … but if any one of us ever forgets that the point of all that machinery is to help Joe take care of his Honey-Do list, and to make Joe’s day a little easier, none of it matters.” No matter what machinery you’re using, or where you’re using it, you’d better be using it to make life easier for Joe! That value drives everything Ace does. And, it is everyone’s job, regardless of their job description, to always keep the customer in mind. That’s a customer-first mindset.
YOUR AMAZEMENT TOOLBOX
No matter what you do in the company, you affect the customer experience.
You actually have two jobs: the one you were hired to do, and to take care of the customer.
If you’re not dealing with the customer, you are supporting someone who is.
THE DRILL
How do your job and responsibilities directly and indirectly impact the customer experience?
Are you supporting someone else who deals directly with the customer? If so, who? And how do you support that person?
CELEBRATE UNIQUENESS
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Respect the different personalities of the people and teams who fulfill your brand promise.
IN SOME OF THE TRAINING PROGRAMS we create for our clients, we do a team-building exercise we call The Great Alphabet Game. We have a room full of a company’s employees sitting at round tables. The rules are that each group has to come up with 26 different items, each item beginning with a different letter of the alphabet. They can use whatever is in their pockets, purses, briefcases, etc. The first team that gets an item for each of the 26 letters wins.
It’s interesting how quickly a team wins, and how close most of the other teams were to getting all 26 objects. What’s even more interesting is that the different teams use all kinds of different strategies and still come close to winning. Some will start by throwing a bunch of “stuff” into the middle of the table. Others take a more orderly approach by taking out a sheet of paper and writing all 26 letters in a neat column before they begin to search for their items. What’s also astonishing is the sheer variety of the objects that people carry around with them. Talk about diversity!
The lessons from this exercise are important. First, there are lots of different ways to accomplish the same goal. The activity also proves that diversity and uniqueness in a team is a big advantage. There is no way that any of these teams could have won if it was just one or two people playing against a table of eight. The greater the number of different, unique approaches you incorporate, the better off you are.
There are certain key concepts you will find emphasized at Ace Hardware stores. For instance: Helpful. Trusted. Consistent. Those are core attributes of the Ace experience. They’re part of the brand. If you don’t try to deliver on those promises, both internally and externally, then you haven’t yet figured out what Ace is all about. Every single store buys into helpful, trusted, and consistent and accepts the responsibility of reinforcing those values with both management and associates. And, while every store celebrates their values, they also celebrate each person’s uniqueness.
As Kane Calamari, Ace Hardware’s Corporate Vice President of Retail Operations and New Business, put it, “If I had to pick one thing that other businesses could learn from Ace, it would be the celebration of uniqueness. While we love consistency and we love our brand, an important part of our business model is our respect for each store’s unique personality and unique approach. That’s what allows us to localize and imbed in the community: a willingness to let each store fulfill the brand promise in its own way. It’s the same at the individual level. You have lots of different people, lots of different skill sets, lots of different personalities, all committed to the same brand promise.”
Each Ace store is deeply individualized, and each Ace associate brings a different set of personal skills and experiences to the table. An Ace store in northern Maine may take a totally different approach to promotion, inventory selection, and a dozen other areas than a store in Southern California does. It has to! It serves, and is part of, a very different community! I doubt you’ll find any snow blowers in San Diego. Ace respects that, because it has built diversity into its business plan in a powerful way.
Celebrate your organization’s diversity and uniqueness, both at the organizational and the personal level.
YOUR AMAZEMENT TOOLBOX
Agree on the core elements of the brand promise, then let people and teams fulfill it using their own unique personalities.
Build diversity into your business plan. Different people and different ideas can be a tremendous advantage.
Celebrate
your enterprise’s diversity and uniqueness, both at the organizational and the personal level.
THE DRILL
What makes your company unique?
What have you done to make your company unique?
Describe a time when a colleague successfully solved a customer problem by taking a very different approach than you would have taken.
GREAT IDEAS COME FROM EVERYONE
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Share the breakthroughs that make amazing service possible. Don’t keep them to yourself.
EMPLOYEES FROM ALL AREAS of a business, and especially the ones on the front line, are involved in solving problems and being helpful. The corporate culture should encourage employees to come up with new and cool ideas, either on their own or as a result of their interactions with customers. The question is, do you have a culture that fosters those creative ideas, and when there are good ideas, what becomes of them?
It’s much more common than company leaders realize that employees come up with potentially awesome ideas but never tell anyone about them. In fact, if I had to bet, I’d bet that the majority of employees who have customer-facing responsibilities fall into this category. They don’t tell anybody about the idea, they just came up with. They don’t tell anyone about the great idea that a customer just shared with them. Why? Well, there are a whole lot of possible reasons for this reluctance—ranging from a simple lack of encouragement on the part of management to a well-placed fear that other people will think an unorthodox idea is dumb. But there are no good reasons not to share ideas, especially ideas that arise from your interactions with customers!
The simplest way around this problem is to make a conscious effort to elicit suggestions from the front lines, and to acknowledge and reward those ideas that do become best practices for your organization. The rewards can involve anything that is meaningful to employees, ranging from appropriate recognition to time off to financial rewards for the very best ideas. Usually, though, the positive regard of peers is a strong enough incentive to get the process started.
Managers can do their part to support an innovative, idea-friendly working culture by (a) never, ever criticizing an idea in a public setting, and (b) creating easy-to-access tools for capturing ideas from both employees and customers. Just remember: The number of great ideas your organization gets from its employees depends on the way management responds to mediocre ideas! If an employee is humiliated for sharing what others consider a “dumb” idea, what’s his or her incentive to come up with a better one?
Employees can contribute to an innovative culture by praising and properly crediting the good ideas of their peers. Never take credit for someone else’s breakthrough! This stifles innovation and causes other cultural problems too.
Some companies have a brief weekly, and in some cases daily, ritual for sharing recent challenges and “brainstorming” possible solutions to them. These weekly or daily “huddles” are a fertile source of (among other things) good ideas that can improve any organization.
Brian Ziegler, president of a number of Ace Hardware stores in the Chicago, Illinois, area, has a brilliant way to garner new and innovative ideas. Brian has a “Lunch with the President” program in which there is a designated day of the month that all employees who have a birthday that month are invited to lunch at a local restaurant. Each employee is required to share an idea that will improve the organization. These lunches are an excellent communication tool for upper management to use to listen to all staff members. Each month the ideas are summarized and management reports back to each employee as to what happened with his or her idea.
This kind of program can be adapted to any type of business, large or small. For larger companies it may be the vice president or a manager of a department who meets with the employees for lunch. The key is to create a culture that encourages and embraces the ideas and opinions of employees.
YOUR AMAZEMENT TOOLBOX
Many employees come up with potentially awesome ideas, but they never tell anyone about them.
Make a conscious effort to elicit suggestions; acknowledge and reward ideas that become best practices.
Properly credit the good ideas of your peers.
Consider a weekly or daily “huddle” ritual for sharing recent challenges and brainstorming possible solutions.
A “Lunch with the Boss” program is an excellent way to connect with employees and get great ideas to improve the company.
THE DRILL
Have you ever come up with a new or different way to do your job? What was it? Did you share the idea with others?
Does your company have a process to elicit suggestions from employees and customers?
What is the best such idea you have ever heard?
CONSISTENCY
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What does it take to build intense customer loyalty? One of the key strategies is basic, but powerful: predictable consistency!
BRAND LOYALTY DEPENDS ON three interrelated quality service experiences. They are as follows:
Brand loyalty prerequisite No. 1: First and foremost, the product or service has to work. That’s really no surprise. If the quality isn’t there, you’re in trouble.
Brand loyalty prerequisite No. 2: This is about how well you deliver the product or service that you sell. The customer service level needs to be above average. Notice that the service level doesn’t have to be a wow experience every time in order to deliver loyalty to your brand. It just needs to be above average.
Brand loyalty prerequisite No. 3: There has to be confidence in the consumer’s mind that No. 1 and No. 2 above will happen predictably into the future. In other words, there has to be consistency. Confidence comes from the customer knowing what to expect—and getting it. The experience becomes predictable.
As mentioned, all three of these prerequisites are interrelated. It’s like a three-legged stool. Take away one of the legs, and the stool tips over. No matter how nice you are (customer service), if the product doesn’t consistently do what it is supposed to do, you will probably lose the customer. No matter how well the product or service works (quality), if the service experience you deliver isn’t consistently above average, you are vulnerable to a competitor who does deliver that kind of experience.
Inconsistency can be a “loyalty killer.” (For more about this subject, see Tool #37: Avoid Loyalty Killers.) Customers like consistency. They like what they are used to. That means you have to create confidence, and confidence comes from a predictable experience. You want customers to own their experience with you, which means that they have to know what to expect—all of the time!
I work with a lot of business leaders, and it always surprises me how totally focused some of them can be on loyalty prerequisites 1 and 2, but not always at the same time. That’s where No. 3 comes in. They are committed to product quality. They understand the importance of above-average service. But sometimes they don’t connect the dots, so the customer doesn’t always have a consistent experience. By the way, it’s usually No. 2, the customer service, where the inconsistency shows up.
One of the things Ace does really well is connect the dots. It works very hard to stock a good product and create a service experience that is beyond compare. That doesn’t mean customers never experience service problems. Like any business with a pulse, it occasionally delivers Moments of Misery. But when those Moments of Misery do happen, customers tend to give Ace the benefit of the doubt. They have had enough above-average experiences in the past that they now have confidence that whatever problem they’ve just run into will be resolved to their satisfaction … because that’s what usually happens! That’s a very important point to remember. Consistency doesn’t mean you never have a problem. It means that if there ever is a problem, your customers have confidence in you to deliver a positive outcome.
As Doug, an Ace customer in Washington, D.C., put it, “I want to know how these guys hire their staff. I’ve been going there for three years, and every single time I’ve been in—ab
out three dozen times—I’ve received absolutely excellent service.”
YOUR AMAZEMENT TOOLBOX
No matter how nice you are, if the product doesn’t consistently do what it is supposed to, you’ll probably lose the customer.
No matter how good your product/service is, if your service isn’t consistently above average, you’ll probably lose the customer.
Inconsistency is a Loyalty Killer.
You have to create confidence, and confidence comes from a predictable positive experience.
You want customers to own their experience with you. They have to know what to expect, all of the time!
Consistency doesn’t mean you never have a problem. It means your customers can count on you if ever there is a problem.
THE DRILL
Customers love consistency. What can your customers count on receiving from you the first time—and every time—without exception?
How would your customers finish this sentence: “I can always count on them to …”?
TELL THE STORY
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The stories that are created between a business and its customers can drive the culture.