Author: sybil

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Customer service Training & Development

A Customer Never Forgets–3 Customer Stories and What They Mean

Impressions of customer service — good and bad — can be long lasting as these three stories illustrate. In this post my marketing colleagues and I share special situations we experienced as customers more than 20 years ago.

“A legendary service experience that touched my heart”
From Toby Bloomberg: “I walked into an Eckerd Drug Store to buy a sympathy card. Before the clerk even rang up the purchase, he took a silk rose from a display at the counter, presented it to me, and said, ‘I’m sorry for your loss. I hope this will cheer you up a little.'”

Toby’s takeaway: There were no dramatic gestures, no casts of thousands, no high cost involved. Simply an elegant approach to ‘service’ between two people. And when you get right down to basics, isn’t that what “legendary service” is all about — people who go the extra mile to connect to the customer?

Take care of the customer and worry about the details later
From Chris Bonney: “It was a Saturday around noon at the Hyatt Woodfield in Chicago for an AMA (American Marketing Association) chapter leadership meeting. Just as our people were sitting down to lunch, the first alarm went off. We were quickly hustled outside by the staff and stayed outdoors for the better part of an hour due to a water emergency.

“A couple of weddings were scheduled to take place at the hotel later that day. One of the brides arrived that morning and, not finding a closet hook high enough to hold her wedding gown off the floor, she hung it on a fire system water sprinkler. The weight eventually broke the sprinkler head, spewing rusty water all over the gown in her room and other rooms on the floor that were linked on that sprinkler water line. The water also leaked through to rooms below the bride’s floor. The hotel could have easily blamed the bride for her misfortune and the inconvenience caused to everyone else in the hotel. But instead they summoned a limousine, took the bride and her mother across to the Nordstrom’s at Woodfield Mall to buy a new dress.”

Chris’s takeaway: I don’t know if the hotel was insured for this kind of thing or not. But they knew that it was cheaper for the bride to get a new dress so that her wedding could proceed and worry about the details later. They recovered the situation without embarrassing the bride and her family. (Perhaps as a result, hotels posted warning signs to not use sprinkler heads as hangers.)
Helping a customer in a difficult situation

This is my story: My husband and I were traveling to Boston to attend a conference for his work when I had a medical emergency on the plane. Upon landing at the airport, I was immediately taken off the plane in a special ambulance gurney and we were whisked away to the hospital. While filling out our medical forms in the ER, my husband and I suddenly looked at each other to ask, “What happened to our luggage?!” given we left the plane in a hurry.

My husband took a taxi to the conference hotel while I was in surgery and explained our situation. The Marriott Copley Hotel staff called Logan airport to find and place a hold on our luggage. They also arranged for a hotel courtesy car driver to take my husband back to the airport to collect the luggage, drop him off at the hospital to be with me after surgery, and then place our luggage in the hotel room for when my husband returned.

My takeaway: In our situation, we were guests who arrived at the hotel with a problem that had nothing to do with the hotel itself. Yet the front desk staff showed their compassion and concern by going the extra step take care of us.

My colleagues and I had different customer experiences that share a common theme: a favorable impression made by customer service providers who were empathetic to their customers’ situation.

Categories
Engagement

A Social Community Gives Back: BlogPaws Interview

It was my second year as a speaker at BlogPaws’ 2014 conference. BlogPaws is a social community that includes pet owners, pet lovers, pet bloggers, animal welfare nonprofits (including animal rescues and shelters, American Animal Hospital Association, and the Human Animal Bond Research Initiative Foundation), and pet-product companies. What continues to impress me about BlogPaws is how much this social community focuses on serving as an “advocate for pets in need” with its Be the Change initiative. For example, at its annual conference, BlogPaws awards donations to several animal welfare organizations. To date, the pet community has donated over $90,000 in cash and goods. Another highlight of the conference is giving a safety vest to a police dog and oxygen masks to the local fire department in the community where the conference is held. All leftover swag from sponsors get donated to a local shelter.

Yvonne DiVita
Yvonne DiVita

I interviewed Yvonne DiVita, social media professional and BlogPaws co-founder, to learn more about this social community’s commitment to giving back.

QSM: Tell us about BlogPaws and what makes it a special community?

Yvonne: We’re truly focused on saving lives. A key part of that is supporting shelters and rescues through a variety of efforts. If we go back to day one of BlogPaws, when three simple bloggers (myself, my husband, Tom Collins, and Caroline Golon of Romeothecat) met at a BlogHer conference and decided to replicate that model for our pet blogger friends, a key element of the decision was Be the Change. This, of course, is based on the familiar “Be the Change You Want To See”… for us, it was a challenge to inspire all bloggers at that first conference in Columbus, Ohio, to go out and be the change for pets in need.

When folks ask me what’s ‘different’ about BlogPaws, compared to other social networks, I tell them about Be the Change. You see, Sybil, I have yet to meet a pet blogger that is not passionate about her local shelter, and many other endeavors to help pets in need. It’s an over-arching goal of this community to facilitate the saving of lives, even one life – to help you understand, I refer you to this video, shared at that first event, and still important today. Frugal Dougal is no longer with us, having passed to the Rainbow Bridge, but this video lives on as our commitment to animals everywhere. In fact, we are also part of a Disaster Relief Network, working with groups like World Vets, to make sure animals are not forgotten during disasters.

QSM: How do BlogPaws members get involved with Be the Change?

Yvonne:  The members of our community participate in Be the Change is a variety of ways. Each one has a passionate purpose or focus – whether that’s their own shelter, where they volunteer, or a purpose they saw on Facebook or Twitter. We use social media regularly to reach out and connect with as many people as possible. The key here is to recognize that the pet community isn’t just bloggers. It’s pet parents everywhere who are devoted to saving pets. Be the Change encompasses all people, the world over, who see the value of the human–animal bond, and work to help the rest of the world accept the importance of pets in our lives. This transcends the usual “we love our dog” focus. It recognizes that pets of all manner help decrease blood pressure, teach children responsibility, assist veterans with PSD, and more. These are creatures that make lives whole for so many of us.

Members of our community share experiences and events, and make sure not only their event is noticed, but everyone else’s is, also. And when we see elephants rescued, or animals in need in disaster areas (flood, earthquake, typhoons), we rush to make sure the entire world is aware. Being involved just means doing what you feel is important. It can be a $5 donation, sharing on Facebook, or working hard to raise awareness of puppy mills.

QSM: What impact has Be The Change made?bethechange image1-472x311 (1)

Yvonne: It’s easy on some level to judge the impact, and, on another level, not easy at all. For instance, BlogPaws itself has contributed over $90,000 in goods and cash (most of that in cash donations via the conference) over the last five years. If we were to go back and ask each shelter that received donations from us, there is no doubt we’d get a lot of stories along with the many thank you’s we receive when the donations are made. In our heart of hearts, we love seeing the change first hand at the events we hold. Shelters are invited and most of them attend. They are astonished at the outflowing of good will and offers of help from the folks who meet them. The cash donations go far to helping feed and care for their charges. The donations of all leftover swag help many, many pets over the course of their stay – donations include dog beds, treats, pet food, toys, and more.

Within the community itself, the change is also apparent. The act of contributing to a shelter or rescue, whether in time and talent, with cash donations, or sharing among a network to help raise much needed medical care, lifts each and every person up in ways nothing else can! Among the deep seated passion for helping these local groups as they rescue and care for neglected or abused animals is the sense of having done something purposeful, of having been part of something bigger than ourselves.

Our Be the Change community is so strong and so sincere, it continues to stand as a foundation of everything we are about – helping pet parents be all that they can (or want to) be… including, angels for animals in need.

The hard part of understanding the impact is in having such an enormous reach – from working with folks like Eldad Hagar, who contributed $25,000 at the latest BlogPaws event to help medical care for pets displaced and lost in the tornadoes of the U.S. during May 2014 … to sharing the efforts of folks like Robin A.F. Olson, who writes Covered in Cat Hair and runs Kitten Associates … to Amazon Cares, which takes people to Peru to save animals in need  – all of which means our efforts in Be the Change are just a blip on the radar of the universe and we still have much more to do.

QSM: What would you tell other social communities about giving back?

Yvonne: I would say, get to it. What are you waiting for? The ability to give back, to participate in a charity organization or event, lifts up all people, and reminds us why we are here – we are here because we are not alone. We are a community across the globe and, as a community, the ability to give back is inherent in our desire to be accepted and loved. When you give, you get… it’s as true today as it has ever been. I am not the first to say it. At BlogPaws, we remain true to this quote by Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” If you hesitate because you aren’t sure how to begin, ask your community. You will be amazed and inspired by the response.

And when you’re ready, connect with others like BlogPaws. Because it’s only in working together, in bringing neighborhoods together, in giving voice to the human desire to save each other, that we will achieve the great success we all strive for.

QSM: Thank you!

 

Categories
Engagement

Engaging in Work and Life: How to “Live Fully”

For World Suicide Prevention Day on September 10th, employee engagement thought leader David Zinger advocates helping “all employees live fully at work – with a full life and a life full of meaning and mattering. We need to recognize when employees are struggling and what we can do to help.” His message is timely given recent public attention on mental health issues and suicidal behavior, and it has important meaning for everyone inside and outside the workplace.

David describes “living fully” as the opposite of suicide:

To live fully is to have a full life in years while putting fullness into each day. It embraces and acknowledges life’s joys and suffering, both our own and others, letting in compassion and support. Living fully is about living for both us and for others. Living fully at work is more about work/life integration than trying to find an ideal state of balance. Living fully at work is the new meaningful employee recognition when we are attuned to others in our work community and we recognize and connect with them during progress, celebration, setback, struggle, and loss.

He also suggests how to apply “living fully” at work:

  1. Accept each day as an invitation to live fully.
  2. Be mindful of moments and in touch with all your fluctuating emotions.
  3. Engage with both your work and the people you work with.
  4. Acknowledge impermanence – know that even negative experiences will change over time.
  5. Move beyond isolation from others by making connection and contribution.
  6. Flourish at work with positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, accomplishment, and strengths.
  7. Open your head, heart, and hands to your coworkers.
  8. Transform the ritual question of “how are you today?” into an authentic curiosity and really listen and respond to what the other person says.
  9. Face fears and create safety at work by caring for others and caring about what they are trying to achieve in their life.
  10. Know that small is big, by taking small steps day after day you will make a huge difference in your life or the life of someone else.

I love David’s suggestion to “entertain a playful serenity with this modified serenity prayer”:

“God grant me the laughter to see the past with perspective, face the future with hope, and celebrate today without taking myself too seriously.”

[Note: the above content is excerpted with permission from David Zinger’s post: How to Live Fully at Work: The New Employee Recognition.]

Thank you, David!

 

Categories
Engagement

When the Board Doesn’t Care About Employee Engagement – The Market Basket Saga

It’s the case of a CEO who did well by his employees (personable management style, career growth, great pay, profit-sharing, etc.) and, in turn, customers – engendering the loyalty of both. So much so that when the CEO was ousted in a board-level family feud, employees and customers protested loudly — with employee rallies and online petitions by customers to boycott the company  It’s the story of the Market Basket  grocery chain that finds itself in a management and public relations nightmare.

With empty shelves, frightened or disgruntled employees, and frustrated customers, I can’t begin to imagine how much the company is losing in actual dollars, not to mention brand damage.

“Put your staff first, customers second, and shareholders third … then, in the end, the shareholders do well, customers do better, and your staff are happy.” Sir Richard Branson

This win-win-win approach works for Starbucks, Virgin, Zappos and many others companies. It’s also a winning strategy of Firms of Endearment that “follow a stakeholder relationship business model rather than a traditional stockholder-biased business model.” Why doesn’t the board of Market Basket get it?

UPDATE: Ousted CEO Arthur T. Demoulas is back at the helm after the company reached an agreement with him to purchase the grocery chain from the family members who fired him.

This quote from a HuffingtonPost article brings it all together: “Most times, CEOs and the company’s business model don’t always align with the employees’ best interests,” said Paul Pustorino, an accounting professor at Suffolk University’s Sawyer Business School. “What this proves is when a CEO can align the best interests of the company with the best interests of the employees, that generates strong employee loyalty and customer loyalty.”

 

Categories
Engagement Marketing

Summer Blog Break 2014

After an extremely busy six months of speaking engagements and client work, it’s time for my annual blog break. I find summer is the perfect time to clear my head, catch up on a backlog of reading (preferably outside in the sunshine), and stimulate new content marketing ideas.

This is only a temporary break from blogging. I’m working on several client and writing projects this summer and will continue to stay active on Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media networks. Until I return to blogging in mid-late August, you can find many great current and archived posts on:

Have a happy and safe summer!

Categories
Engagement

Why We Need to Put the Brakes on Wheel-Spinning Managers

Bike racing is a great sport but it’s a lousy metaphor for management. I know because I had the unfortunate experience of seeing such management in action.

I once worked for a boss who had a bike racing poster in his office. The poster was a gift from the Lehigh Valley PA-based Velodrome cycling track to its corporate sponsors. Over time I came to view this poster’s image as a symbol of my boss’s wheel-spinning management style. He would give direction for a project and then shift gears once the project was well underway. My staff and I were continually frustrated as a result. Despite the pressure to complete our work with limited time and budget resources, we had to stop the project in progress, regroup, and somehow find the time to do things over – all on budget and deadline, of course.

So forget about this type of fast track management. You can’t win with disengaged employees drained of energy and enthusiasm.

Categories
Customer service Engagement

Good Signs of Customer Service

Irish restaurant welcome sign

  • Employees who smile and are genuinely happy to see you.
  • Employees who sincerely want to help you.
  • Managers who smile and are genuinely happy to see you.
  • Managers who sincerely want to help you or help their employees help you.
  • Happy customers.
    Copperhead Grill sign-3
Categories
Engagement

Employees as Volunteers? Or Volunteers as Employees?

If your organization relies on paid employees to get its work done, would you treat them any differently if they were volunteers?

Other thought leaders have shared their views on this topic, including:

Here are my thoughts to build on this management discussion. The key difference between these two sets of workers are that volunteers “aren’t bound by the same command and control requirements that employees have.”  This means volunteers can voluntarily choose to offer their time and services to what they consider a worthwhile organization. They can also voluntarily choose to withdraw their time and services  when it no longer suits them. Even though employees are in contractual work situations, they can also choose to stay or leave an organization. Unlike volunteers, however, employees may need to stay for their paychecks even though they would prefer to leave — engagement for payment purposes only.

If your organization relies on volunteers to get its work done, would you treat them any differently if they were employees?

As I’ve found in my work in the nonprofit sector, the presumption that all nonprofits value volunteerism is not necessarily the case. Some nonprofit managers only give lip-service to their volunteers despite benefiting from their time and skills. These managers can take advantage of their volunteers’ passion for the mission for only so long before those volunteers get frustrated and leave.

What matters to employees and volunteers is being treated with respect while getting the tools and information needed to effectively contribute their time and talents. Whether an organization is profit-driven or mission-driven, the quality of workplace engagement depends on its culture and values including how its people are treated, regardless of their paid or unpaid status. Both employee engagement and volunteer engagement are critical – neither should be taken for granted.

 

Categories
Marketing Training & Development

Marketing Animal Rescues & Shelters – BlogPaws 2014

One of the reasons I love my work is that I get to meet dedicated nonprofit professionals and volunteers eager to share their stories. They’re also eager to learn how to further their respective organization’s mission in the marketing workshops I teach.

The volunteers and employees from a variety animal rescues and shelters who attended my recent BlogPaws 2014 Conference session, Fundamentals of Nonprofit Marketing: Building Share of Mind & Heart for Your Rescue/Shelter were no exception. These people involved in animal welfare are most passionate and inspiring. While rescues/shelters benefit from showcasing cute and appealing animal images in their marketing and social media outreach (i.e., the “aww … ” factor), they face intense competition from other rescue/shelter groups doing the same. They also run the risk of “wearing out people’s compassion.”

Animal Rescue/Shelter Marketing Challenges

In their efforts to save animals and find them “furever” homes, animal welfare volunteers and employees are challenged with service demands that often exceed their resources. Yet they manage to do what they can to:

  • educate the public about animal welfare, including raising awareness of animal abuse
  • advocate for spay and neutering
  • obtain the necessary support of volunteers, pet foster parents, donors, veterinary assistance, community sponsors and partners
  • communicate via social media to support their special events and the important work they do.

Intentional Marketing

Like many nonprofit organizations, animal rescues/shelters strive to maximize their mission with minimal resources. With this mode of operation, marketing is often a casualty — ” Marketing? Who’s got time to do marketing?!” But being a well-kept secret won’t sustain an organization. That’s why building and maintaining brand awareness through marketing needs to be intentional, and it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. It starts with understanding that each point of personal and/or media contact between the shelter, its stakeholders, and the market-at-large (e.g., every phone call, shelter visit, special event, email, letter, press release, Tweet, Facebook post, etc.) impacts the public’s perception of that shelter’s brand. Recognizing people’s individual and collective impact on the brand, intentional marketing then focuses on how best to ensure its brand contacts are as positive as possible.

Employees and volunteers who run animal rescues/shelters are already intentional in their commitment to help animals. By marketing intentionally as well, they’ll be able to continue their valuable work.

“Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way.” —  John Muir

 

Categories
Marketing Training & Development

Is Your Recruiting Hurting Your Brand?

Talk about first impressions! Managers responsible for recruiting new employees have a significant impact on both the employer brand and their organization’s overall brand.

Here are two examples of how an ineffective recruiting experience – described by a potential candidate looking for work in the nonprofit sector – resulted in a negative brand impression. [Note: I’ve heard similar job applicant horror stories in the for-profit sector as well. ]

Example #1. “I had a telephone interview for a grant writer position in an arts-related organization. It was clear during the interview that the supervisor had no interviewing skills — she did not seem to know what she wanted to ask, nor could she process my responses. She was very busy concentrating on what to say next rather than evaluating my answers. Mid-way through the interview she sighed with exasperation and said she had no idea how to talk with me because I was not ‘part of the art world.’  At the conclusion of the interview the HR person asked if I would be available for an onsite interview, and I said yes. I never heard from them again.”

Example #2. “In my experience with another organization, the telephone interview was a fiasco. Three people on a speaker phone interviewed me; I could barely hear one of them and was never quite sure who was speaking.  The first question asked why I had applied for the position. My response addressed the unique combination of duties, appeal of the variety of work involved, etc. When I finished my response they told me they were no longer certain that the position would be structured as posted. They then asked a series of narrowly focused questions that indicated very clearly that they had not read my resume or that they were incapable of shaping the questions to elicit additional information. At the conclusion of the interview, the convener told me that additional interviews were being scheduled the following week and that he would be in touch ‘either way.’ Two months passed and I received an email from him saying they had decided to put the position on hold while they reviewed and possibly revised the position’s responsibilities.”

Bottom line brand impact

The job candidate had previously worked in HR. Here’s what she had to say about her experiences with the two organizations that interviewed her:

“As a former HR and management professional, I am appalled at the ridiculous turn the interview process has apparently taken. I am struck dumb by how little regard or understanding these folks have of their role as brand slayers. They seem completely unaware of the fact that an interview is not a one-way street.  While they are asking questions and making some attempt to assess the applicant, the applicant is gaining a great deal of insight into the nature of the organization and the people who inhabit it!  My respect for these organizations is diminished, my interest in supporting them in any way is erased, and my new and distinctly negative view of their capacity is going to be a topic of conversation for some time to come.”

Do the people who recruit and interview potential employees for your organization understand how their actions affect perceptions of your employer and external brand?