Chris Lane
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Provide outstanding customer care when things go wrong!
I believe there’s a difference between customer service and customer care.
Service is the actual performance, while care is the ethos behind it that:
• reflects the core values of the company delivering it,
• delights the customer, and
• exceeds their expectations by so much they tell ten people and come back time and time again
In his best-selling book "Setting the Table", Danny Meyer describes customer care as when something happens FOR you and not just TO you.
Good customer care is a whole different experience. Sometimes outstanding customer care only shows when something has gone wrong.
Let me share an example with you from my club some years ago, although I was away when it happened.
A member came to the club around 3.30pm with two children aged five and six years. She dropped off one child at a class at the club, and returned to her car to take the other for a piano lesson in Guildford, only to find it had a puncture. In a panic she ran back into Reception and asked if we would call a taxi to take her child to Guildford for her piano lesson on time, while she rang the breakdown service to fix the puncture.
Good customer service would have been to do that with sympathy, quickly and efficiently, perhaps offering her a coffee while she waited at least an hour for the breakdown service.
But let me tell you what my Duty Manager, Charles, did off his own back ... remember, I wasn’t there!
He told the club member the child was too young to be in a taxi on her own and offered to personally drive the child the ten miles each way to her piano lesson, at his own expense.
Before leaving, Charles called our handyman and asked him to swap her tyre over for her while she sat in the clubroom watching her first child in her class.
The mother collected her first child from our class when it finished, then drove over in her now drivable car to collect her other child from her piano lesson.
Now THAT is outstanding customer care!
That is what The Ritz Carlton Hotel Group call the “WOW" in service.
How can you put a price on the goodwill and great word of mouth that it would have brought us . . . but, you know, it just made us feel good!
Customer care is training people to serve clients in an outstanding fashion. If you don’t have great people working with you . . .now THAT is another story!
Have you ever asked a person when they applied for a job whether they have the "Soul of a Servant”?
22 January 2013
Some get it right but some . . . .
It's amazing how wrong some companies can get it and yet others get it right !
I was waiting in a Vodafone shop a few days ago. The fellow being served had a little four year old girl doing what kids do when they want to go to the loo. He asked if they had a loo and the guy serving them nodded, went to the back office, returned and told the customer she couldn't as it was "against company policy and that he should try Cafe Rouge just up the road"!
I bought a couple of tee shirts off a company called CafePress.com, designed the logo myself, paid and three days later they turned up . . . but although the shirts were of very good quality, the writing on the logos was too small . So on their website I complained while saying the quality was good.
Within two hours I received a reply with an apology, asking me to reorder and advising how to redesign it properly. It said there would be no cost for the new ones.
I decided to have a couple of shirts that were more expensive and asked them to bill me. Again within an hour: "no charge . . . if you are happy , we are happy".
Shortly afterwards another email arrived telling me not to go to the trouble of sending back the originals as it would be a nuisance but to give them to friends !
Who am I going to buy my tee shirts from in the future and who may you go to now having read this? CafePress.com of course!
28th January 2013
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Chelsea got it right for a change!
I've been going around London recently looking at Health Clubs and seeing what they are offering in terms of their Customer Care.
Check out The Chelsea Club . . . I hate to say this, but it was the best of all the high-end clubs I visited, including the newish one called Equinox, over from NY .
I do not like what Chelsea stand for BUT the club is terrific and the Customer Care was a joy.
It's not cheap at £190 per month and I can hear people saying: "Well, it should be for that price"! Well, perhaps, but others I visited were as expensive but not as good.
Ask to have a tour by a fellow called John Groves the Membership Manager . . . a young guy but a real professional. I'd have counted myself lucky to have employed him at my club.
2nd March 2013