How to Give Customers
What They Want
 I was speaking at a five star hotel in Auckland the other day. Before
the meeting started, I went to the concierge and told him I needed a white
board. I said I would not be speaking for two hours so there was no hurry
and they could bring it at the afternoon tea break. Now, whenever I talk
to someone wearing a name tag, I always use their name, just to be friendly.
In this case, the concierge amazed me using my name in return. This impressed
me because as far as I knew we had never met before and I know my brand
is not that strong! As it turned out, we had sent our children to the
same school and had met many years ago. We had a brief chat about old
times and left with smiles and best wishes all around. I was still impressed
he had remembered me.
No white board showed up at the tea break.
I walked back to the concierge’s desk find out what was happening.
My friend was not there so I told New Face that I had talked to Bill (not
his real name) and he had said he would have a white board brought to
the room where I was speaking but it had not showed up. “I’ll
go a see what Bill organised,” said New Face and he was gone before
I could tell him I did not care what Bill had organised. I just wanted
a white board. Of course, the white board never did appear and I had to
give my speech without it.
Here is a customer experience that began well because Concierge Bill
was friendly and obliging. Then it went from good to great when he knew
my name. Finally it descended to the dark depths of Hell when I did not
get my whiteboard. I am sure both concierges intended to get me that white
board but it is the road to Hell, not the road to business success that
is paved with good intentions.
First and foremost, the customer wants what the customer wants. They
do not want failures, excuses, explanations, justifications or apologies.
They want right first time with no additional financial, time, effort
or emotional costs. As much as they would like to deal with friendly,
respectful and enthusiastic staff, at the end of the day they want to
talk to people who can deliver. When you think about it, this is not an
unreasonable request since they are paying the bill; yet I recently saw
research showing nearly two in every three New Zealanders are unhappy
with the service they get.
What is wrong?
In many cases, as with our friendly concierge, our intentions are good
but our processes and systems are non-existent, poorly constructed or
rarely followed. The second common cause, in my view, is staff are not
empowered to do whatever it is that needs to be done so the customer gets
what they want.
Here are four steps to change that so you give your customers results
not excuses.
1. Review customer complaints.
Your customer will tell you everything you need to know to improve. In
fact, through compliments, complaints, suggestions and questions, they
are giving you that information every day. Get out your complaints log
and see what your customers are complaining about. Rank the issues in
importance from high to low and start with the top failure. Do not rush
in and put a patch over the leak, take the time to identify the process
that is failing to produce what the customer wants and understand where
in the process the failure is occurring. Then involve staff in finding
a solution. Those of you not far away from retirement will recognise
this as TQM: Total Quality Management. If you do not have a way of recording
customer complaints, set one up immediately.
2. Review your processes.
Once you have identified and fixed the known trouble spots, undertake
a systematic review of your processes. Your processes are the engines
that drive your business. Your operational performance will only be as
good as your processes because nobody can outperform a faulty process.
Now, do not make the mistake of thinking that if you do not have manuals
or flow-charts, you do not have processes. Processes are how the work
gets done. So, every organisation has processes but if they are not written
down, you run the risk that how the work gets done varies from person
to person, hour to hour, situation to situation or all three. The road
to business failure is paved with non-standardised, idiosyncratic processes
that are not under control
When you review your processes, ask yourself and your staff these questions.
Are our processes documented and understood? Are they robust and performing
well? Do they have weak spots? Are staff following these processes? Could
anything be done better?
3. Then set standards and measure performance.
After reviewing your processes, set standards for their performance and
put measurements in place so you can easily monitor performance. The
best people to monitor a process are the people who operate it. That
way they take ownership of their processes’ performance. And how
do you know what standards to set? Set one that relates to waste and
two that relate to things that matter to the customer, such as in stock
or on-time delivery. You will need to train your people in the basics
of process measurement, data analysis and problem solving but you will
notice a big reduction in waste and complaints as a result.
4. Empower your staff.
Once staff have taken ownership of their process and have the skills to
measure performance, analyse results and solve problems, they need the
authority to make improvements. This does not have to be an open cheque,
of course. It is necessary to set limits on their authority. But if you
hold them accountable for the performance of the process, you will find
they are very cautious about the changes they make because they will
not want
to see the process fail any more than you will.
Designing and implementing processes, setting standards and measuring
performance, reviewing processes and working to continuously improve is
work – hard, and to many, boring work. But in the quality management
days we all learned, often the hard way, that weak processes produce poor
operational performance, which results unhappy customers and high operating
costs. All of which is OK unless you want to make a profit!
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