Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization (15 page)

Let’s examine this balancing act with a practical example that’s close to our hearts—our selves as a whole, actually—it surrounds us, in fact.

While the two of us work on this book, we’re sitting in a fully staffed, comfortable airport club lounge. A few minutes ago, a perfectly nice, well-groomed, well-spoken staff person interrupted Leonardo when he was in mid-sentence. What was lacking here?
Training.
So let’s look at how training could effectively apply to this environment.

Otherwise-nice service people obliviously break protective bubbles all the time; training can ensure that
your
employees will do better.

Assuming proper selection in the first place for empathy and other necessary traits, proper training can turn the principles below into second nature. Here are the principles we would stress:

Principle 1. Service starts the moment the customer comes in contact with
you.
The first step of service is a warm and sincere greeting. How do you execute that? At a distance, a guest such as one of us might look up from our work here in the airport lounge, turn, and see an employee coming in from the service door. The employee returns the eye contact and begins service with a sincere smile. The ‘‘switch’’ is turned on; service starts.

But perhaps we didn’t actually need anything. The employee needs to continue to maintain eye contact; if it turns out we were just ran-domly looking up, the employee will recognize that and smile. We would then probably smile back briefly and go back to work. Service Your People

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has now ended. The employee has reassured us with a smile and should back away, because no service has been requested.

Principle 2: Learn to read the subtle verbal and non-verbal messages the
customer is delivering.
When customers and guests aren’t ready for assistance, they don’t like to be disturbed. If they want something, they’ll ask. The trick is that the ‘‘asking’’ may be extremely subtle, but employees must be skilled enough to recognize it as clearly as if it had been explicit.

To role-play this principle, we might begin by sitting in the lounge talking with each other; Micah turns his face because he notices peripherally that the employee has walked into the room. The employee makes eye contact and smiles. Micah looks at him, smiles back, and maintains eye contact.

These are sufficient cues: The employee now needs to come a little forward and engage Micah verbally (‘‘Good morning. May I assist you with something?’’) Why? Because the customer’s non-verbal message is

‘‘I’ve seen you; you’ve smiled at me, and that’s super. But I am, by
maintaining
eye contact, trying to bring you closer.’’ (If he didn’t need anything, Micah would have concluded the visual exchange as in scenario one: he would have turned right back to talking with Leonardo.)
Principle 3: Adjust to the pace of the customer.
You cannot attend to a chatty, meandering tourist in the same way you would serve a time-stressed, introverted banker. It is the server’s job to pick up on this.

Principle 4: The bubble is the sanctuary of the guest.
If the timing’s wrong to disturb the customer,
don’t.
Your procedures and timing need to be based on the customer’s convenience, not yours. Don’t change out the salt and pepper shakers on the table when customers are seated.

Don’t reach across your customers to light a candle to make the room cozier if the moment’s wrong for them, even if it’s on your checklist of things to get done. All customer care activity needs to be driven by the
customer’s
needs and timing, not ham-fistedly by the employee’s rush to check a to-do item off a list. It’s simply not service if it doesn’t match the customer’s timing.

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In our lounge example, if the customer opens a little door into his sanctuary and looks up—or makes an obvious break in conversation—

that’s
the time to check in. Stay focused enough on your customer that you notice these subtle ‘‘door’’ openings. For example, if Micah and Leonardo have been engaged in constant conversation and then Leonardo turns his head sideways as if looking for somebody, that’s the server’s chance to step in.

‘‘Yes, sir, how may I assist you?’’

‘‘I would like, uh, can you bring another cup of coffee?’’

‘‘Absolutely. May I bring a pastry with that also?’’

‘‘No, but thanks.’’

Principle 5: Closing the sanctuary door—or not.
When the waiter returns with the coffee, there is a final element. The customer has intentionally come to the foreground with his request for coffee, so the door to his personal sanctuary is now open. The server brings the cup of coffee back, with appropriate niceties. His responsibility now is to ask,

‘‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’’

The customer has two options: ‘‘Yes, there is,’’ or ‘‘No, there is not.’’ Depending on the answer, the door to the sanctuary may stay open, or it may be shut again. If it’s the latter, the server needs to thank the customer graciously and move away.

This is the last principle: the ‘‘closing’’ of service. Too many service interactions end with a cold and impersonal ‘‘Bye,’’ or ‘‘OK,’’ or nothing at all. The closing of service is as important as the opening. It is the last touch point, and it needs to be handled properly.

Reinforcement: The Daily Check-In

Preparation for serving customers is like a paint job: The thicker and more multi-layered the coating, the more gracefully it will weather.

Regardless, over time your employees will suffer wear and tear to their

‘‘paint’’—from the day-in, day-out strain of working with customers Your People

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on the one hand and with the demands of management on the other, compounded always by the pressures of life that come from outside work.

This wear and tear can rub even your most naturally friendly employees down to the grain. You need to polish their coats of paint—ideally, every day.

Strangely, the
technical
aspect of a job can actually compound the problem, can actually be part of the grit that chips away every day at the paint of exceptional service. Why? Because service professionals perform the technical parts of their jobs day after day. If someone is a gate agent at Delta or a retail clerk at Bloomingdale’s, he will perform the technical aspects of his job daily. He will check people in and out, process transactions, scan items, run credit card payments, day in and day out. And he will end up being very, very good at it.

This, however, is only a portion of his role in the organization: What maintains him in the portion of his role that demands the delivery of caring service—over and over, in a tireless and always subtly different manner? If a company wants to maintain great service, it needs to find a way to discuss service on an ongoing basis and to include everyone from frontline workers on up in the discussions. One way you can do so is with a daily standup meeting.

We know that every industry and every company culture is different. We are far from dogmatic about applying what you could call our daily ‘‘standup routine’’ to every business situation. We have, however, worked in and advised companies that have made revolutionary improvements from implementing this approach. The key is a daily meeting held in small groups throughout your company at the same time each day. Discuss a single aspect of service (for example, one of your guiding service principles, as exemplified by an encounter with a particular customer). Prove your commitment to brevity and focus by holding the meeting standing up, assuming there aren’t attendees with physical disabilities who are put at a disadvantage in this setting.

This procedure gets inspiration from, and yet is 180 degrees removed from, the old hospitality tradition of a check-in with staff 100

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(‘‘lineup’’), where daily specials and other mundane updates are shared.

The difference is, in today’s world, the challenge of providing great service is not in such nuts and bolts, skills-and-details-related updates.

(Put
those
on your wiki.) The challenge is that even if you start off strong with a great orientation, the daily grind will ensure that functional issues ultimately end up overwhelming company purpose.

A daily standup meeting is a chance to keep your company focused on your overriding purpose and to ensure that all staff are aligned to fulfill it. It only takes a few minutes, and the difference it makes can be crucial.

Try it on for size. There is no more powerful way to create an extraordinary experience for your customers than to maintain a fully aligned company—and there is no better time to align a company than once a day, every single day.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Leadership

Guiding the Customer-Centered Organization

Maintaining production capability in a service-oriented business requires a different emphasis than in the world of manufacturing. Your ability to provide service is overwhelmingly are affected by how engaged—how professionally ‘‘alive’’—the employees are who come in contact with customers. Employee engagement, in turn, is propelled by organizational leadership.

Service Leaders Matter Because People Power Service

On an assembly line, there are traditionally two measures. One measure may be termed ‘‘theoretical capacity,’’ the theoretical maximum output of that assembly line during a shift: for example, 100 units. The other counter let’s call ‘‘forecasted actual production,’’ and also start at an optimistic 100, since nothing generally goes wrong on an assembly line
before
the start of the production day. (Note: This is an admittedly simplified illustration in several respects.) As the day goes on, the units come through the assembly line, until suddenly one unit arrives with a component that won’t fit right. This marks the first drop, or ‘‘dis-101

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count,’’ in the ‘‘forecasted actual production’’ number. Ultimately, this second count settles some notches below the ideal 100 by the end of the shift.

By contrast, let’s look at the beginning of the shift in a service-focused department. The employees are just showing up. They haven’t seen a customer yet. The first employee to arrive is Aviva. On the way back from work yesterday, she had a little car accident. Nothing serious: a little scratch on the door and fender. Unfortunately, this is the new car that she had just picked up on Saturday. Is Aviva upset? Oh, yeah—she’s
really
upset.

The second to show up is Mark. How’s Mark doing? Well, he just found out that a bill he had overlooked for a couple months is now affecting his ability to buy a house. That stupid $20 medical bill went into collections without him knowing it, and now his credit rating is going to be affected: He’s going to be paying $70 to $80 more a month on a thirty-year mortgage. Is he thrown off his game? You’d better believe it.

Do you think that these things don’t happen to your employees?

They happen all the time—and they downgrade your company’s service production capability. Remember: Aviva and Mark
haven’t seen a
customer yet.
They haven’t interacted with another employee. They haven’t opened their paychecks to learn that someone in accounting forgot to enter their overtime. But already you’re starting with a hob-bled organization—in contrast to manufacturing, where production only begins its downward drift once the day has begun.

This is one of the reasons that leadership, starting at the top and spreading throughout the managerial ranks, is so crucial in a service organization. Constant reconnection with workers, as well as constant reconnection of workers with the organization, is your greatest tool.

The goal? Having people get to work and think, ‘‘
You know what?

Maybe if I didn’t have to go to work
at all
it would be better, but since I do
have to work, I like this place. It’s healthy, clean, supportive, and engaging. So
I’m going to give it my attention, performance, commitment, loyalty, and effort
.’’

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Reaching for this state is a central function of a leader in a customer-focused organization.

Five Characteristics of Great Service Leaders

Great service leaders, in our experience, share certain characteristics.

The following five are the most crucial for building an exceptional service organization.

1. Vision:
The leader is able to dream of the future vividly and then distill that dream into a clear view of where the organization needs to go; to envision, in rich detail, what is to come.

2. Alignment:
The successful service leader works to align the entire organization behind a single accessible idea, such as ‘‘Customer Focus.’’

Great leaders actively work to simplify complex or abstract ideas into simple, concrete phrases and metaphors that keep people on track. Employees won’t always catch implied or obscurely-expressed messages, especially not in diversified, multi-site organizations.

The Cynics Among Us

A leader who assumes the helm in an established organization (or, even more importantly, in a turnaround situation) should address the issue of established cynics and skeptics and their roles in the realignment process. There are at least two possible approaches. One is to terminate the cynics, which is often legally and practically complicated and runs the risk of promoting a new generation of cynics. (‘‘
Do you remember Cheryl in Accounting? She
was always saying that management was out to get her. Guess
what? They just
did
. . . I guess they
are
out to get us
!’’) A more successful approach is to use positive energy and benign neglect to help realign the cranks. Taking this approach, think of your staff in terms of three groups: positive employees, 104

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skeptical employees, and cynical employees. Then put nearly all your energy into the positive employees. In such a situation, the true naysayers will tend to quickly move on, and the more moder-ate ‘‘skeptic’’ sector will fall in line with the positive element that they see receiving your support.