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Great service
By Bill Perry
Charleston Regional Business Journal 05/05/2003
CUSTOMER SERVICE
How
do you define exceptional customer service? When I ask this question in
seminars, I usually get a wide range of answers, such as “taking care of the
customer,” “treating the customer well,” and “exceeding the customer’s
expectations.”
I particularly like the last
definition, because I think we all define our experiences according to how they
match up with what we expected. For every service experience we have, be it at
a restaurant, doctor’s office, store or car dealership, we form some
expectation prior to going in.
Let’s say we are going to an upscale
restaurant for a special occasion. We’ve never been to the restaurant before.
Our expectations are pretty high. They are formed by a number of factors: what
others say about the restaurant, reviews in the newspaper and price being just
a few.
The big night arrives and we go to
dinner. The food is fantastic, the service is great, and the atmosphere is warm
and inviting. Do we define our evening as exceptional? Some may, but most of us
would think, “I expected a lot and got what I expected.” A great evening, but
not a “wow.”
Weeks later, after a long day of
shopping, we stop at a small restaurant in a strip mall for a quick dinner.
Again, we’ve never been there before, but this time we don’t expect much. After
all, how good can a restaurant in a shopping center be? Well, we go in and the
experience blows us away. We are seated immediately, the atmosphere is nice,
the wait staff cordial and the food some of the best we’ve had for the money.
We leave and plot our reality much higher than our expectation. Do we consider
this an exceptional experience? You bet. We’ll probably even go home and tell
our neighbor, “You’ve got to try Joe’s Diner over at the mall. It’s the best
kept secret in town.”
Two weeks later, you take your neighbor
to Joe’s Diner to show him personally how good it is (we all love to show off
our favorite places and be seen as an expert). You receive the same service and
food quality as before. When you leave, how do you feel about the experience?
Your expectation on the second visit was higher, probably about equal to your
reality the first time, so you weren’t nearly impressed the second time. Your
neighbor probably wasn’t either, because you raised his expectations by raving
about the place.
What’s the lesson in all this for those
in service industries? It’s pretty simple, really. As customers, our
expectations for service and product quality are constantly increasing. We are
better educated and informed consumers; we have more choices and expect the
best value for our money. Service we thought was great five years ago is barely
satisfactory today. The better we are treated today, the more we expect
tomorrow.
Test this definition the next time you
go somewhere. I did recently when I took my wife to the Biltmore Inn in
Asheville, N.C., for our anniversary. My expectations were high, for exactly
the reasons I wrote of earlier: price, reputation, etc. Our weekend was
wonderful. Everything was first-class. Still, as great as it was, I plotted my
“reality” on a par with what I expected, but no higher. Could they have done
things to “wow” me? Yes. Can I tell you what they might have been? No. If I
knew, I would have expected it.
Truly exceptional service means
surprising the customer with something truly unexpected. At Ritz-Carlton
Hotels, it is sitting down for breakfast in Kuala Lumpur and having the
waitress ask you if you still like your eggs scrambled lightly because they
keep a database of customers’ preferences.
It’s a manager at a local Wal-Mart who,
after disappointing a customer because a layaway item wasn’t in stock when she
came to claim it, got in his car and delivered the item to her house 10 miles
away. That’s a WOW!
Bill Perry, president of the Charleston Center
for High Performance Organizations, co-authored the book “Exceptional Customer
Service” with Lisa Ford and David McNair and gives seminars and speeches on
customer service. E-mail him at billperry829@aol.com.
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