The Secret Sauce Revealed
Sometimes your product is so good that your standard of customer service is irrelevant. Unfortunately, most of us don't have that luxury and need to establish epic standards of care and detail to build strong relationships and engagement.
At Roma Moulding, fostering amazing leadership is very important to us. Once a year we hold an internal conference, LEADERMASH, where we bring together our leaders from across North America to brainstorm, as well as build skills, vision, and a brighter future for Roma as a whole. LEADERMASH 2015 was held last week, from October 6-9 and it was a great success. Each year we choose an overarching theme for the event, and this year we decided to focus on our number one core value “Delivering WOW through Service”.
As a student of life, I crave knowledge and continually want to improve upon our relationships with our many loyal Partners. In an effort to discover how we can go above and beyond when it comes to service, we focused on successful global brand leaders for clues and key take aways.
Did you know 78% of customers have bailed on a transaction because of poor service?
Here are short stories from four of the world’s top service brands that stand out from the crowd and live their core values daily by providing exceptional service.
Four Seasons Hotel
A guest was halfway down the hallway at a Four Seasons hotel when he realized he’d forgotten something in his room. Walking back toward the room he had just left, he was surprised to see someone from engineering with his door open, adjusting it.
Curious, he asked what was going on. The engineer told him, “The housekeeper servicing the room next door noticed that when your door closes, it closes more with an indeterminate gentle closing sound. This sound is a little bit less definitive than the ‘click’ we prefer, so she called down to engineering to have us come up and zero in on the closing mechanism.”
This amazing service standard can be broken down into three core components of a customer service system.
- Defining a standard of how a guestroom door should sound when it closes
- A reporting standard
- A scheduling/non-interruption of guest standard
Zappos
Online retailer Zappos has 500 employees in a call center in Las Vegas, who have all received seven weeks of training on how to make customers happy. The company has been called “insane” and “fanatical” for the way it will do anything to please its customers. The stories are legendary and are a key part of its brand.
Zappos is so in tune with customer engagement that they put their 1-800 number on every page of their website, as well as all packaging that they send out! Having their contact number so prominent encourages customers to call them, and if they get the interaction right, people will tell their families and friends about it to keep coming back for more.
Starbucks
My morning does not start without my lactose free wet cappuccino. The other day, before I even got to the register, the barista already had my name written on my cup! This particular morning I decide to change things up by also ordering a bagel. While off to the side buttering my bagel, a second barista called my name to let me know that my cappuccino was ready.
Before I even had time to look up he was next to me with my cup in hand, wishing me a great day. It was unnecessary, but it was part of the service that he wanted to provide. It made me feel extremely special and important!
Southwest Airlines
Southwest Airlines thinks of themselves as a customer service company that happens to fly airplanes (on schedule, with personality and perks along the way).
They’ve perfected the concept of providing anticipatory customer service by following two simple rules:
- Selecting employees who have the potential to work empathetically with customers
- Training these employees to anticipate “even the unexpressed wishes” of customers, one customer at a time, and one situation at a time.
I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
– Maya Angelou
Service at its core is simply how you’re making someone feel. The better we can make someone feel, the more likely they are to share that story with the world!
Service is a long game, a marathon instead of a sprint… it’s a way of life!