Category: examples

Ways to delight your customers

For all your cricket lovers there, I don’t have to explain how exasperating it is to have the match being interrupted by ads – either immediately after an over or when a wicket falls. The exasperation is a amplied multifold in the 20 over version of the game.

And for all the verbal support that the ESPN Star commentators provide against such a behavior of the channels, I felt they this channel too sold out to the advertisers during the ongoing T20 world cup. Whoever is deciding on when the ads come on is so trigger happy ….
But the channel did come out with a master stroke recently. The second semi-final between Australia & India was a true humdinger ….being decided in the very last balls of the game. Every single moment was worth grabbing on to. And in this situation, the channel decided to skip (I hope this was a conscious decision) ads between the 19th & 20th over of the Australian innings. And even after the win, they continued showing the joyous celebrations on the field off it without showing the ads. ESPN-Star managed to delight me with this.
  • They knew exactly what their customer base values the most.
  • And they decided to positively affect their customer’s experince when it mattered the most.

Customer Service Champs

Ideas that caught my imagination :

  • Rankings & lists do matter, but nothing matters more than having the processes & the determination to do the best for your customers. Case at hand – Jetblue. Though not on the BW top 25 customer service champs list, the first 10 mins of the podcast sounds like a Jetblue promo!
  • Disasters happen – how you recover from them is what characterises a company. Work on the foundation!
  • Empathy Engine – is the idea that every single person in the organization is really thinking of customer.
  • Customer Service leaders don’t just want to be best amongst their competitors, they want to be the best in customer service. Period!

Best Practices:

  • Remind your employees often about who their customers really are, what is it like to live the customer’s life, what is their perspective, what do the customers go through, etc. eg. Four Seasons has a program that allows even a housekeeper gets to stay in a Four Seasons hotel as a guest & experince that life.
  • Employee (treat them well), Processes (get the senior management in front of the customer) & Attitude (never be happy with just customer satisfaction)- most important constituents of the foundation for customer focus.

Source:

Example of a customer champion

A perfect example of the saying – anyone can make a difference!

The story of an individual who went out of his way to create memorable customer experinces. A walking talking marketing machine for United Airlines. Imagine the effect if even 5% of United’s personnel adopt such an attitude – god save the competition.

Lessons from this story –

  • What Capt. Flanagan is doing is not a result of any corporate customer centricity initiative. This is in fact a result of his own initiative. Similary, anyone – just about anyone anywhere in the hierarchy / value chain can make a difference. Recruit individuals with the right mental make up …that has the potential to generate such initiatives.

  • Capt. Flanagan did things that were valued by the customers …examples like what he does for unaccompanied childeren, confirming of baggage on connecting flights, etc. Value is customer defined.

  • Its good to see United backing up this individual’s modus operandi. Every small initiative / gesture / acts should be glorified by the organization if it has see more of this. Spot such positive actions & glorify them to the hilt.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118826634834410559.html?mod=The+Middle+Seat