When was the last time you praised someone for giving you great service? Are you one of those people who is only too happy to complain when things go wrong, and ‘takes it for granted’ when things go wrong for you as a customer? If you are, I urge you to think again.
These days, with social media and other forms of communication so easy to access, it is tempting to complain about poor service via Twitter or Facebook – most large companies have social media accounts but a number of them don’t know what to do with them!
Take Wetherspoon’s, the U.K.’s largest pub chain. I go to one of their pubs in Peterborough, ‘The Draper’s Arms’ once or twice a month, sometimes for breakfast (excellent value at £2.99) and sometimes for a few drinks with friends. The service in there is always friendly and efficient – I don’t know about you, but I don’t usually find great service in ‘chain’ pubs, and I wanted to recognise the team at ‘The Draper’s’ publicly. I ‘tweeted’ a message about it and included Wetherspoon’s Twitter name @jdwtweets in my tweet.
Guess what happened? Nothing. Nada. Nowt. Then I looked at Wetherspoon’s Twitter feed, and realised what I had done wrong. They are only set up to deal with complaints, not praise. It appears that they do not have a system in place to take praise messages from customers to front-line people. I find that unbelievable, particularly as they have a reputation as a great employer. I wouldn’t mind working for them, they seem to work hard and enjoy it in most of their pubs, and that is the key to a great job for me!
What a missed opportunity though! I wonder how many other large businesses are not set up to receive individual commendations for great service?
Ever heard of The WOW! Awards? www.thewowawards.co.uk They are a great way of helping your customers to nominate individual members of your team for brilliant customer service!
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This week I paid a regular visit to a well-known company that specialises in refilling ink cartridges here in the U.K. I have been using this service for ten years and have always enjoyed the experience. This time, the very friendly and professional assistant asked me if I would like to take replacement ink cartridges at the same price as refills as they didn’t have my type of ink cartridges ready re-filled. I accepted easily, after all, hadn’t I had a great customer experience here every time for the past ten years?
When I got gack to my home office I tried to fit these replacement ink cartridges into my printer. Then I tried again, and again. Finally after nearly an hour, I gave up, drove back to the store with the offending ink cartridges and was served by a different assistant. She was very friendly and helpful too, and was about to give me branded replacement cartridges for my printer at no charge, when the young lady who had served me earlier, interrupted. ‘No, actually, you can’t do that’ she whispered to her colleague, and then took over the conversation with me. She told me that, actually (she used that word a lot!) they weren’t allowed to do that – if I wanted to take the more expensive branded replacement ink cartridges I would have to pay the difference. After a few minutes of exchanging conversation about that idea, I came up with the solution to the problem myself. If she still had the original ink cartridges that I had brought in to be refilled, could she refill them for me. I was quite prepared to wait.
That was what we did in the end – in the meantime I had lost an hour or more of my day. I left the store feeling reasonably satisfied, but not completely satisfied. I will go back, but I will have my guard up next time, and I will tell them exactly what I want.
Imagine how I would have felt if I had left the store with the branded replacement ink cartridges at no extra cost – if the newer member of the team had been allowed to use her initiative and keep the customer happy – I would have become a raving fan of that company and it probably wouldn’t have taken me three days to write a blog post about it. Now, I haven’t even mentioned their name.
What does that tell you about who controls customer service in that business? Who makes the decisions? Is this company a maze of processes and procedures that are designed to make a profit at the expense of great customer service? I’ll let you decide.
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This is a question that I have been asking myself for a few weeks. The answer takes me back to happy days when I worked at a railway company called GNER (Great North Eastern Railway) in the 1990′s. I used to bounce out of bed on a Monday morning and look forward to getting to work, and that happy state of affairs continued for at least three or four years, and encompassed some very trying times. I will attempt to put the feeling into words.
GNER took over from British Rail at the time when the railways were being privatised. At that time I had been in the industry for over fifteen years, and it would be fair to say that I wasn’t a fan of privatisation. Many of my colleagues thought that this new company would come in and get rid of them – I didn’t fear that, as I knew that our new bosses would still need us and our skills, but I did fear change, as most people do. When the takeover happened, nothing much changed as far as the front line people were concerned, for the first few months. However, we were communicated with much more than we had ever experienced with British Rail. Our new Chief Executive, Christopher Garnett, made sure that we were all kept up to speed with what was going on and once we started to hear about the changes that were coming, I noticed that most of them were positive ones. For example, there were going to be 400 new people starting work with us, as not only were GNER going to run more trains, they were also going to raise the levels of customer service on the trains, and that meant more people to serve the customers.
There were frequent roadshows where we were told what the changes were going to mean for us, and our questions were answered honestly. We had never been treated like that by our British Rail bosses. Most (but not all!) of them had been too busy looking after their own status to worry about the ‘insignificant’ people that looked after the customers on the front line.
The GNER culture change gave me the opportunity to move into training and developing people in the business, something I will always be thankful for, because it helped me to achieve dreams that I didn’t even know that I had! It wasn’t long before I saw directors and senior managers of GNER helping customers with their luggage at busy times and when trains had broken down, and there wasn’t just one isolated incident of that. It happened all the time, and it was because we had a ‘hands-on’ Chief Executive, the aforementioned Christopher Garnett, who would never get on a train without asking the front line people if they needed any help, and was often to be found pouring tea and coffee, collecting rubbish or even washing up on trains! If the service went wrong on a Friday, which for some reason it always did, he would come down from his modest office at King’s Cross station and help the station people deal with the customers.
That was true leadership, and of course, it led to a very engaged workforce – we really felt that we were supported and listened to, and performance increased as a result. I look back on the happy years I spent there and wonder why it all changed. I’m very glad, however, to have had the opportunity to be part of a really engaged workforce – it was wonderful!
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An early start for me yesterday, catching the train to London to attend The Social Customer 2012 in Borough. Thanks to Luke Brynley-Jones and the team for an excellent day. I noticed that I was the only person in the room wearing a tie! Also noticed the jazz soundtrack during the breaks – wonderful! It was the first conference I have attended where the Twitter feed from the event was displayed on a screen at the front of the room, many of the notes I took were ‘tweet bites’ rather than ‘sound bites’, so thanks to everyone who was tweeting there yesterday, I think I have followed most if not all of you, if I wasn’t already following you. I particularly enjoyed the presentations from Guy Stephens, Bian Salins, Ben Kay, Martin Hill-Wilson and the contributions from Vincent Boon and Frank Eliason, but I took something from every presentation and was very happy to be in a room full of customer service professionals and supporters for the day. Thank you to Derek Williams at The WOW! Awards for suggesting that I attend.
Here, in no particular order, are some of the highlights, all more or less written in 140 character tweet-bites!
‘Social customer service has not worked, companies are afraid of their customers’
‘Conversations within and outside of organisations’
‘We have always wanted to share, now it’s easy’
‘Decision making is changing’
‘The customer is driving the conversation’
’90% of the data that we have has been generated in the past two years’
‘People are moving faster than you can ever move as an organisation’
‘What are your customers complaining about and are you aware?’
‘Have process but retain pioneering spirit’
‘There are more ways to complain online than there are to say ‘thanks” (The WOW! Awards can help there!)
‘ROI of social media is engaging and listening’
‘Technology won’t make you customer-centric’
‘We all have an answer that someone else might need’
‘Every 30 years we change our thinking’
‘How do you train people in empathy?’
‘Mash up marketing and customer service’
‘Customers don’t care about organisational silos’
‘It’s much easier to know nothing about a customer and just flog’em stuff’
‘Assign each issue to one person until resolved’
‘You cannot effectively manage a group of more than 300 people’
‘Social media needs someone to lead it not someone to own it within an organisation’
‘Guerrilla tacrtics – the way to change things is to light a fire in the basement’
‘Define a process for a listening programme’
‘Person of the Year – The Protester’
‘Social customer is about experience of a brand right from awareness stage – first touching point’
‘What are your customers saying about you> Where is it being said?’
‘They are out there and they are talking about you’
‘If you do nothing else, listen!’
‘Do you want to be the tallest of the dwarves or to stand among the giants?’
‘Implement one idea from your customer community every three days’
‘Are you making the most of the slivers of brilliance within your organisation?’
‘Bring customers and senior managers together’
‘Your customers know more about your product than you do’
‘Are you a customer service evangelist within your business?’
‘Everything must be alright in the customer service departmnt because they have balloons’
‘Customers and employees own the brand’
‘Working in social media requires a culture shift’
‘The change starts at the top’
‘Always Capitalise the word Customer’
‘Different communication channels for different generations/preferences’
‘Saving the world from bad #custserv’
‘Focus on disloyal customers’
‘Customers don’t want a relationship but they do want the benefits a relationship brings’
Spotify mantra: ‘Move fast, break things’
That’s all folks, enjoy, and I’ll see you again soon!
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If you have not visited a Little Chef roadside restaurant in the U.K. for a while, it might be time you took another look!
Yesterday I travelled from my home in Peterborough to Lowestoft in Suffolk to attend and speak at the launch of a brand new business networking and support group – a round trip of over 200 miles. On the way, I stopped at a well-known supermarket on the outskirts of Norwich for breakfast – to be honest, I wasn’t impressed with the quality of the breakfast and the person who served it to be table was surly and uncaring. Driving back late in the evening I was hoping to find somewhere to eat where I could have ‘seaside’ fish and chips, but decided in the end to stop at a Little Chef at Thickthorn Services near Norwich instead. What a pleasant surprise to be greeted by a professional, smiling young lady named Claire.
It’s a rare experience to be greeted with a smile at a roadside restaurant, especially as it was around 9 p.m. There were a few other customers there and Claire seemed to be running the restaurant with just herself and the chef, Graham, on duty. I ordered fish and chipos and a pot of tea, and it was served quickly, professionally and with a smile. I was asked if everything was alright part way through my meal, and I was so impressed watching Claire and Graham working together as a team that I decided to stay for dessert too.
Little Chef is definitely back on my list of places to eat and I wanted to share this great news!
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Part of my life story which is as yet unwritten involves what happened when I started to find some other ex-members of the fundamentalist religious cult that I was brought up in. This started to happen when I went on to the internet in 1999. Two of the people that I met were Gordon and Patricia Martin. They were a wonderfully loving elderly couple from Canada. I met Gordon first, during one of his frequent forays over to London and the U.K. The second or third time I met Gordon, he had his wife, Pat, with him.
Gordon had been born into the same cult as I was, in the 1930′s. He was around the same age as my own father, although he couldn’t have been more different. Pat was born a Baptist, I seem to remember her telling me. I have never met two more patient, understanding and tolerant people in my life than Gordon and Patricia Martin.
When my younger brother escaped the clutches of the religious cult in the early 2000′s, we decided to take a trip to Canada to look up a relative of our mother’s who had emigrated there in the 1960′s. This turned into a three-week road and air trip that took in several cities in Canada and I have many happy memories of that time. We started by spending two nights at Gordon and Pat’s wonderful book and music-filled apartment in Montreal. I remember Pat preparing the best nicoise salad I have ever eaten for us – I remember waking that first morning to the smell of fresh coffee and almond croissants that had been fetched from a nearby patisserie. I remember feeling really at home in that apartment. Perhaps it was the bottle of wine that was opened at 11.30 am – but no, it was the ability that the Martin’s had to make people feel part of their family.
I have felt part of that family ever since. Gordon and Patricia have six children, I believe sixteen grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. I had the privilege of meeting them all at their 50th. wedding anniversary celebrations in 2002, and I will be going to celebrate with them again in Montreal in July of this year. One very special person will not be there this time, because Patricia Martin passed away this weekend. I was privileged to know this remarkable woman, and if there were more people like her, and her husband Gordon, and their family, on this earth, the world would be a far better place, in my opinion.
So Rest In Peace, my dear friend Patricia Martin, my world was a much better place for having you as part of it.
The picture above is of the River Thames at Cookham. The last time I saw Patricia Martin we were walking along here together, with a group of friends going to have Sunday lunch at a pub in Cookham after a convivial weekend spent together at Maidenhead.
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Ultra high-end customers are known for being picky, impatient, and hard to please. The truth is, these customers have the same desires and time constraints that all people do, with the difference that they have the resources to assure their needs are met. This means they do not settle for second best, much less third or fourth. They have the money to spend on obtaining top-notch service. (more…)
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I heard Roy Wood speak the other day. No, not the one that was in the Electric Light Orchestra and Wizzard in the 1970′s and 80′s and looked like an accident in a paint factory, this one. Now, I didn’t really expect to be inspired by a financial adviser, but I was. It just goes to show that you never know where the next little bit of inspiration is going to come from. One of the lessons in Roy’s presentation really resonated with me, he said that if you really want to achieve something you have to put a full shift in, and that might mean working harder than you have ever worked in your life before. Roy works around 200 days a year, and a day means a day. He will do a morning shift, an afternoon shift and an evening shift. What he is doing means so much to him that he is willing to forego work/life balance for 200 days out of 366 (this year). That made me think, and here I am, at 7.15 on a Sunday evening, working.
Are you putting in a full shift?
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I remember hearing about The WOW! Awards back in the very late 1990′s. As someone who has been obsessed with great customer service for much of my career, I was delighted when I discovered that Derek Williams had found a way to encourage customers to recognise companies’ front line people for individual and collective acts of excellent customer service. Simply, The WOW! Awards are the only customer-nominated customer service awards programme in the world.
Derek Williams had been high on my list of people that I wanted to meet for a long time. In December 2011, I attended a meeting of the Customer Service Training Network - and sat next to Derek. We chatted during the day and I sensed a kindred spirit. Someone who totally believes, as I do, that front line customer service professionals are as important as anyone else in any organisation – in fact, I would argue that they are more important than most if not all other people in a business! The WOW! Awards offer a simple way for customers to show their appreciation for a job well done, or an instance, of which there are plenty, when a customer service professional or team has gone the extra mile. Managers and supervisors are often not around when these acts of greatness take place, and, even if they are, the brilliant acts of the front line people often go unnoticed, so keen can the managers sometimes be on keeping the boss happy! I could go on…!!
Well, early in January Derek and I met, and we met again today. We are very much on the same wavelength, and I’m delighted to announce that I am joining the team at The WOW! Awards as an Employee Engagement Adviser as from today. I’ll be helping to look for companies who want to recognise their people for their efforts on the front line, and helping them to get involved. I’ll still be delivering training, professional speaking and writing too. The involvement with The WOW! Awards fits my ‘strapline’ of ’Supporting Achievement’ like a glove, and I have a great feeling about this new collaboration that I have started.
I met some of The WOW! Awards team today and they are all a great bunch of people! Contact me if you would like to know more about The WOW! Awards, wherever in the world you are!
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All of us have something in our lives that we want to do, or wish we could do. I’m no exception to that rule! My current dream, sitting here in my office, looking out on a grey, uninspiring day in Peterborough, Eastern England, is to be able to take a group of cricket-loving friends to the Saturday of a Lord’s Test match, and have a ‘corporate’ box for the day, so we can live like lords, just for the day. Last year I sat in the Warner Stand at Lord’s, and drank champagne at 11.30 in the morning while watching England play Sri Lanka in a one-day international. Just along from us, in the executive boxes, were celebrities enjoying the champagne lifestyle that they are used to. Well, I don’t necessarily want that lifestyle all the time, but a a taste of it now and then would be great. So that’s one of my goals. What are your goals? What are you waiting for? What is holding you back?
I decided that in order to earn enough money to make this dream come true for me I have to set up several different ways of making money, and then focus on the ones that start producing first. I’ll share with you how things go, but there is one thing that I already know for certain, this dream won’t come true on it’s own. I will have to take action to make it happen. So, what is there in your life or business that you know you need to take action in order to change? What are you waiting for?
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