Categories
Customer service

Customer Service: Is Business Paying Attention?

That’s the question I’m left with after reading Toby Bloomberg’s recent posts: “Social Media’s Influence on Customer Service” followed by “Social Media’s Positive Influence on Customer Service.”

To whet your appetite – or if you’re pressed for time – here’s the story: dissatisfied consumer blogs about her poorly handled experience with Capital One. Fellow blogger and diva marketer (Toby) e-mails Capital One with a link to the blog post & suggests the company respond. Her posts also generate a number of comments and head-scratching about why more companies don’t respond to these types of posts. Either they’re not taking the impact of social media & “word-of-mouse” seriously … they don’t know how … or maybe they don’t care.

[Sidebar: I love Toby’s quote about conveying the message: “You matter. I hear you. I’m paying attention to you.” That’s the true essence of customer service and delight.]

I encourage you to read these thoughtful posts, and I also challenge you & your friends to respond to Toby’s request if you’ve ever posted a positive experience on your blog and received feedback from the company involved.

Categories
Engagement Marketing

A Must Read: “Firms of Endearment”

I predict a business best seller for a book that’s being released this month: Firms of Endearment: How World-Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose. It’s about how successful companies focus on ALL their stakeholders, not just shareholders. [2014 Update: This book is now in its second edition.]

Given my internal marketing bias, I’m thrilled with any book that encourages companies to pay more attention to their employees. But Firms of Endearment goes even further as it advocates appropriate attention to all of a firm’s stakeholders: its customers, employees, partners/suppliers, investors, and the community-at-large/society. I also love the examples of how these companies do this profitably in spite of Wall Street’s short-term focus.

The research process used to identify “Firms of Endearment” (FoE) was opposite of the Good to Great approach. Instead of starting with financial performance and working backwards to find common corporate practices as with “Good to Great” companies, FoE authors began by identifying companies that people love. These companies were then screened for their performance in serving each stakeholder constituency, followed by an investor analysis on the publicly-traded companies.

The book explores the answer to the question:

“How is it that these companies can be so generous to everyone who costs them money (customers, employees, suppliers, communities) and still deliver superior (some would say spectacular) returns to investors?”

I’m adding the book to my “recommended reading” list that I handout in my training workshops and, of course, my “Good Reads” blog roll.

Happy reading!

Categories
Customer service Engagement Marketing

Employees & the Customer Experience: A Question of Motivation

Here’s the last post in my series about Maritz‘s approach to the Customer Experience.

Maritz recognizes the importance of the customer experience as a critical brand differentiator: “ … companies must take a more thorough, local, meaningful, and integrated approach to managing the people who are in regular contact with their customers.”

One point I would add is it’s important to ensure the process also includes non-contact staff; i.e., don’t forget the behind-the-scenes folks and the role they play in taking care of their fellow employees (aka “internal customers”).

However, there’s one excerpt from Maritz’s white paper that I question, and I wanted to bring it to your attention. “Maritz defines ‘the customer experience management process’ as creating greater value for customers by better understanding drivers within the experience, enabling the people who touch customers to act differently, and motivating them to care.” [emphasis is mine]

There’s something about those last few words … I know we can motivate employees to deliver a good customer experience, deliver on the brand promise, etc., but can we really motivate them to care? I keep thinking of the advice from the hospitality industry: hire people for attitude (i.e., those who genuinely like working with and helping people) and train them on the skill set you need.

Maybe I’m just having an issue with semantics here. Let me know what you think.

Categories
Customer service Engagement Marketing

Employees & the Customer Experience: What Companies Can Do

As promised in my last post, here are the findings of Maritz’s 2006 Customer Experience study:

  • Almost half of all customers (43%) who defect do so because of service
  • 77% of these customer blame their leaving on employee attitude
  • 83% of these customers tell someone else.

Maritz’s white paper, “Delight or Defection: The Pivotal Role of People Inside the Customer Experience,” also outlines its approach on how companies can positively impact employee behavior:

  • Better (deeper) measurement of the customer experience:
  • Localized, “grass-roots” intervention (more on this shortly)
  • Meaningful motivation
  • Integrated & aligned action.

I especially like Maritz’s combination top-down & bottom-up strategy to enabling and driving change at the local level: share research results with employees … obtain their input on improving the customer experience … and facilitate action plans based on the research & particulars of the organization at that locale. According to Maritz, “Co-development of learning and action plans with front-line staff generates relevancy, greater participation, and employee buy-in.”

More on Maritz’s approach in my next post …

Categories
Customer service Engagement

Employees & the Customer Experience: Employee Engagement Isn’t Enough

That’s the takeaway I got from D. Randall Brandt, VP of Customer Experience & Loyalty, Maritz Research in his presentation at AMA’s MPlanet

Now that I have your attention, let me put his message in context. Brandt was talking about employee engagement as a variable in research on the customer experience. Most firms measure engagement by asking “what’s it like to work here?” That’s important, but it’s not enough. What’s missing are questions about the employees’ customer orientation; i.e,, how they’re enabled or inhibited in providing service quality.

Effective measurement of the customer experience needs to consider both employee satisfaction AND the employees’ ability to deliver a positive customer experience via customer-focus, readiness & empowerment.

I’ll have more on Maritz’s latest research on employees & the customer experience in my next post.

Categories
Engagement Marketing

Shhh! Check out the “Quiet Manager”

It’s good to be reminded that not all great leaders are of celebrity-caliber.

That’s one of the key messages in Managing Quietly by thought leader and academic Henry Mintzberg, who is critical of the hero worship stimulated by the media for turnaround executives. According to Mintzberg:

“To ‘turn around’ is to end up facing the same way … Might not the white knight of management be the black hole of organizations?  What good is the great leader if everything collapses when he or she leaves?”

Instead, he favors the “quiet managers” who:

  • Inspire rather than empower their people by creating a culture with “conditions that foster openness and release energy” so that “empowerment is taken for granted.”
  • Care for their organizations by spending more time “preventing problems than fixing them, because they know enough to know when and how to intervene.”
  • Infuse change so that it “seeps in slowly, steadily, profoundly” instead of dramatically so “everyone takes responsibility for making sure that serious changes take hold.”

The power of listening

What I found particularly refreshing is the quiet manager’s appreciation & respect for an organization’s institutional and collective memory. Mintzberg writes:

“Show me a chief executive who ignores yesterday, who favors the new outsider over the experienced insider, the quick fix over steady progress, and I’ll show you a chief executive who is destroying an organization.”

His description calls up one of my favorite quotes from entrepreneur Andrew Filipowski:

“The insiders of an organization understand the stupidity of its traditions better than the outsiders.”

Quiet leaders are in touch with what’s going in their organizations and do not treat their people as “detachable ‘human resources.'”  A manager who respects and listens to employees?  That’s the understated mark of a true leader.

Categories
Marketing

Remembering My Father

It’s been just over a month since I lost my beloved father. He was 91 and lived a good life filled with loving family, friends and faith.

He had a profound impact on me both personally and professionally.

So I thought I’d share a tribute I wrote about my father on the occasion of his 80th birthday. This is an excerpt from my column in a services marketing newsletter published by AMA in the 1990’s.

My father was a tailor. When I was little, I would visit his store to admire the rows of colored thread on shelves above the old sewing machine. And occasionally, I would accompany him while he picked up and delivered his customers’ dry cleaning to their homes. I didn’t realize it until now, but I learned a lot from my father amid the colored spools and chemical cleaning smells.

Customers loved my father. He spent as much time socializing with them – in the store and during deliveries – as he did sewing for them. Whenever a customer came into the store, my father would get down to business: with a warm greeting, followed by a concerned query about the customer’s health and family, and then the specifics of the customer’s clothing alteration needs.

He took a lot of care with customers as well as with their clothes. And they kept coming back, while referring new customers to him. My father was not only a craftsman when it came to sewing, he was a master of relationship marketing.

Now you know the term “relationship marketing” didn’t exist back in the 1950’s-70’s when my father ran his tailor shop. It was just an intuitive way of how he did business.

(I can now picture him in heaven reconnecting with his former customers and friends and getting the latest updates on their families … )

Thanks, Dad, for a wonderful legacy. I love you & I miss you.

Categories
Engagement Marketing

Leonard L. Berry – Distinguished Marketing Educator & Mentor

Catching up on my Marketing News, I was excited to find the announcement of Dr. Leonard Berry being named the recipient of the 2007 AMA/Irwin/McGraw-Hill Distinguished Marketing Educator Award. It’s the highest honor a marketing educator can receive based on his/her contributions to marketing education and the marketing discipline.

I’ve been privileged to learn so much from this man even though I never had him in a classroom. Len is one of my mentors from whom I’ve learned a lot about services marketing, service quality, leadership, and of course, internal marketing. In his classic 1991 book, Marketing Services, Len recognized employees as “the most powerful medium for conveying the brand to customers.”

A pioneer in the field of bank marketing (where I began my career) and service quality research (“When we improve quality of service, we improve quality of daily living … “), Len has been both generous and gracious in sharing his knowledge and work. His advice and support were also critical in helping me make the decision to launch Quality Service Marketing nearly 20 years ago.

Congratulations, Len, on a well-deserved honor. And thanks for all you’ve done for the marketing field, for the services industry, and for your students, including me.

Categories
Musings

A Time for Reflection & Looking Ahead

It’s a good time to look back over the year in this last week when calls & e-mails are down considerably. Not much business seems to get done with folks taking time off for the holidays or using the last of precious vacation days.

Professionally it’s been an interesting year, albeit one with numerous ups & downs. I enjoyed a lot of challenging and fun work, including some special pro bono projects. I also met new colleagues and reconnected with others through my travels, attendance at AMA and IAF events and, of course, through the blogosphere.

Unfortunately, this year was overshadowed with much sadness – I lost two very special men in my life: my father-in-law (who passed away in April) and my father (who passed away earlier this month). And that’s why I’m anxious to say goodbye to 2006.

Here’s to better times in 2007 … and a happy & healthy New Year!

Categories
Customer service Engagement Marketing

A Guide to Losing Customers for All Seasons

As part of the holiday season, you hear plenty of customer service horror stories – as well as some positive retail experiences. However, the bad experience I mentioned in my last post occurred before the shopping rush.

As did Olivier Blanchard’s experiences, which he wrote about in his great post: How to Lose Customers in Ten Simple Steps. Of particular note in his formula for alienating customers is this step: “Treat your employees badly.”

Many consumers have zero tolerance for managers who demean employees in front of them. The situation is not only embarrassing for those involved but can have negative repercussions on both employee and customer satisfaction & retention.

Good help is not only hard to find, it’s hard to keep!