Category: Action

Example of a customer champion

A perfect example of the saying – anyone can make a difference!

The story of an individual who went out of his way to create memorable customer experinces. A walking talking marketing machine for United Airlines. Imagine the effect if even 5% of United’s personnel adopt such an attitude – god save the competition.

Lessons from this story –

  • What Capt. Flanagan is doing is not a result of any corporate customer centricity initiative. This is in fact a result of his own initiative. Similary, anyone – just about anyone anywhere in the hierarchy / value chain can make a difference. Recruit individuals with the right mental make up …that has the potential to generate such initiatives.

  • Capt. Flanagan did things that were valued by the customers …examples like what he does for unaccompanied childeren, confirming of baggage on connecting flights, etc. Value is customer defined.

  • Its good to see United backing up this individual’s modus operandi. Every small initiative / gesture / acts should be glorified by the organization if it has see more of this. Spot such positive actions & glorify them to the hilt.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118826634834410559.html?mod=The+Middle+Seat

Processes are enablers of customer success

Ever so often, customer facing teams become so obsessed with internal processes that they forget that processes are meant to be enablers of customer success. Achievement of process goals become the be-all and end-all. Instead of striving for the customer, these customer facing teams become slaves of internal serving (mostly) processes.
How does an organization escape from this kind of internal serving behaviors?
An organization vision that makes clear the overall objective of the business needs to provide an overarching direction to keep all teams gunning for the customer – not only customer facing teams, but also other teams that serve internal customers.
Another factor that promotes appropriate behavior is an active recognition framework. When designed & implemented appropriately, this would essentially keep the teams focused on whats important for the business.

Lifestyle – Taking the extra step to please customers

Yet another visit to my favorite multi-brand mall Lifestyle prompted me to write about their success in creating superior customer experinces ..not once, but over & over again.
Being the second day of an annual sale, the place was jam packed within the first 2 hrs of opening on a public holiday. The sales staff were struggling to answer the product & discount related queries raining from the customers eager to grab a bargain ahead of others. How were the sales staff coping?

  • There were a big augmentation of permanent staff to take care of rush

  • Inspite of the maddening rush, most of the sales staff were calm & trying to respond to as manyu queries as humanly possible. These guys were mentally prepared to handle the rush.

  • The staff were also apologizing to customers whenever they were being pulled between customers. They were not just blaming the crowd for a lack of requisite service.

  • The huge work load not withstanding, one of the sales staff actually volunteered to stand in the long check out queue on my behalf (seeing that I was struggling to cope with huge shopping bags & an overactive toddler). He even offered a chair to me & called me 20 mins later when the invoice was ready.

Note that the above was characteristic of all the sales staff in Lifestyle today. And I suspect there were quite a few temporary employees there to handle the sale rush.

I wouldn’t have written about the store if such behaviors were isolated to one day / person. The truth is they consistently deliver such experinces over and over again. Thus creating an edge for themselves.