Today’s Score 23 – 5

I’ll be the first to admit, my method is not scientific. However, I do feel it holds some merit and certainly parallels the customer sentiment; at least for this morning. What am I rambling about? My Twitter feed.

I set up Twitter searches on a lot of my interests – sports, marketing, friends, events and business-related items. As an exercise, I set up separate feeds for “Good Customer Service” and “Bad Customer Service” just to see what types of responses we have floating around the Twitter-verse. It might not surprise you that the bad outweighed the good by a large margin.

Monitoring for an hour today (9-10 am) I counted 23 bad to the five good, and I had to stretch a bit for the good; two were tied to customer service articles by the tweeter! Along with those were more links to articles on how important customer service is to a company and their competitive position. The most impressive coming from Harvard Business Review .  

We’ve all heard the stats that we will tell one or two friends about a great customer experience, and 12 or more about a bad one. I’m not so sure that that ratio isn’t actually driven by the amount of bad customer experiences and not our need to spread bad news! In fact I pride my blog on the mentions of great customer experiences, and I have to seek them out, all while I’m inundated by the bad and so-so service stories.

OK, only one hour during one day is not enough data you say. I agree, but I have been monitoring this for months and the ratio has not changed. In fact, since I’ve been typing here we have five bad, one good. The point? If your customers’ experiences are paramount to your success, shouldn’t you be doing everything possible to ensure they are legendary?

Dee-vine Service at Daveed’s

It happens so often that I’ve become accustomed to it. I go to a restaurant that looks chic, has wonderful, eclectic dishes (the kind I can’t pronounce properly!) but the service reeks like the green moldy thing in the back of my refrigerator posing as a leftover ham sandwich.  Well, I’m happy to say that was NOT the case at Daveed’s at 934 in Cincinnati!

This place really has it all. It’s in a fantastic location (once you find a parking space) on top of Mt. Adams near the old monastery; where by the way I did finally find a parking space and the monks were too kind to have my car towed.  Daveed’s is comfortable with posh decor and local artwork lining the walls for sale, incredible food (I had the filet – pronounced fil-A’) and the excellent customer service that topped it all off! 

Matt, our server, was attentive without being annoying and I could tell he took pride in the job. How could I tell? Because he took personal ownership of our dining experience. He made sure everything was absolutely perfect and he told us his name at least three times during the evening. Just like Picasso signing a painting or an architect leaving his cornerstone on a skyscraper, Matt put his “signature” on the experience by ensuring we knew him by name, and most importantly because he is proud of what he does.

Sometimes I feel customer service is a lost art here in the states, but every once in a while someone like Matt renews my confidence!

‘Tis the Question

I hear them all the time – “What is the true value of customer service”? Or, “How do I know my customer service training works”? Customer service is a  funny thing, it’s very hard, if not impossible to draw a straight correlation between service levels and bottom line revenue. Asking the direct effect is kind of like asking “What is Santa Claus’ value is to Christmas”? We know he does elevate the holiday, but how would you affix a dollar amount to that? However, we can measure the satellite effects of great customer service.

In business, we spend countless amounts of money trying to improve and some things can be measured directly – a new laptop computer that runs 20% faster and has 300% more memory is fairly easy to measure the impact it will have on our productivity. Technical items seem to be easier to measure by nature, but what about those non-technical advances – customer service for example. There are ways to measure and evaluate our service levels. One of the oldest and most common, asking the customer. We are at the mercy of their memory and emotional state at the time, but it does provide some feedback. What I have found to work even better is using a mystery shopper! These are trained individuals that make a science out of measuring sales and service levels. They account for their experience on a pre-determined scale of elements. For example, did the sales rep use my name? Did they ask for the sale? Did they offer complimentary items along with my purchase? These are specific service elements that we can measure against. 

The Temkin Group, once was an operation within Forrester Reasearch and came to this conclusion as it relates to the value of customer experience – “At an aggregate level, my research at Forrester Research showed that improvements in customer experience are highly correlated to higher loyalty in consumer markets. In a report called “Customer Experience Leaders Garner More loyalty,” for instance, we found that customer experience leaders have more loyal customers than customer experience laggards. The loyalty gap with consumers was 15% to 17% in three areas: willingness to buy more products, reluctance to switch, and likelihood to recommend”.

Those are huge correlations, a loyalty gap of over 15% for customer experience leaders! No, I don’t know how much Santa or the Easter Bunny are worth, but I gaurantee they make those holidays richer for all of us!