Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization (8 page)

It doesn’t always feel good to go to extreme lengths to pacify a customer. It can be hard to remember the upside, to know that your work is ultimately going to pay off. So here’s an overriding philosophy which can help you through thankless moments:
Individual customers are irre-placeable.
Regardless of the size of your market segment, once you start 44

Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

writing off customers, we can predict the day in the future when you’ll be out of business. (We’ll chart it on a big piece of paper for you if you like.) Think you have a huge market and it’s okay to kiss off customers and replace them down the road? We all watched Detroit automakers make that assumption and let imports chip away at the edges until there was little remaining as a core.

We suggest in the strongest terms that you think of every one of your customers as a core customer—and treat the loss of a customer as a tragedy to be avoided.

CHAPTER FIVE

Keeping Track to Bring

Them Back

Tracking Customer Roles, Goals, and Preferences

Even if you hired a platoon of statisticians to pore through your customer data, they’d never uncover a single style of ‘‘good service’’ that can please every customer. Good service requires custom fitting. This is one principle on which true customer service virtuosos—successful barkeeps, booksellers, shopkeepers, and maitre d’s—agree.

So, to succeed far beyond a Mom and Pop scale, or even to run a Mom and Pop that continues to thrive when Mom and Pop are chillin’

in Cancun, you need to ensure that all of your employees are able to provide individualized service—no matter how briefly they’ve been part of your team and no matter how poor their memories are.

The solution is to develop a tracking system that captures each customer’s likes and dislikes, as well as what each customer personally values and is hoping for when doing business with you. After each customer interaction, your staff will use this system to
note
the idiosyncratic personal values and preferences of the customer and then
share
that information, however or wherever it is helpful within your company.

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Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

A commitment to systematic noting and sharing will separate you from that wonderful dry-cleaning business on the corner (the one that lost most of its customers when the owner fell ill). It will allow you to avoid the fate of the popular, lively restaurant in LA that never quite succeeded when it tried to open other locations.

Principles of Noting and Sharing

What follow are our key principles for building a successful system for the notation and sharing within your company of customer information.

Principle 1: Keep Your Systems Simple.
Don’t track too much stuff, and keep what you
do
track right at the fingertips of your frontline staff.

Simplicity is what makes a preference-tracking system sustainable. If you obsessively gather gobs of data on every customer for hypothetical purposes, you’re going to obscure the preferences you need ready access to. You’ll also dilute the energy of your staff, who will lose track of the original goal: relating warmly to customers as individuals and making them feel important. This ‘‘Keep-Your-Systems-Simple’’ (KYSS) approach is almost always the best one, even in very complex customer contexts.

Setting Up the Ritz

Years ago, to begin building the customer service systems at The Ritz-Carlton, the staff were given notepads to write down guest preferences and concerns that they noticed or were alerted to. A guest who had recently sobered up wanted the mini-bar emptied prior to his arrival. One very allergic woman felt comfortable in her room only if she had ten boxes of tissues placed there. If housekeeping noticed that a solo guest turned down his bed on the left or on the right, this would be duly noted as the side to turn down in the evening. These were requests staff at The Ritz-

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Carlton wanted to honor on each subsequent visit
without
being asked—in whichever Ritz properties throughout the world these guests next visited.

In their initial, groundbreaking system, the Ritz-Carlton team gave themselves the goal of notating just five preferences—and then satisfying at least three of them. The result was a
transformative
impact on the guest experience, as has been well documented in the business press, for example in this traveler interview by Gary Heil and his co-authors from their book
One
Size Fits One
:

The hypoallergenic pillows we requested during our last stay
are on the bed, all fluffed up—and we forgot to ask this time.

There are numerous extra towels (and we remember we had
called room service for extras during our last visit). The cookies
on the tray are all chocolate chip, our favorite kind—and the
oatmeal ones we received last time but didn’t eat are mysteri-ously missing. When we checked in, the concierge asked us if
we wanted tickets to the symphony as we had requested last
time.

We begin to realize that The Ritz-Carlton has taken every
bit of information it learned about us from our last visit and
indexed it in a database. Before our arrival, the hotel staff, from
room service staff to the chambermaid, customized our room
with the extra touches they knew we would want or need. They
seem to know us as individuals and they seem to care genuinely
whether our stay is
enjoyable.
1

The impetus for the Ritz’s simple tracking system, Leonardo explains, came from an early finding: ‘ We’re always asking customers for their expectations and desires from our properties.

The most common answer we heard—and even to this day

hear—is
‘We want it to be like home.’
But when we probed guests for the unexpressed need beneath this not-quite-convincing answer, it turns out it’s not
their
home they want. It’s the dream of 48

Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

a childhood home that they’re looking for—you know, the home where everything is taken care of for you.’’

At home as a typical adult, you are in control, but only on a self-serve basis. In your childhood home (optimally), it was a different sort of experience. Food appeared at mealtimes. You didn’t have to worry about shopping for personal items. When light bulbs blew out, new ones replaced them. When you left, your parents were genuinely saddened by your departure, and they looked forward to seeing you again. Most of all, your personal preferences in all of these matters were well known and ‘‘magi-cally’’ taken into consideration.

Once the Ritz-Carlton management team recognized that this was what their customers were seeking, they were able to develop a better and more customized service model. In Leonardo’s newest hotel brands, in fact, they are extending this concept by pre-interviewing guests to see if they can help reduce uncertain-ties that
precede
the customer’s arrival—transportation and other logistical issues, for instance—to ensure they feel cared for from the moment they arrive in the city. A bit like Mom might do if she knew you were on your way back to town.

Principle 2: If It’s Important to Your Customer, It Belongs in Your System.

In the independent music and film industries where his company operates, Micah makes a point of using software to allow his staff to capture information in specific categories, such as which genre of music and instrument a customer plays, as well as unique details of nearly any sort in which the customer shows interest or appears to take pride in. This latter, general category may include a big movie the client has worked on, a treasured industry award he has received, and so on. Or, it might be more important to use this space to note that his wife is ill and that he hates being called on the phone in the morning. We call these data points
Roles, Goals, and Preferences
.

Even in the tiniest of companies, roles, goals, and preferences Keeping Track to Bring Them Back

49

should be tracked consistently. When Micah first started his business ventures, his ‘‘empire’’ consisted entirely of himself taking phone orders and processing them—in the leaky basement of a starter home. Micah could have personally stayed on top of the roles, goals, and preferences of each of his (few!) early customers. But after hearing the first employee he hired struggle to chat with a big musical client (‘‘Who’s your drummer again?’’), he became an early advocate and developer of automated systems to track roles, goals, and preferences. Without these systems, his employees wouldn’t have been able to deliver the ‘‘Mom’s house’’ experience as his company grew.

Startups often use off-the-shelf software to manage customer preferences. Be careful: Some such programs do not carry forward notations from individual project records into the customer’s permanent record.

Leaving a customer’s preferences languishing as notations in a single project’s record is no better than a scribble in a restaurant’s reservation book. (That ‘‘classic’’ method means that unless the restaurant goes through all the reservations ever made, it’s going to miss the 2005 entry where the gent now being seated mentioned his shellfish allergy.) Put durable information about each customer in that customer’s
permanent
database record. And make sure that preference data is easily visible from within any project he does with you moving forward.

What types of items should go in your tracking system? Track whatever is most important to the customer. Customers’ roles, goals, and preferences are quite diverse, and no amount of market research can predict them perfectly. Here are some items that we recommend you keep at your fingertips:

?
Information on any missteps on past projects/visits/trans-actions with a particular customer.

?
Information on any problems that have already occurred
on this visit, or that seem to be unfolding at that moment.
As we have already discussed, a customer who has already received poor service on this visit shouldn’t, later on in the visit, receive oblivious, 50

Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

chirpy greetings from other staff members (‘‘Are you enjoying your time with us so far?’’), requiring the customer to educate the staff over and over (‘‘Actually, it’s been problematic’’) in response.

?
Product/service preferences, whether stated by the customer or observed, which you should try to accommodate
without being asked.

?
Anything your customer filled out earlier on a comment
card or electronic survey.
These forms contain not just statistical data but feelings expressed by a real, live customer. In addition to responding to such feedback personally and promptly (see Chapter 6), include this information in the customer’s tracking file so that you can keep it in mind when working with the customer in the future.

?
Any personal ties to your establishment, such as a shared
history, friends the customer has who work at your establishment, etc.
Some of your customers will perceive your business in especially emotional, personal terms. Encourage this. For example, if a customer explains that she first visited your drugstore with her dad as a child thirty years ago, be enthusiastic about that. Then write it down.

As another example, some of your customers may express special attachment to a particularly charismatic member of your team. Record those feelings, and cue that employee to be sure to make contact with the customer. The employee’s personal contact will enhance loyalty far more than a discount.

?
The number of projects/purchases/visits.
Make sure your tracking system identifies unusually valuable customers clearly.

?
Especially challenging customers.
Never write notes about challenging customers except in a tactful code. Any such warning must be reviewed by someone in an ownership position before being shared, even in your internal, password-protected computer system. Among the reasons for this caution: Many ‘‘intractably’’ difficult customers are actually misunderstood customers responding to a specific situation; the next time you encounter them they may be as easy as the day is long.

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So while service establishments often do have codes that alert staff to troublesome customers, it’s crucial to keep such negative notations secret, and only maintain them with the approval of senior staff. (Speaking more broadly, there is emotional value in reframing how you talk, and type, about customers. Using less judgmental language toward customers in your own notations and discussions will actually help soften your feelings. For example, try:
demanding
rather than
difficult
,
has discriminating tastes
in place of
impossible to please
, and even
very time-focused
instead of
impatient
.)

?
Personal facts: spouse, pets, kids, etc.
If included, such details need to be accurately dated. (For example: Pets noted five years ago are, sadly, not safe to inquire about. Husband you haven’t heard mentioned in a few years? Probably ditto.) Use a software system that automatically time-stamps entries.

Privacy training and systems security are critical parts of any professional
setup.
And for added peace of mind,
assume
your files are a lot less private than you think. We consulted with one company that was still reeling from an IT initiative designed to allow customers direct account access. The initiative’s goal had been to cut staffing costs by increasing customer self-service. Unfortunately, in the new system it was possible for customers to be inadvertently greeted online with their personal tracking files—which in one mortifying instance included very embar-rassing comments, written in quite plain English! This kind of self-in-flicted privacy breach is not uncommon. And demanding customers are particularly unforgiving. So figure out a useful code, swear all parties to secrecy, and stick to the code.