By Mike DuBose
When you think of high-quality products and great services, what companies come to mind? Chances are you think of at least one Japanese company, like Toyota or Sony. For years, many Japanese companies have produced reliable, high-quality merchandise, coupled with superior customer service. In fact, Toyota is now the world’s largest auto manufacturer and consistently receives very good reviews from consumer groups. Why would Americans prefer to buy foreign-made products like Toyota instead of American-made items? The answer is simple: consistent quality and good service over many years. I will always remember buying our first Toyota Corolla for $2,000 in 1973. It was the first car I ever owned where nothing went wrong, and I got more than 125,000 great miles out of that car before selling it.
One of the individuals I interviewed for this book was an entrepreneur who owned both a Toyota and a General Motors franchise. During the interview, he quipped, “Toyota treats me with respect. They listen to our concerns, have great customer service, and build fabulous products. They care about me! I can’t say that about the other one!” Anyone who watches the news knows the rest of the story—GM is in serious trouble.
But how did the Japanese create companies that are so successful and quality-driven? In part, the answer goes back to 1950, when W. Edwards Deming was invited to post-World War II Japan to teach managers there his innovative new theory on quality. As part of his teachings, Deming encouraged companies to seek continuous improvement—an ongoing process of making things better. Often, continuous improvement requires a new approach to the way companies do things, which can be threatening to some. Others love change if it means the possibility of a better future. The job of the leader is to guide his or her staff through these changes in hopes of improving quality.
Deming’s ideas relied heavily on collecting and utilizing fact and statistics, teamwork, and continuous improvement. At our companies, we try to make decisions based on facts and logic, although we sometimes follow our gut instincts in order to execute promptly. We also believe that several people working together toward a common purpose always produce superior products and services, so we assemble teams, give them broad goals, and turn them loose with the power and authority to make things happen. While we may set parameters and give input along the way, our teams thrive on challenges and making operations more efficient and effective.
Most CEOs will tell you their company exceeds customer expectations. Unfortunately, many business leaders and staff are out of touch with their clients. In a Bain and Company study of 362 businesses, 80% of leaders and staff reported that they gave their customers a “superior experience.” However, when their customers were interviewed by researchers, only 8% said they had received superior services. Notice the disconnect?
I am sad to report that few businesses today exceed my expectations for customer service. Companies are cutting customer support, focusing solely on meeting short-term profit objectives, and forgetting about long-term client retention and customer satisfaction. These actions have lead to poor customer service and, in some cases, punishment when consumers have had enough and take their business elsewhere. As Denove and Power (of J.D. Power and Associates, the customer satisfaction gurus) note in their book Satisfaction, “There is an intractable connection between high levels of customer satisfaction and increased shareholder value.”
At our family of companies, we define happy customers as those who receive what they want when they want it in an outstanding way! Yet, many businesses have unknowingly created what Denove and Power refer to as “assassins”—customers who make it their mission in life to tell others how they were poorly treated or how a company has failed them. They report that if businesses exceed customer expectations, they create “advocates”—clients who will passionately tell others how well they were served. We believe that our customer advocates are our primary sales force. We strive to live up to our motto, which is: “We are here to serve!” At Columbia Conference Center, 91 percent of our business is word-of-mouth and 98 percent of customers have rated us good to outstanding since 2003. Independent, confidential surveys reported that 100 percent of respondents would recommend our companies to others. Obtaining those high ratings took a lot of hard work and time, along with teamwork, going the extra mile, producing excellent products and services, and loving on our clients. We see it as an investment that will reap many dividends.
“Customer service” is a phrase used often by companies, perhaps more than any other two words. Yet more and more companies are failing to understand and implement good, old-fashioned, personal customer service! To do this, they must truly understand their customers’ needs and serve them in an extraordinary way. “The ultimate goal,” as Allen, Reicheld, and Hamilton note, “is to shift ever more consumers into the high-profit, high-advocacy area.”
However, consider how you have been treated by businesses recently. A few of my sad customer service stories from 2009 are:
• When I call my airline to buy a ticket because all the flight options are not advertised online, I have to plug in number after number, listen to their specials and how great they are, and go through fifteen options (do any companies use the same menu?). Then, I have to talk with a computer that does not recognize my voice and aggravates me to no end by asking me if I want to complete a stupid survey! When I finally get a rep on the line, I am ready to kill someone! As a loyal, frequent, profitable customer, I wonder why they don’t just have an actual person who says, “Hello, how can I help you, Mr. DuBose?” when I call?
• I call my bank to renew a CD, only to get passed around to different departments where I have to tell multiple employees password after password and repeat my account number over and over before they will talk to me or answer simple questions. Some reps even made me call another 800 number and go through all the mess again instead of just forwarding me to the appropriate person. They treated me as an inconvenience. Why couldn’t one person have said, “I have your account in front of me and I will get the right person on the line for you. I will stay with you until the connection is made?”
• An auto repair shop breaks their promises repeatedly and tells me lies in regard to when my car will be done. I have to call them ten times just to get someone to tell me that (yet again) it’s not ready yet. Why can’t businesses just deliver what they say they will?
• I would rather have a root canal then call my cell phone customer service department. Their network’s service is excellent, but their customer service is awful.
• I call my home long distance company, which has overcharged me by $24, and the customer service rep spends hundreds of dollars of their company’s time trying to figure out how she can avoid crediting me the full amount for their mistake. Then, tells me to call back the next day and see if the credit posted! I would have been impressed if the rep said: “I am sorry about this mistake and we will make it right with a full credit!”
• I place an order for a cheeseburger at a famous fast food restaurant’s drive-through and proceed to the first window to pay. When I reach the second window to pick up my food, I tell the worker there that I forgot to order a small cup of water and ask if she could give me one. Instead, she employee barks, “That’s against policy!” She tells me that I will have to return to the long line, place an order for the water, pay 10 cents, and wait! The right response? “Sure!” I wonder how many clients have been lost because of the phrase “That is against policy!?”
I could write a book on my bad customer experiences alone. I wonder sometimes if anyone actually listens to those customer service telephone calls they say they are recording for training. Unfortunately, I can count on one hand the times in the past year that I have said, “Wow! That was great service!”—and customer service as a whole is only getting worse!
Now, let me tell you about a very successful company that consistently exceeds customer expectations and integrates high quality into their culture. I have traveled a good bit of the world, logging in more than one million actual flight miles with Delta Airlines. As an entrepreneur, I am constantly observing customer service levels at businesses like hotels, car rental companies, restaurants, etc. wherever I travel. The company that wins my (and AAA’s) five-star rating is the Four Seasons Resort in Maui at Wailea. I pay top dollar to stay in their hotel because they truly know what the definition of customer satisfaction is. My family and I have visited the resort four times in the last three years. When we arrive, we are greeted by the bellmen—whose big smiles make them seem excited that we are there—with flower leis and cold towels for our hands and faces. They begin their customer service program immediately when we arrive because they know that first impressions are important. The exemplary service continues at the reception desk, where the receptionists learn and remember our names throughout our stay. Everyone on the hotel campus smiles, greets us, and is truly friendly. You can tell it is heartfelt, not put on—great service is ingrained into their culture and the employees themselves. Our rooms are serviced by a team of staff who view themselves as artists. Even my dirty clothes are folded neatly! While lying by the pool, we found more artists constantly patrolling and offering guests treats like complimentary fresh Rice Krispie cakes, popsicles, suntan lotion, and cold towels. They even offer to clean guests’ sunglasses! Every 15 minutes, staff members come by looking for ways to serve guests and any orders placed are promptly returned. The food is some of the freshest, most well-prepared I have ever eaten. It is very high-quality and the hotel offers a variety of options. My salad tasted as if they picked it out of a garden out back!
I interviewed Jana Dimartino, catering and restaurant manager at the resort, as part of my research into what makes outstanding customer service. I could tell that Jana was a premier employee because she was working each table and talking to each customer like they were family. She was actively engaging each customer and letting them know through her actions, “I’m glad you’re here; you are our partner.” She stated that their excellent customer service culture is created by the following:
1. All potential candidates for employment are interviewed four times by different people, including the hotel’s general manager. They only seek outstanding, humble, friendly staff.
2. Their mindset is that they are there to serve and they go by the “Golden Rule,” treating others like they would like to be treated.
3. They hire people who will fit their culture and they all care about each other. They hold each other accountable to serve their customers.
4. Before a new staff member interacts with a customer, they go through several weeks of training and then are carefully monitored to ensure they are living up to Four Seasons’ standards.
5. Four Seasons provides staff with ongoing training on continuous customer service improvement to keep them engaged. Dimartino said that staff turnover is low and people genuinely like working there.
Yes, it can be expensive to stay at the Maui Four Seasons, but I feel like a king when I go. I am a loyal customer advocate who is willing to pay top dollar for the extraordinary services and products that the Four Seasons provides. A great customer service program, like the one the Maui Four Seasons has, consists of several components that need to work together in unison. Let’s examine how every business can be like that Maui Four Seasons Resort:
Defining Your Customer: Many firms see a customer as a piece of meat or a dollar bill walking through the door. These companies experience limited success because they are all over the place trying to serve anyone and everyone and doing a fair job at best—versus refining their focus to do fewer things really well for a smaller number of high-profit repeat clients. Your strategic plan should define in detail exactly who your clients are and where your target area is. Focusing on your primary clients allows your organization to market more efficiently and defines where you should concentrate resources and energy. Employ your Hedgehog Principle (what you know the most about, are passionate about, and is the most profitable) when defining your clients. When these three principles align with the right customers and great customer service, your company’s chances of success are much improved.
Be Your Customer: One of the best ways to develop a good customer service program is to constantly place yourself and your staff in the customer’s shoes. In meetings, we share both personal customer service horror stories and positive experiences. We try to think like the customer when delivering our services to them and employ the “Golden Rule” in our interactions.
Determine Your Customer Touch Points: Potential, new, and existing customers come into contact with different points of your service delivery system at varying times. For example, one may speak to a receptionist, or a salesperson, or someone in billing, etc. Each point of contact represents your company’s opportunity to build rapport, communicate effectively, assess needs and wants, deliver great customer service, and bond with the customer (especially if they are new or prospective clients who may not be familiar with your services and products). Every person at each point becomes a marketing and retention agent who adds to the organization’s value and reputation. In my opinion, the person who first engages the client is most important because first impressions are everything. Many clients are desperately seeking organizations whose employees deliver outstanding service in a consistent, caring, considerate, and responsive way. They simply want to get what they pay for (and hopefully more), be pampered, and feel special. Every person within your organization, no matter what their title, must see that their job is to shine in each and every customer encounter.
Know Your Competition: Study your competition well. Stay a step ahead of them in pricing, quality, and quantity. Learn from them!
Establish a Single Point of Customer Care: There is nothing worse than having to travel through several different people and a maze of bureaucracy for an answer to a simple question. In all of our companies, we establish a single point of contact so the customer can call one person to help them with all of their needs and concerns (rather than be passed from one person to another).
Create Strategic Alignment: Businesses need to have (and employees need to pursue) a goal beyond simply making money and staying in business. They need a clear purpose, mission, vision, and values. Our employees need and want to know how our products and services align with the strategic plan that they helped to devise. Don’t let profit be the sole force behind all your actions.
Hire the Right Staff: We have already talked about this a good bit but it rings true—fitting the right staff into the right jobs helps yield great customer service results. We have passed on employing competent, experienced, and educated job candidates because they did not fit into our humble servant culture. Arrogant, know-it-all behavior is not part of our system and generally does not make for good customer service!
Train Staff Thoroughly on Your Philosophies before Exposing Them to Customers: A culture of exceeding customers’ expectations begins at the top and is integrated throughout the company. Everyone must hear loud and clear that their job is to keep the customer happy. That takes consistent messages from leadership over time!
Set an Example: Leaders (and in fact, everyone) in the organization need to set high customer service standards. Employees are influenced by leader’s behaviors, so modeling is important. Leaders should mingle with customers (as Sam Walton of Wal-Mart did) to gain a sense of how they are doing as a company. Many leaders become isolated from customers and rely solely on staff to tell them how things are going. Use every opportunity to talk to staff about delivering great customer service, and be sure to occasionally consult with customers through tools like surveys, visits, and focus groups to see how staff is performing.
Institute Personal and Professional Development: Everyone in our companies is involved in a “Live and Learn Club” where they read and discuss books as part of a voluntary professional and personal development program. The program offers cash rewards for participation. Great organizations need outstanding employees who want to continuously improve their personal and professional selves. This employee-driven program builds knowledge and teamwork while allowing employees to explore new quality-improvement approaches from a variety of different experts. .
Define Your Culture: The last chapter of this book describes our culture and details who we are and who we want to be. This document helps existing employees know what is important in our companies and how to act, and serves as a tool we hold new employees up against to see if they “fit.”
Develop a High-Quality Philosophy: Producing very high-quality work is critical to continuous improvement. At our companies, we send a clear, consistent signal that repeated mistakes, negativity, and mediocre work quality are unacceptable. Constantly challenge staff in a friendly way by asking, “Can we perform any service or serve customers better?” Customers will pay a premium for great service!
Grow Your Business Carefully: One of the biggest killers of good customer service is overexpansion, which is often driven by the profit monster. If you grow exponentially, problem employees can slip through cracks in your screening as you attempt to get more people on board fast. When two of our companies expanded nationally, we saw customer service decline rapidly. We were consumed in too many company ventures and could only focus on day-to-day activities. There was little time to lead and improve staff and nurture our customers. Instead of doing too many things at once with average outcomes, do fewer things really well.
Create a Participatory Management Style: We subscribe to Total Quality Management (TQM), which draws upon the ideas of W. Edwards Deming. TQM promotes a participatory form of management that solicits input from all employees within a business while focusing on superior quality goods and services.
Correct Mistakes Quickly: Empower staff to make it right with a customer when something goes wrong and it is the company’s fault. If you screw up, admit your mistake and get right with the customer. However, you can only say “I’m sorry” twice before it ceases to mean anything to the client.
Promote Quality Inspection Processes: Quality comes from creating processes that work and allowing few mistakes along the way. When mishaps and failures do occur, do not place blame or point fingers. We encourage our staff to bring mistakes out into the open so that everyone can learn how to perform better in the future. Our goal is to dissect and understand the mistake and then create processes to prevent the problem from reoccurring. Everyone is enlisted in this process.
Build Processes that Result in a Long-Term Effort to Continually Improve: All staff should be engaged to reduce waste, improve quality, enhance efficiency, and strive for “reasonable perfection.” If you can’t make a profit, even stellar customer service is worthless!
Award Your Business to Vendors Based on Quality Relationships: Great companies build superior products partially because they build long-term relationships with their vendors. Focus on quality when forming these relationships, not just monetary concerns.
Build an Open Environment: Team members need to feel comfortable challenging the status quo, making suggestions to improve quality, and helping guide the company to greatness. Fear cannot be a part of a company’s culture if it is to be great.
Know Yourself—and Others: Leaders and team members need to understand each other and accept that everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. When our team members stopped trying to fit others into their “boxes” or personal spheres of operation, they were less frustrated and worked closer as a team toward creating great services and products.
Stay Human! When speaking with clients, focus more on live human time and less on electronic communications like e-mail and voice mail. Return customer communications promptly. Treat every customer like your best friend and as if they are your only client.
Promote Collaboration, Teamwork, and Communication between Departments: Everyone needs to see the big picture when creating products or services. We continually generate ways that our teams can work together, communicate well, and build on each person’s knowledge, experience, and skills. Help everyone understand that there are direct links between profits, customer satisfaction, and client retention.
Establish Pride in Workmanship: Most people want to do a good job. We try to remove boundaries and bureaucracies that prevent quality workmanship and give employees the tools and resources they need to build their products well.
Provide Staff With Good Fringe Benefits, Salaries, and Profit Sharing: Let your staff know you care about them. Happy employees are much more likely to be pleasant to customers and strive to make them happy as well. Staff will repeat behaviors for which they are most recognized and rewarded. It is simple Maslow theory—people like positive reinforcement.
Emphasize “Underpromising and Overdelivering!” Employees must understand that it is better to say no or promise less to customers when they are unsure they can deliver. Never promise what you can’t provide. Sometimes, overzealous sales reps only desire to make a commission or their numbers for the month and don’t care about long-term client retention and satisfaction. They promise the world and then pass customer on to other staff who may not be able to deliver. Everyone in the organization needs to know what was promised to customers and ensure that these promises are realistic. Then, it is everyone’s job to deliver. The goal is to make the client say, “Wow! That was great!”
Stay in Regular Contact with Customers in a Variety of Ways: This strengthens your bond with customers and allows you to identify problems early on and correct them instead of fighting a forest fire. We try to communicate with each client at least every 30 days and in a variety of ways (like newsletters, e-mail, or telephone calls). Customers are more apt to express concerns if you keep different lines of communication open. When you are with a customer, be there! Listen to what that customer wants and needs, then deliver more than promised. Learn to read body language so you can hear even what they don’t say.
Listen: One of the greatest secrets to excellent customer service is to listen carefully to clients. Every staff member should do much less talking than the customer they are working with. Their job is to guide the customer, make suggestions, and build value based on the client’s desires. Many problems can be prevented and fewer clients lost to competitors if employees simply listen to the customer, especially in the early stages of engagement. Other times, troublesome clients will give you clues of what it will be like to work with them later if you are not blinded by the money fairy!
Protect Your Staff: Staff who deliver stellar customer service will find that some clients are demanding and will push them to their limits. While they must hang in there with some merely bothersome clients, some customers can and will be abusive. Don’t forget that your staff is your first line of customers and must not be mistreated. If a situation with an abusive customer cannot be resolved gracefully by the employee or leaders, it may be time to disengage the customer (making an effort not offend them, of course).
Don’t Turn Away Customers: If you cannot serve them, suggest someone who can—even competitors. Give customers a reason to come back in the future.
Promote Accountability: Know your customers and their satisfaction levels. Everyone within a company must accept that if they do not satisfy the customer, a competitor will. Therefore, we have to constantly monitor both what a customer needs and what they want to ensure that we have delivered beyond their expectations. We view our customers as partners and friends and employ a variety of feedback methods to measure customer satisfaction. All staff must constantly monitor customer satisfaction. If anyone senses that a customer is less than satisfied, all communications flow back to the single representative who serves as one point of contact to coordinate and communicate with the customer. When we have delivered all of our services, we send a simple, one-page evaluation form and a self-addressed stamped envelope to the customer along with their bill. The client can return the survey directly to me through my private fax, send it via mail (which I personally open), or they can go online and complete an electronic version that comes directly to me and has the option to be submitted anonymously. Thus, the client has a variety of ways to complain, comment, or compliment. The survey also lists the names of all staff at our Columbia Conference Center so we can pinpoint problems with specific people if the need arises. All surveys are copied and distributed to everyone. No one wants to see a bad mark by their name, but they love outstanding comments, so the form works well as a motivator! We also use it to discover customer concerns early on, respond quickly (once the facts are in), and coach staff to improve our services. Without these assessments right after a service, we would have lost some of our clients. Instead, we saw where we dropped the ball and identified and resolved small problems early on before they became major concerns.
Celebrate: When our staff members create great products and customer-driven services, we recognize their contributions and give out financial rewards. Let staff know when you feel they have excelled and coach them when they make mistakes. Develop an environment where employees feel like company owners and leaders care about them and their successes. When your staff scores victories, celebrate!
Thank the Customer: Be sure to thank your customers in different ways. I once received a thank you note from a jewelry salesperson at J.C. Penney in Greenville, S.C. for buying a $100 watch! Now that was going the extra mile for great customer service, and I was blown away by the gesture.
In conclusion, Deming once wrote about customer service: “The aim of leadership should be to improve the performance of man and machine, to improve quality, to increase output and simultaneously to bring pride of workmanship to people. Put in a negative way, the aim of leadership is not to find and record failures of men, but to remove the causes of failure: to help people do a better job with less effort.”
If you want to build a great company with outstanding customer service and products, you must build your company around the customer with a comprehensive, holistic approach and take care of them well beyond their expectations! After all, the customer signs our paycheck and pays the bills. Without our customers, we are out of business.
