Lessons from Napier
It is always a highpoint when I can spend a few hours in the company of a group of people who are
passionate about customer service. Sadly, it does not happen often enough. So, you can imagine how I
felt when I spent the evening with over three hundred customer service fanatics in Napier last month.
The event was the Napier Inner City Customer Service Awards, organised by the Napier City Council’s
Inner City Marketing Board. Twice a year, the Inner City Marketing Board arranges for all the businesses
in Napier’s CBD to be mystery shopped. Finalists are chosen in five categories. There is also
the Mayor’s Supreme Award for the overall winner.
Not surprisingly, the majority of finalists were small businesses. There was only a sprinkling of
large corporates among the finalists. Although their large marketing budgets allow large corporates
tell a good story, their command and control style of management and their narrow focus on short-term
financial performance means they rarely deliver a consistently great customer experience.
There were two types of small businesses represented among the finalists: franchisees and independently-owned
businesses. You would expect that with all the support they get from head office, franchisees would
out perform the independents. But judging by the overall winner, this is not the case. The winner of
Mayor’s Supreme Award was a small privately owned business called Chris Wiigs Suit and Menswear.
This was the second year in a row Wiigs has captured the top prize. Clearly, Chris and his staff are
to able to accomplish what few are able to, and that is to deliver an outstanding customer experience
consistently.
My role at the Awards Ceremony was to deliver a short, light-hearted, inspirational speech. It was
hardly the occasion to harass people about the need to look after their customers. After all, I was
speaking to the converted.
I gave the hard-hitting speech the next morning to a hundred or so business people and employees of
the Napier City Council. Guess who was sitting in the second row? Yes, it was Chris Wiigs. I have seen
this many times. The following week, I gave a seminar to 100 dentists and their staff. Twenty per cent
of the audience was made up of the dentists and staff of North Shore Dental, a large practice on Auckland’s
North Shore which I often use as an example of a business that consistently delivers a great customer
experience. It seems those who are very good at something are constantly trying to get better, while
those who are not very good think they are doing well enough.
Chris Wiigs and his staff at Wiigs Suit and Menswear are to be congratulated for their achievement.
Winning the Mayor’s Supreme Award two years in a row is no mean feat. Judging by his attendance
at my talk the next morning, Chris aims to win it next year too.
Napier City Council and their Inner City Marketing Board are also to be congratulated. I know of no
other community in New Zealand that mystery shops all of the businesses in its CBD, or any other area
for their matter. It is refreshing to see an organisation that realises the best way to attract new
residents, visitors and shoppers is not to advertise how good they are, but to actually deliver a great
customer experience. A lot of marketing departments would do well to learn this lesson.
It is also exciting to see customer service as the main focus. This is rare in New Zealand. We have
awards for the best executive, entrepreneur, marketer, exporter, business and IT company, to name just
a few. Many of these have a customer service award as one of their award categories but to my knowledge
there are no national Customer Service Awards in this country. I tried to get such an event going a
couple of years ago but there was very little interest in them, especially from the large corporates.
The shopkeepers and other businesses in Napier’s CBD are also to be congratulated. This is the
second year of the Customer Service Awards and this year it stimulated even more interest and competitive
activity. Customer service has improved as a result. This year’s scores from the mystery shopping
are generally higher than last years.
What can we learn from this? First, having an award based solely on customer service would arouse
a lot of interest, be hotly contested and would raise the standard. Why not talk to your local council
about following Napier’s lead? If they are not interested, why not organise the businesses in
your area to do it yourselves? You would all benefit in the long run.
Secondly, you do not have to be a large company or part of a large franchise organization to be the
best at customer service. In fact, those of you who own your own independent businesses have an advantage
because the only thing stopping you from improving the way you look after the customer is you.
Finally, no matter how good you are, you can always learn to do it better. And, as Chris Wiigs told
me, you have to keep getting better very quickly if you want to stay at the top.
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