If you took anything away for the previous lesson (Service/Train), I hope that you realized that Service is a people thing. Yes, we can automate and many customers even prefer self-service but by and large we need the right people to deliver the right service at the the right time and at the level of service that the customer expects. First, we have to start with our employees; I call it that Zappos’ thing. The Customer Experience will mimic the Employee Experience. We need to get it right from the beginning and that is why all the effort is put into that upfront at Zappos and by the way Toyota.
Who else does it right? Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, MI is another example of a company that gets it right. Zingerman’s went from a 25-seat, 4-person start up to a nationally known, $40,000,000-organization employing over 500 people.
I wanted to share was my personal experience of Zingerman’s Deli. Besides the great food and great service and catalog littered with special gifts and even more unique food, Zingerman’s left a special mark on a venture into the retail business that my wife and I did for six years. It was Ari’s book,Zingerman’s Guide to Giving Great Service, that provided our outline for the service that we would provide and train our staff. Below is a mind map of the initial outline that I constructed from the book.The second mind-map is what I would call an ad-hoc representation of the Zingerman’s PDCA cycle: Teach, Define, Live, Measure, Reward.
I find the Zingerman model an excellent guideline for many retail operations. In fact, very few things are difficult to do, it is just a matter of doing it.
There has been a fair amount written about designing a customer experience and more specifically how the interpretation of theater can help. The most ready reference on the subject is Interactive Services Marketing
By service theater we mean that services involve the same theatrical elements as a stage production: actors, audience, setting, frontstage, backstage, and a performance:
- The actors (service workers) are those who work together to create the service for the audience (customers).
- The setting (service environment) is where the action or service performance unfolds.
- The frontstage actions that service actors perform for the customers usually rely on significant support from the backstage, away from the audience’s inspection, where much of the planning and execution of the service experience occurs.
- The performance is the dynamic result of the interaction of the actors, audience, and setting.
But seldom do we look at the customer experience through the entire supply chain. We view it as a “marketing” thing. However, designing a customer experience seldom works unless your organization is actually living it.
Metaphorically speaking the actors are the customer-facing team or the Front-stage crew. Back-stage is your support cast. The traditional stage of course, is the platform that your customer sees to include website, signage and such. In the service examples above it seems well-defined and understandable how this analogy works.
Can it work in SD-Logic (The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing by Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch) where the premise that products and services only create the opportunity to provide value. Value is created only when the customer uses the product or service. So the front-stage is your customer using your product.
Viewing the Front-stage in this sense, you put a greater premium on value in use! It re-defines your sales and marketing efforts and the rest of your supply chain on supporting the customers in their process of creating value. The stage must provide a platform for customer engagement that will increase a network of relationships between organizations. Can actors and the audience be entwined this way? Is that the experience that Starbucks creates? Or maybe a better example is Personalize M&M’S® with your words and faces?
What do you think? Can the customer be front stage in your organization?
Observing Zappos and Zingerman’s is an enlightening process. You would even think that the service they provide could sell anything. Do you think the carry-out, catalog and other orders at Zingerman’s could be carried out by Zappos personnel? Or, do you think that Zingerman’s personnel could sell shoes at a retail location. I do! What they do well is they have identified who they are, and they live it. It is their brand.
Do you know what your brand stands for? What your customer thinks your brand stands for? I hesitated to go to deep into branding at this juncture but to complete this exercise, I felt it a necessity. From the book Branded Customer Service: The New Competitive Edge, the authors state:
Only by understanding the underlying processes that drive the relationship between brands and people can companies achieve successful alignment to customer service. The underlying process of defining the space your brand occupies involves
- Establishing a justification for the value of the brand and a picture of the brand’s future aspirations
- Defining how the brand’s promises and differentiators are to be delivered
- Clarifying how the brand is to be seen in the marketplace and establishing its personality in relationship to the organization’s business ideas, staff capabilities, and customer needs
Lets first start with some basic branding exercises:
- Bring in magazines and have groups make collages of the brand. Encourage a creative atmosphere. Afterwards have them list the features of the brand. Swap collages and have the other groups compare. You can choose to swap collages between all groups. Post on wall and discuss.
- Have the group(s) describe a particular good customer experience. Afterwards discuss how the customer experienced your brand.
- Have the group(s) describe a particular bad customer experience. Afterwards discuss how the customer experienced your brand.
- If possible, include customers in these discussions.
- Have a group of salespeople demonstrate selling your brand and list the features presented.
What we need to review is our services, service-products and touchpoint. Are they on-brand or off-brand? The following exercises adapted from the above mention book are designed to help you determine whether your service either supports your brand promise or fails to deliver it.
- Customer Touchpoints: Using Trilogy Journey Map highlight each touchpoint if you are on or off brand. Think about 5s again. If you are off-brand eliminate these activities if you cannot bring them back to being on-brand. The off-brand items are probably the activities that create the problems not only during the sales process but also those “problem orders.”
- Identify which of your sales staff currently sells your brand values along with selling products or services. Set up step-by-step checklists of your already-successful sales staff so that your entire sales force can more easily emphasize all the essential points that relate to brand value. Build a script from it for others to practice from.
- Study your customers to find out how they like to buy your brand. What values are reinforced in the way they purchase your product so they are, in effect, purchasing your brand in the process of buying your products or services? The purpose of branding is to reinforce the ideas that are meaningful to your customers even during the sales experience. Here are several questions to ask about customers to help you get started:
- Are there any parts of your brand that are not demonstrated in the sales process?
- Are your customers quick to make their decisions while buying from you? Or do they like a leisurely sell or some combination of both? How can you tell which customers want which selling style?
- What previous experience have customers had with you that you definitely do not want reinforced?
- What is of value (for example, education about your brand and products) to the customer in your sales process? How do these value points link to your brand promise?
- Others?
- Make sure that your entire sales force knows how to sell your brand, without selling a service or product. In other words, if you were to sell the value of your brand idea, how is that done?
- Have one group of salespeople demonstrate selling just your brand. Have another group demonstrate selling your competitor’s brand. Learning how to focus on just your brand idea teaches salespeople to cut to the quick in terms of your brand values and proposition.
When people first think about selling services, they have a tendency to forget what has made them successful selling their products or other services. Understanding yourself is more important than understanding your markets.
Review your service brand strategies and go to the next page Service/Ascertain
Recommended Reading/Listening
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Who Really Determines the Success of Your Business |
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The Aroma of a Good Vision |
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Using Little Ideas to achieve Big Things |
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Dr. Jeffrey Liker discusses PDCA |