Your contact center is suffering from unexpected staff shortage. Two queues are are in trouble. Michelle, one of your super agents is skilled in both queues. Where do you place her?

Actually, it doesn’t matter. The point is you will decide to put the agent in one of the queues, which ultimately means, for whatever reason, you will consider one queue, a set of customers, to be more important than another.

Because service and the idea of serving people has an ethical taste, it is easy to adopt a general altruistic philosophy towards customer satisfaction. As a humanist you may believe all customers should be addressed with the same attention regardless of their economic weight on the organization, however, for a business person managing limited resources, some customers are worth more than others.

Depending on your company’s priorities customer may be more important because they purchased a strategic product or because your company needs quick market share growth in a particular segment to win a positioning battle. For whatever reason, when in a resource constrained situation, some customers are in fact more equal than others.

Great customer centric organization work hard to avoid this dilemma altogether. When Customer Centricity becomes part of our corporate DNA, we begin to proactively manage the incessant pressure of limited resources, always including the customer in our business plans, our contingencies and our innovation.

Customers are resources just like cash. The difference is that customers can appreciate the value we add and the difference we make in their lives, and therefore, can offer long term loyalty.

The benefits in the transformation of corporate DNA towards customer centricity is not only external in the way customers see us, but more internal in the way we begin to see ourselves; holding ourselves to a different standard for the benefit of our customers, and therefore our own, as a member of a social group.

“Recognizing our responsibilities as industrialists, we will devote ourselves to the progress and development of society and the well-being of people through our business activities, thereby enhancing the quality of life throughout the world.” – Konosuke Matsushita, 1932

At some point we will all have to make the decision to place super agent Michelle in one queue over another, but our intention to work towards avoiding the dilemma altogether, speaks volumes about our future.

Committed to XCS !
Rudy Vidal

I’ve been thinking about intention for a couple of days now. So, I may as well post.

I think great work of any lasting value comes through intention. In fact, I believe clear intention may be a prerequisite to greatness. I read somewhere, “if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere else”. The place we end up may be a good place, but we will probably not be able to reproduce our results consistently.

Through intention we can transfer the “human-ness” of our effort to another person and increase the likelihood and strength of the potential emotion. Simply because two people purposefully and intentionally interchanging in a common interest is emotional. Intentional service.

Some touch-points are managed by technology, collateral materials and other innimate methods, but even then, our intention can be made to show through.

Without intention we run the risk of having our companies feel machine-like and impersonal, even when we do a good job. Without intention we loose the opportunity to create and be part of a culture that is sustainable, reproducible and proud.

My intention is to serve my customer as I would like to be serviced myself.
Because it feels right and brings positive emotion to all involved.

Committed to XCS !
Rudy Vidal

Ok, I’m glad to be writing about a good experience, since sometimes I think I concentrate too much on the poor ones. And, although I could use the excuse that there are many more poor ones that good ones, I still think we learn more from discussing good customer experiences.

Today, I went to a newly opened Harmon’s supermarket near my house. As a result I have decided I need to find the person in charge of training at Harmon’s because it is clear that training is the key to consistency and consistency is the key to exceeding customer expectations quickly.

From the moment I walked into the store my expectations were exceeded:

The deli guy: (a young man not older than 18), asked if I would prefer my slices of Parma ham separated by individual sheets of paper. Usually I have to spend 5 minutes peeling the paper-thin slices from each other, making a mess and causing unnecessary handling (not pretty). – Sure, if it’s not too much trouble. – Not at all, my pleasure. I’m assuming you would like them very thin, right? Yes, please.

Over to the bread counter from where a French Baguette had been staring at me for some time. – Could I have a Baguette please? – Of course, can I offer you a sample of it first, to make sure it meets your expectations? – Yes, that would be nice. Delicious, I think I’ll take two.

Over to the prepared foods: – Could I have a pound of the mozzarella, tomato and artichoke salad? -You’ll be glad you chose it, and you will not feel bad you didn’t make it yourself. The Mozzarella is fresh, the artichokes were cooked today and the tomato’s are those off the vine, right behind you. Would you like to try it first?. – No, no need thank you, I know fresh mozzarella when I see it. – By the way, that Baguette and this salad were made for each other. – I know, I can’t wait.

Where can I find the honey? – let me take you to it. – if you point I’ll find it. – No, its my pleasure, right this way please.

At check out: Do you prefer paper or plastic? You gotta be kidding me, right? – No sir, your choice.

What happened at Harmon’s today is special. Not because I was treated well as a customer but becuase in one day (my first visit) I had enough great experiences to bring me to a tipping point about the store.

Normally, most retail establishments need multiple visits to gain the trust and loyalty of a customer. This takes time, and money. Harmon’s on the hand, was able to provide me enough examples of excellent service and quality to exceed my requirements for loyalty, on the first visit ! This means they shortened the meantime to loyalty and thereby increased their velocity of cash. Brilliant !

What made this possible was consistancy across the employee base. What made that possible was training and hiring. Very good training and very good hiring.

The right people, in the right seats, on the right bus, well trained, following a clear vision.

That’s beautiful.

Kuddos to Harmon’s in Draper, Utah !

Rudy Vidal
Committed to XCS !

You know the one. She or he is a paying customer. You need their business, but you don’t necessarily want it anymore. They ask more questions, question your answers, challenge policy and/or procedure, threaten their account or business and in some cases, harrass your staff.

When do you say good-bye?

My opinion is; unless the customer has blatantly abused someone, Never ever ever.

The scenario du jour:

Special order and handling was required, which meant a little research on my part. When I was making a call for our Special Customer (profile above), one of my team members took notice of the research I was involved in, heard my questions – and even some aggresive negotiating tactics on behalf of our customer.

He asked me, “How can you still be trying so hard for this guy? He’s not very nice!” The answer was so clear to me, that I thought I should start sending money to the XCS founder, because clearly something is catching on. What I mean to say is, “there was a time when… ”

This person is OUR customer, a fee paying bank customer.

We have to be careful to exude the same level of enthusiasm in our work for the engaging, warm and pleasant people who buy our products and use our services as we do for those who can tend to drain us. They should be viewed as the same, even when this is something of an effort.

My father called Quest to have a new phone installed at the house.

On Monday, as scheduled, the technician came and connected the new line on the outside of the house. After some time, not knowing they had come, my father checked to see if the line was working and found the main line was not working, but the secondary line (available only in some of the rooms in our house) was now present.

He called Quest and asked them to return and install the line correctly. A new visit was scheduled on Thursday.

On Thursday a technician knocked on the front door to let my father know he had finished re-installing and was leaving. My father, who is not easily fooled twice, asked him to wait so they could test the line together. They found once again, the connection was made incorrectly. They both went outside and the technician quickly discovered the problem, fixed it and went on his way.

What is wrong with both of these customer experiences?

Most of us might say what went wrong was the technicians’ inability to complete their work correctly the first time. However, when I talked to my father about it, he seemed to understand and accept the inevitability of human error. What he was having trouble with was the lack of intention to provide a good service. Both times the technicians were uninterested in the effectiveness of their effort and more interested in moving on to the next task. The problem in my father’s mind did not seem to be lack of expertise as much as lack of intention.

Interestingly enough, if the right intention had been present, the problem, the costs associated with the second visit and the strain on the customer relationship would have been averted.

Why then, would Quest not ask their technicians to check with the customer before and after doing the work? The return on investment is certainly clear.

Intention overpowers errors and inefficiencies – because we are human and we value experiences more than error-free service.

Rudy Vidal

Committed to XCS !

A couple of days ago I traveled for the second time on Southwest Airlines.
It took the second time to fully understand and appreciate the experience. I think it wasn’t clear to me the first time because I was accustomed to a certain way of flying. I had accepted the flying paradigm handed to me over the years.

On the second trip, I read the airline magazine and came across a farewell article from the airline’s president Colleen Barrett. In the article she explained Southwest’s customer philosophy and how their success was based on a simple premise, an expectation and requirement of a display of “:Golden Rule Behavior” among and from Southwest Employees -

“Do onto others as you would have others do onto you”.

Once I read the article something seemed to click and I began to see things I had not noticed until then. Flight attendants were fun, helpful, nice, friendly. More importantly, passengers were the same. When the captain announced a weather delay, no one made the usual sarcastic comments or eye-rolling sighs. In stead there were the inevitable jokes about Chicago and its weather. The next thing I noticed was that the energy on the flights was less hurried, intense and more . . .I’ll say it, “loving”.

Southwest is not a high priced airline that can afford great customer service, in fact, they are the opposite, a low cost airline (one of the few making money). So, how does that work?

Ms. Barrett, understands it, and I suspect the entire culture does as well. Customer satisfaction comes from a state of mind. It comes from a caring spirit that needs no funding, no budget nor gadgets. Loyalty comes from the emotions we are able to create in our customers when they see that they are cared for, as people.

Most executives with whom I speak regarding Customer Satisfaction mention they would like to work on customer centricity but believe they can’t afford it. We must convince them all to put away their money and put their hearts out where the customer can see them.

Higher quality of life and higher business benefits are just around the corner, ask Ms. Barrett, or fly Southwest at least twice.

RudyVidal
Committed to XCS !