Amaze Every Customer Every Time
Page 17
Being proactive for the customer means solving problems before they start!
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN in a restaurant where the waiter refilled your glass of water before you even had to ask? If you have, then you’ve experienced proactive service. There’s never an empty water glass, so you never have to catch the waiter’s attention to come fill it.
A lot of people aren’t used to thinking of problem solving in this way. Typically, we wait until a customer has a complaint or a problem, then we take ownership of it and work out a solution that leaves the customer remembering a Moment of Magic, rather than a Moment of Misery.
Don’t get me wrong; that’s certainly a good outcome (see Tool #35: Master the Art of Recovery). But there is an even better approach: proactive service, the kind of service that keeps problems from materializing in the first place!
Getting into problem-solving mode is good, and it’s certainly necessary sometimes. But getting into proactive mode, so that there isn’t even a problem to deal with in the first place, is even better. For example, it may be that the shipping department follows up with a customer to make sure the package arrived instead of waiting to hear from the customer that it didn’t.
Doesn’t that make perfect sense? After all, customers decide to do business with you because they trust you. Proactive service reinforces their decision to do business with you. It helps to build respect, confidence, loyalty, and evangelism for your brand. Why leave this powerful concept to chance? Make it a normal procedure, as part of the greeting, sales, and follow-up process!
The idea of proactive service is not new. It’s been around for decades. Often, though, what I find is that there is no formal process in place at most companies to provide the type of “thinking ahead” that prevents customers from having to identify and take action on their own problems.
Usually, we don’t have a set of steps in place that keeps people from reaching the point where they say, “Hey, my water glass is empty—where’s that waiter?” (As it were.) To continue with the example of the restaurant, there are attentive waiters and inattentive waiters, but there usually isn’t a standard that makes sure that every waiter in the restaurant notices half-empty water glasses every time. It is usually an individual employee’s effort and initiative that provides this high level of service. It’s quite rare that a company invests in, trains for, and supports a truly proactive customer experience.
Ace Hardware stores are a world-class model for this approach. Different Ace stores do this in different ways, of course—that’s the beauty of the Ace model, which is built on the principle of autonomy for the individual stores. Nevertheless, they each have certain best practices they can follow to deliver proactive service. It can be as simple as a greeting at the front of the store and a question about what the customer is looking for. Shannon Carney’s store in California has taken this helpful best practice of greeting the customer to a much higher level, though. Her front-of-store greeter has the title of Customer Coordinator (CC) and acts as “floor director.” The CC greets the customers, asks them what they’re looking for, and directs them to the proper aisle in the store. All of the associates are equipped with wireless radio headsets, and it’s the CC’s job to inform team members about what parts of the store the customers are headed toward, when a customer needs help, when a customer doesn’t want help, when a customer is in a hurry, and much more. Imagine going to the electrical section and there is an Ace associate waiting for you when you get there. That’s proactive service in action—because the “empty glass” (a customer wandering around the store looking for help) is never allowed to happen in the first place!
YOUR AMAZEMENT TOOLBOX
Proactive service is the ability to head off problems before they happen.
Proactive service is an opportunity to show how good you really are.
Proactive service reinforces the decision the customer made. It helps to build respect, confidence, and loyalty.
Make proactive service a normal procedure as part of the greeting, sales, and follow-up process, and watch your customers say, “Wow!”
THE DRILL
Were you ever able to prevent a problem from happening, or anticipate a customer’s needs before he or she asked for something? How did you do that?
CHAPTER TEN
COMMUNITY
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“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
CHURCHILL COULDN’T HAVE REALIZED IT, but he was expressing, with perfect faithfulness, the philosophy that truly sets Ace Hardware apart in each of the communities where it operates.
We close this part of the book with an essential reminder, one that distinguishes the most amazing companies from everyone else. Business and success are not just about us.
True success happens when we start to look beyond the short-term outcomes that immediately benefit ourselves and our business. The strongest loyalty of all is the loyalty that’s rooted in being a member of the same community that the customer belongs to. The final four Amazement Tools (#s 49–52) show you how to build much stronger ties to that community.
Community Tools
49. The Law of Reciprocity
50. Do Local Well
51. Loyalty Goes Both Ways
52. Be Part of Something Bigger than Yourself
THE LAW OF RECIPROCITY
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The more you give, the more you get.
PERHAPS YOU’VE HEARD that saying before. It’s known as the Law of Reciprocity. You help people get what they want, and in return, somehow it comes back to you. It may not happen at that moment or with that person, but it comes back. And, this is an overarching strategy—or maybe a better word, “philosophy”—of Ace Hardware.
I’ve interviewed dozens and dozens of Ace Hardware owners, executives, and associates, and one of the topics that comes up over and over again is their commitment to their community.
This local commitment to improve the community, to make things better, takes countless different forms, financial and otherwise, and it serves countless diverse groups of people. Because Ace stores are independently owned and operated, there is no requirement to “give back” to the community. Headquarters doesn’t tell everyone in the Ace network that it’s time to write out a check to the local branch of such-and-such charity. Instead, charity the Ace way is all about what makes sense to the owner of the individual store, the people who work in the store and live in the area. It might be the sponsorship of a Little League team, or support for the local shelter for the homeless, or a decision to pull out the chainsaws, fire up the pickup trucks, and help clear local streets and driveways after a storm. Or it might be a combination of all of these.
The point is, you won’t see a uniform approach when it comes to fulfilling this value of giving something back to the community that an individual Ace store serves. In fact, at a very few stores, you might not see charitable giving emphasized in any obvious way. Here again, though, we’re interested in what usually happens most of the time across the store network. And what usually happens is that the people within the store find a way to make a big positive impact on the lives of people who may be in need.
Ace’s former Chairman of the Board, Tom Glenn, told me that it sometimes comes as a surprise to outsiders, and even to newcomers to the Ace family, to learn that this kind of giving is one of the big reasons that store owners in the Ace network strive to do well financially—and succeed! They want to be successful enough to start making some decisions that don’t support their bottom line.
“What you find when you talk to our people who are the most successful,” he told me, “is that a lot of them want to be able to have a store that performs well enough in terms of their own margin for them to be in a position to make some major investments in the community where they live. Those investments reduce the margin, but that’s okay. That’s why they wanted to build the margin up in the first place. That’s a big motivator for them, a b
ig reason why they get up in the morning and do what they do every day, the potential to make their own community a better place.”
Mind you, I’m not saying that Ace is a charitable organization. These are businesses, and they operate in order to get and keep customers. What I am saying, though, is that a whole lot of Ace stores have built their brand promise into something that’s a little bigger than a hardware store, something that has the potential to inspire everyone who comes in contact with it on the local level: a true commitment to the community. That community starts with the family of the owner, extends out through the associates who work at the store, and eventually includes everyone in the store’s immediate area—whether or not they ever buy anything from Ace!
You might be tempted to think that your local Ace store does what it does for your community “just to get good coverage in the local news” or “just to get their store’s name out there.” You might be tempted to think this is all a little opportunistic around the edges. And, you’re right. There is no doubt that publicity and goodwill are a benefit to giving back. That’s why this tool is called The Law of Reciprocity.
Rick Alspaugh, an Ace owner in Kingwood, Texas, uses most of his marketing budget for local charities and his community. There isn’t a Little League team, a bake sale, or a school or charitable event that he doesn’t contribute to. Everyone knows him. His store is deeply interwoven with the community in lots of different ways. By giving, the community reciprocates with loyalty. That’s a competitive edge. Rick feels this is a great way to give back—and get back. This is the Law of Reciprocity in action!
But, after having talked to many members of the Ace family over the years, I’d be more inclined to say that your local store does what it does for your community because it’s all about delivering on helpful. It’s the belief that, when someone at Ace makes the decision to take good care of you, as one member of the community to another, good things start happening to everybody.
Zig Ziglar, the incomparable motivational speaker, once said, “You will get all you want in life if you help other people get what they want.” A lot of people have repeated that advice over the years. Zig was right, of course! He was reminding us all of the power of the Law of Reciprocity.
YOUR AMAZEMENT TOOLBOX
Be so successful that you don’t have to make every decision based on what’s best for the bottom line.
Look for ways to make a positive impact on the lives of people in need.
When you take care of the community, good things happen to everybody!
Zig Ziglar said, “You will get all you want out of life if you help other people get what they want.” That’s the Law of Reciprocity.
THE DRILL
What does your company do to give back to the community?
When was the last time you personally had a positive impact on the life of someone who was in need? (Use examples from inside or outside the workplace.)
DO LOCAL WELL
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No matter how big you get, don’t get too big to care about the local community.
EARLIER IN THE BOOK (Tool #16: Celebrate Uniqueness) I introduced you to the notion of respecting and embracing the uniqueness of the people you work with. The way you can tell that you’ve successfully implemented this tool is that your team members start doing a better job of embracing and celebrating the uniqueness of individual customers—and, by extension, the local community.
When we accept each other as we are, we do a better job of accepting customers as they are. We take a little more time to connect with those who buy from us—and even those who don’t! If we all celebrate uniqueness well, we will be operating as far as anyone can get from the cookie-cutter business model that can leave customers with a cold, impersonal feeling. We become a major strategic asset for the business, the means by which the company does local well.
Ace is a global company with more than 4,600 stores in 70 different countries, and its entire helpful business model depends on doing local well. It is a successful international brand made up of thousands of locally owned businesses operating as local players in local marketplaces. Each one of those businesses is driven by deep local ties within that marketplace as it operationalizes helpful in its own unique way. If I were building a global brand, that’s the kind of brand I would want to build. Global in philosophy and culture, local in execution and relationships.
There’s a big difference between a national or an international company with a true local presence, as compared to a national company with a local branch that’s “just following orders” from headquarters. If you want to be like Ace, that means you want to be a national or an international brand that also operates a truly local and customer-focused business. You want to have connections to the community that run very deep—so deep that you can never say, “It’s not my department, call corporate.”
And you know what? If you’re an Ace customer, you won’t ever get that kind of response from a local Ace owner, manager, or associate. Why? Because they are members of the community they serve. They know that the buck stops with them, and they communicate that message to the community by the way they treat their customers.
In New York City, there’s an Ace store that hired a graffiti artist to do the in-store decorations. That kind of move wouldn’t make a lot of sense to hardware store customers in Minot, North Dakota, but in the Big Apple, the graffiti designs send a perfect message: “You’ve come to the right place. We understand you because … we are you.”
YOUR AMAZEMENT TOOLBOX
Be global in philosophy and culture but local in execution and relationships. “Do local well.”
Never say, “It’s not my department, call corporate.” Instead say, “You’re here, in our store. You’ve come to the right place.”
The way your community thinks about you depends on the way you treat your customers.
THE DRILL
Think of a local store or restaurant where you really enjoy shopping or eating. How does this business make you feel like you are a local or a regular?
What can you do to give your company a more “local” feel (especially if your company is large, national, or international)?
LOYALTY GOES BOTH WAYS
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Don’t expect customers to be loyal to you before you are loyal to them.
SOME COMPANIES’ “CUSTOMER LOYALTY” PROGRAMS are more like “customer entrapment” programs. They don’t reward you for your loyalty. They punish you if you aren’t loyal. For example, they may have rules in which you forfeit all of your points or credits if you don’t give them enough business. Some of my friends tell me the only reason they fly a particular airline is because they have so many miles accrued in their loyalty program, and they don’t want to lose them. Otherwise, they would switch. Is that loyalty?
The point is that they don’t have loyalty to the company. They have loyalty to the loyalty program. That’s a big difference.
In order to get our customers to be loyal to us, we need to be loyal to our customers first.
Loyalty is about creating value at the personal level for your customer. It’s about building a strong relationship and developing trust. It’s about having an understanding of our customers’ world, knowing what they want and need, making them feel special, and letting them know we appreciate them—and that we are there for them. Once they know we’re there for them, they’ll be there for us. Loyalty goes both ways, and it starts with us.
Steve Kelly, Director of Store Operations for the Ace stores in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is someone who knows that loyalty goes both ways. When his community was hit by a massive snowstorm that left over a foot and a half of snow on the ground, he made sure all of his stores stayed open, even though all the other businesses in town were shut down. Steve knew most of his customers personally, and he knew that they were going to need things like shovels and flashlights and batteries and generators.
So, the store managers and the associates spent the night
in the stores just to be absolutely sure that they were open when people in the community needed them. (Steve spent the night in one of them too.) This decision of Steve’s wasn’t about making a lot of money, and it certainly wasn’t about raising prices to take advantage of a neighbor’s inconvenience. It was (as he put it) about “being there for our community in a time of need.”
That’s the very best loyalty program there is. And you don’t have to wait for a snowstorm to start it. You can launch a real loyalty program just by taking full advantage of the next opportunity to deliver helpful to your customer.
YOUR AMAZEMENT TOOLBOX
A true loyalty program rewards loyal customers versus enticing customers to do business with us, which is marketing.
Don’t confuse customers who are loyal to your company with customers who are just loyal to your loyalty program.
In order to get our customers to be loyal to us, we need to be loyal to our customers first.
Be there for your customers and your community, especially in a time of need.
The best way to start a loyalty program is to be there for your customers and your community, always.
THE DRILL
How do you or your company show loyalty to your customers?
Identify a time when you and/or your company made a point of “being there” for customers and the larger community, especially in a time of need. What role did you play in that experience?