I’m at a work conference staying in a resort in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, Australia.

I’ve heard some great speakers today and there are more lined up tomorrow so over the next few weeks I’ll blog about some of the things I’ve learnt.  But today, I want to blog about my experience at the resort.

I’ve blogged before about how delivering service is like putting on a performance - if it’s not rehearsed well, it can go badly.  Well, there have been a few elements to this hotel stay that haven’t gone too well that possibly could have been avoided.  Here are some examples, and some ideas to stop them happening in your business.

You need good staff to deliver on your promise

There’s two aspects to this point – having good staff and having enough staff.

Here’s some interesting events:

• When we initially arrived, we went straight into our sessions until 5.00pm.  We then went to check in to discover the hotel only had one staff member working at reception – there were over 50 of us.  So checking in took a little longer than it should have.  And the hotel didn’t create a good first impression.
• At breakfast they had insufficient staff to clear the tables.  At one stage it looked like over 60% of the tables were empty, but hadn’t been cleared.  I had no option but to sit at a table with someone else’s dirty plates.
• During the breaks in our sessions, there were a couple of times that no staff came into the room to clear the rubbish, top up the water etc. 

Sorry if I’m stating the obvious, but they know in advance how many guests they have staying there so you’d think they could get the staffing right.

Check the premises

In our meeting room I looked up at the light shade and saw a ‘Happy Birthday’ balloon sitting on top of it, right up by the ceiling.  It was obviously left behind from a previous function and the room wasn’t cleaned properly.  I’m a big believer in using checklists for delivering services.  If someone had a list of things to check off, they would have been reminded to check the light shade.

In the room

My room doesn’t have a clock radio, or any kind of clock.  Strange for a hotel room.  It also doesn’t have a list of internal phone numbers, so if I wanted to phone reception to enquire about getting a clock or a wakeup call, I don’t know what number to call.

I’m also a little frustrated with the room cleaner.  There’s a sign that tells me to leave in the bath any towels I want cleaned and to hang up any ones I want to re-use.  This morning I’ve hung my towel up on the towel rail together with my bath mat so I can use them again tomorrow.  I come back to the room tonight and they’ve been replaced with new ones!

Don’t tell me you’re going to do one thing, but then do the opposite.  One of the key elements of delivering good service is being reliable and doing what you say you’re going to do, not saying one thing and doing another.

Deliver on your promise

When you look at this resort on the web, it looks great.  And it is.  It’s in a great location and has great facilities.  But good service isn’t just about looking good; it’s about delivering on your promise.  And this place hasn’t delivered on its promise.

Reflection

Have a think about the areas I’ve highlighted her and think about the equivalents in your business.  Are there areas involving staff that you can improve on, or processes or service delivery?

Leave a comment and let me know what you think.  And if you’re reading on Twitter and like this article, could you re-Tweet it please?

 Photo credit The Edinburgh Blog

I’ve been writing about some of the keys Harry Beckwith has in his book called The Invisible Touch.  The final key, and the one he considers to be the most important, is that of Relationships.

Beckwith makes the point that the other three keys – price, packaging and brand are important, but when you sell a service, the most important factor is your relationship with your clients.

Business is personal; it’s about caring for people, making them feel important, understanding what they’re after and helping them to achieve it.

When you sell a service, you’re selling a piece of yourself, a relationship, and clients will buy that if they’re comfortable with who you are.

Beckwith lists 8 keys to lasting relationships:

• 1. Natural affinity – select clients like you.
• 2. Trust – do this by being consistent and doing what you’ve promised to do.
• 3. Speed – deliver what your clients want – quickly and accurately.
• 4. Apparent expertise – Beckwith says ‘you’re only as expert as you appear’. Look the part.
• 5. Sacrifice – Give something extra to cement your client relationships.
• 6. Completeness – what else can you offer that your clients may value?
• 7. Magic Words – say thank you, welcome customers, use their name.
• 8. Passion – this is what keeps clients. If you’re passionate about what you do, you’ll build strong relationships and get clients for life.

If you work in a service industry where you sell knowledge or information, I encourage you to get hold of every Harry Beckwith book you can and read them.  Have a think about the 8 keys above – how can you demonstrate them better?  What experiences have you had where someone invested into their relationship with you?

Photo credit Katie Tegtmeyer

He makes this comment.

Saw this in one of your articles. “Even the best bands get it wrong on stage sometime, and I’m not suggesting you control the service delivery so tightly that the individual personalities of people get stifled.”

Miles Davis once said something like – “It’s not about the mistakes you make but how you recover from them.”

I think Miles was on to something there.

In a previous article we talked about how clients make decisions about the quality of a service.  One of the points was that if you wanted to exceed the client’s expectations of service, you need to be able to demonstrate the qualities of Tangibles, Responsiveness, Assurance and Empathy.

One point I didn’t make is that when the service delivery goes poorly, you have an opportunity to make it good and, through that opportunity, you can exceed the client’s expectations.

If you run any business that involves people delivering the service, things will go wrong from time to time.  There’s a lot you can do to reduce the instances of service failure, but as long as there’s the human element involved, you won’t be able to eliminate it.

Think about a time when you bought a service – or a tangible product – and something went wrong with the service.  Let’s assume you said something to someone in the organisation about it (if you don’t provide clients with an opportunity to provide feedback then you need to start thinking about how you can begin to).

This is where things get interesting.  You tell the company that the service delivery was not great.  This is their opportunity to make it good again.  What do they do?

The poor companies either do nothing, make you feel like the mistake was yours, or grudgingly try and fix the problem. 

Other companies will do what they have to do to fix it – nothing more, nothing less.  In one sense, they’d argue they’re doing what you paid them to do (albiet late).

Good companies see service breakdown as an opportunity to exceed the customer’s expectations and win a customer for life.  You see, they know how to use the qualities of Tangibles, Responsiveness, Assurance and Empathy to their advantage.

Think about it.  A customer has complained about something that went wrong at your business.  Can you demonstrate empathy – putting yourself in their shoes and thinking about how they may feel.  Can you provide assurance to the client – a sense of confidence in your abilities to fix the problem. 

Can you be responsive – there’s nothing worse than complaining about something, and then having to follow up on the complaint because no-one seems to be doing anything about it.  One organisation I worked at at a slogan called TOFU – Take Ownership and Follow Up.  In one respect it’s a bit sad that these things need to be said – they should be common sense, but at least the TOFU concept reiterates the importance of being quick to fix a problem.

Finally, when there’s a breakdown in a service delivery, the tangibles become more important, because now more than ever your client is looking for visual cues to reassure them that your organisation can provide the service they’re looking for.

The important concept here is that service breakdown actually provides you with an opportunity to exceed the customer’s expectations and provide exceptional service.  It’s possible to develop a stronger client relationship out of a service breakdown than if everything went well the first time.

So, maybe Miles was right.  Mistakes are going to happen.  Accept that.  It’s what you do about them that can make your business great in the eyes of your customer.

What are some examples of how you’ve either been a customer and received poor service and then had your expectations exceeded, or done it in your own business.

It stands to reason that if we want to provide great customer service, we need to understand what our clients think great customer service looks like.  Spending time understanding their expectations can lead to more effective results.

The authors summarise customer service expectations into five areas: reliability, tangibles, responsiveness, assurance and empathy.  We’ll cover these in more detail below, together with some examples.

Reliability

This aspect of service delivery is all about doing what you said you were going to do when you said you were going to do it.

Have you ever waited at home for a tradesman to arrive hours later than they’d promised?  Or been frustrated that the person on the phone who promised to call back with some important information regarding your insurance hasn’t called?

When you’re selling a service, customers use reliability as one of the important clues to make a decision about whether or not to use your services.  You see, when they can’t see your physical product, they look for other cues that demonstrate whether you’ll be able to deliver the promised product.  Do you do what you say you’ll do?  This means when you say you’ll call them tomorrow, you actually do.  Or when you promise to post some documents, they arrive on time and the clients don’t have to call your office to follow them up.

If you say you’re going to do these little things and you actually do, then people have faith that you’ll be able to deliver on the big service they’re buying from you.

As an absolute minimum, if you want to meet your clients expectations, do what you say you’re going to do.

If you want to exceed their expectations, read on and do the next four things well.

Tangibles

How do you make your service come alive?  It’s hard for me to show a client a mutual fund, but I can talk about the companies they deal with every day that the fund invests into. 

As a client interacts with your service experience, they use the tangible things they see to make decisions.  If your offices look messy and untidy, this affects their perception of your service. 

What about when you stay in a hotel and they put that paper sash across the toilet lid.  It’s there as evidence that the toilet has been cleaned.  You wouldn’t necessarily notice the clean toilet by itself, but the sash draws attention to it.  The implication is – if the toilet is clean, the rest of the room must also be clean.

I’ve been in waiting rooms that have magazines from 5 years ago in the magazine rack.  Maybe it’s just me, but my brain thinks that maybe that business is stuck in a mindset of five years ago, and maybe they’re not up with the latest ideas and strategies that I need to know about.

Have a good hard look about the physical elements to your service – your office, appearance, documentation you use etc.  Does it convey to your clients that you’re professional and capable?

Responsiveness

Are you interested in helping customers?  Being responsive means understanding that when a client calls with a query, they are responded to quickly.

We recently changed the provider for our home phone.  It was an interesting experience.  When we called the sales area, we spoke with a live person very quickly.  Once we were an existing customer and had queries about the service not working properly, we were on hold for over 20 minutes before we got to speak with someone.  This shows to me that the company really isn’t that interested in me.

How do you show that you’re responsive?  One thing we do is try and return all phone calls on the same day we received them so our clients understand they’re important to us. 

How willing are you to help clients?  How can you show this?

Assurance

When a client deals with your organisation, do they have the confidence that the employees are capable and able to do their jobs well? 

We recently took our dog to our regular vet to get them to look at a lump that had developed on her side.  We were seen by a younger vet (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) and, after a brief feel and a quick blood test, she made a diagnosis that involved surgery.  To be honest, we felt that she’d rushed things a bit and maybe hadn’t done a complete diagnosis.  Of course, the cost of following her advice would involve a significant financial outlay as well as the mental pressure of having a dog have surgery.  As a result, we took our dog to another vet for a second opinion.

You see, when I haven’t got faith in your ability to deliver, I’ll question the things you suggest.

In your service business you need to find ways to convey your credibility to clients.  One very effective way is through the use of client testimonials.  Potential clients can read about how you’ve helped someone similar to them, and this gives them confidence that you’ll be able to help them in a similar fashion.  If you don’t have any existing clients who will give your testimonials, use case studies instead that show how your advice could benefit a particular type of client. 

Empathy

This last point is all about showing the client that you care about them and their personal situation. 

In our business we have a phrase “It’s not about the money”.  As financial planners, in one sense it’s actually all about the money.  But it’s not.  It’s about wanting to understand what the money represents to our clients – what are the things they want to do with it.

At the moment we’re dealing with the extreme market volatility.  We have clients who have lost 20% or 30% over the past year.  In our conversations with those clients we’re taking a lot of time to just sit and listen, and find out how they really feel.  We understand the pain they’re going through. 

We’ll say things to them that other clients in a similar position have already said.  If they’re retired, a popular phrase is ‘I can’t go back to work to recoup my losses’.  I’ll say to clients ‘I understand that you can’t just go back to work to recoup your loss’.  Most clients will nod their head and agree – they’re seeing that we understand how they feel.

Most people just want to be valued as an individual – that’s what empathy is all about.

Putting it Together

If you want to meet your client’s expectations, the best thing you can do is be reliable – deliver the service you say you’re going to deliver.  In other words, give them the outcome they’re expecting.

But if you want to exceed their expectations, you need to have a service process in place to deliver the elements of tangibles, responsiveness, assurance and empathy.

Think about a time in your life where you’ve had an experience where your expectations were exceeded.  How did they do it?  Chances are it wasn’t from just doing what they’d promised, but it involved one of the other four elements we’ve discussed.

Have a thought about your business and think of innovative ways you can deliver these five elements of service so that you don’t just meet the expectations of your clients, but you exceed those expectations.

Leave a comment below and let me know what you think.