Carquest Standards of Service Excellence

The Hazards of Subcontracting Your Hellos and Good Byes

Be cautious about subcontracting your greetings and your farewells. Of course, subcontracting is often a necessary part of business: properly handled, it can be appropriate and desirable. But such arrangements can also be Trojan Horses, filled with enemies of your cause who ransack the precious goodwill of your customers - sometimes even before the customers quite make it at your doorstep.

We are being melodramatic in our language about this to make sure you mark our words with special care: The quality of the subcontractor's entire staff, their selection process, their training standards, their appearance and grooming, their code of conduct - everything - has to be absolutely integrated with your own. From the point of view of customers, if employee wears the company logo or answers their calls or opens the doors for them, that employee is your employee.

To make matters much worse, so many of these subcontracting - gone wrong happen at hellos and good byes. the rationales do not help:" Oh, he works for the security company"; "Oh, they are the parking subcontractors"; " I am sorry she barked at you on the phone- she is a temp."

In essence, such statements are a way of coaxing customers to accept the idea that "that is not us". To your customers, such statements are just infuriating baloney. "If I buy a product from you", explained one such customer, "and it's serviced by somebody else you hired, well, I am sorry; to me that is your service." And if that rough service happens at an entry or exit point, it is harming a critical, emotion-filled moment that has a strong hand in shaping your customer's perception of your brand.

Excellence Service Tips Part 6

1. You basically have 2 choices when it comes to growth: do more of what you are already doing, or do different things. In our framework, doing more of what you are already doing means growing the existing service model. Doing different things means building new service models.
2. If you want to grow your existing service model, you must first take control of it. This typically means that you have to increase your standardisation. Most organisations, it turns out, have to give up some degree of responsiveness to the needs of some customers if they want to scale the business. This does not have to mean, however, that you must sacrifice overall quality. You can use various strategies to defy the expected trade-off between standardised operations and the level of service a customer experiences.
3. An alternative growth model is the multi-focused firm, which means that multiple service models within the same organisation are each individually optimised for a distinct operating segment, each strategically good or bad at certain things. These models often show up as distinct brands or at least distinct business units. From a structural standpoint, the multi-focused firm is a shared-service platform where multiple service models share at least some of the same back-office services.
4. Multi-focused firms succeed when their individual service models create some kind of mutual benefit for each other, either economies of scale or economies of experience. Organisations that achieve economies of experience are good at sharing and leveraging knowledge across service models.
5. There are 2 primary barriers to making the multi-focused firm work. The first is a lack of political will to draw the line in the right place, that is , to optimally determine which service will be shared and which will stay within control of the individual service models. The second barrier is the willingness to tolerate uncompetitive quality or pricing in the company's shared services.

Excellence Service Tips Part 5

1. It's not enough to design your service model right. Uncommon service is achieved when great organisational design meets a culture of service excellence. A basic way to think about it is this: service excellence is a product of design and culture
2. The right culture is not an universal concept. Your right culture is a distinct asset that must be consistent with your organisation's service model
3. One way to understand culture is to break it down into its relevant components. Edgar Schein's culture framework, which loosely divides a culture into artefacts, behaviours, and shared basic assumptions. As he argues; to change behaviour, you have to change the way people think. To change the way people think, start with the underlying assumptions that drive that thinking.
4. Great service organisations tend to do 3 things well in their relationship with culture. They have a deep clarity about the organisational culture they must cultivate in order to compete and win. They are effective in signalling the norms and values that embody that culture. And they work hard to ensure cultural consistency, alignment between the desired culture and organisational strategy, structure, and operations. 

Take Control of Good Byes

Good byes are often rushed - or skipped altogether. After all, you are frequently so relieved to have gotten one job wrapped up successfully, and to be able to move on to the next one. So a transaction often ends with an invoice. What a wasted opportunity! If your customers are happy, the good byes is your last, and one of your most notable, chances to bond with them, to add an important final chapter to the service story.

Try to close each interaction with your customer in way that is memorable and sincere. Too many otherwise-fine service experiences come to a miserable close that consists solely of handing back a credit card or "OK" or "next". How much hard-earned good will is lost that way? A lot.

So, try to never close an interaction without providing a personalised farewell and an invitation to return. If handled properly, this farewell will be personal, resonant, and long lasting - but before you move to the closing, make sure you ask a final question, slowly and sincerely: " Is there anything else I can do for you?" If the answer is "No, thank you," then move to the closing, as follows:

• Personalise it: Use the customer's name, for starters. Offer your business card, if appropriate for your type of business. Beyond these obvious things, customise your language to fit this customer's history with you. For example: if this is the last day of a convention or holiday, add your sincere wishes for safe travel. If you are a retailer, express your hope for satisfaction with the item purchased.
• Make it resonant: If appropriate, give a parting gift. It can be a lollipop for customer's child, a vintage postcard, or a book. An ideal gift I something that is emotionally resonant with your brand as well as appropriate to the customer. Invite your customer to come back again as she leaves.
• Long lasting: Unless inappropriate for the type of purchase, send a follow-up note. Persona and handwritten is better than pre-printed - this is the best $1 investment you may ever make.

Your good bye at the end of successfully resolving a customer's trouble call should never morph into an attempt to make an additional sale. Trouble calls need to be about just one thing: solving the customer's problem. Customers feel especially vulnerable and dependent on you during these calls, because you are the only one who can help them. Since they feel one down, for you to sneak in a sales pitch at the last moment can come across as having their arms twisted or being bait-and-switched. Yes, they may buy whatever you are pitching at that moment, but they will often resent you for it later.

The customer May come in Contact with You Earlier Than You Expect

Remember that service begins as soon as the customer comes in contact with you - but only the customer gets to determine when that first moment is, and it may be much earlier than you think, or would wish. For example, suppose a customer parks his car in a retailer's parking lot, and the first things he sees are broken chain link fencing and cigarette buts strewn all about. In this instance, the first contact has occurred, unbeknownst to the retailer, who now must struggle to overcome this negative impression, It's unfair, but it's reality. This is why every carefully managed resort pays attention to the arrival sequence: the flowers, the signage, the friendly security guard at the gatehouse, the doorman. By the time you get to your room, you should feel gently transported to another world.

Excellence Serivce Tips Part 4

1. Service customers don't just purchase a service; they also participate in creating it. Among other things, they make the service faster or slower, better or worse, cheaper or more expensive to deliver - for themselves and for other customers. They are active producers of the value they end up consuming.
2. Customers can be more or less involved operationally, depending on your industry and your specific design choices - for example, how much self-service you build into your model and whether you involve your customers in your improvement efforts.
3. The more dependent your service business is on the behaviour of customer-operators, the more important it is to manage them successfully. Similar to employee management, the four components of a successful customer management system are customer selection, training, job design and performance management.
4. Not all customer-operators are alike. When compared with each other, they are faster slower, smarter, pickier, later, earlier, or more or less prepared to perform their operational roles. This diversity increases the cost and complexity of running a service business.
5. Assume that you don't know exactly how your customer re affecting your operations or how well your efforts to manage them are really going. Reframe any certainties as hypotheses that need confirmation. Test them. Fortunately, the data you need is usually right at your fingertips.

Which Level of Service Do You Provide? Let Them Know from "Hello"

One of the first things a greeting does is convey the level of service a customer may expect from your establishment. Are they going to get non-compliant service, compliant service, or anticipatory service?
Non-compliant service will push away customers every time. They asked for a glass of water and received nothing - except a grudging set of directions.
Compliant service is pretty much the baseline for the contemporary business world. It doesn't offend customers, but it won't win them over either. Complaint service can be well-executed, but it's not going to build loyalty for your brand.
Anticipatory service is extremely rare. But as we have discussed, this is where customer loyalty is created. When customers' wishes are anticipated, they get to bask in the magical feeling of being cared for. That feeling crates loyalty, which builds strategic value for your company.
SO, if you can tip your hand at the front door that this exceptional level of service is what they expect - if you can manage to literally "have them at hello" - you will predispose your customers to think well of you throughout the rest of the service experience

Why Efficient Processes Can Transform Service

We understand why service-focused teams tend to be sceptical about the relevance of systems like Lean Manufacturing. After all, to stand out and inspire confidence, we strive to anticipate - to meet customers' needs ahead of time -  because "just in time" can mean too darn late. We insist on keeping "excess" inventory, because it means we can maintain our high service standards even when unexpected demand occur. We even encourage our employees to make "repetitive" motions on behalf of customers precisely because willingness to be inefficient on their behalf is read by our customers as caring. More generally, we often need our employees to be "inefficient" in their caring for customers, because it enhances the customer's valuation of us.

For these reasons, our kind of enterprise seems more easily reconciled with a second principle of Lean Manufacturing: Value is determined by your customers. If it takes a thousand "inefficient" experiences to create loyal customers with confidence in us, so be it. Yes, It's slow, hard work to provide the kind of lavish, painstaking attention that produces unqualified positive reactions. But when our customers' satisfaction and loyalty are high, they value us highly. And when we are highly valued, we earn more. Hard measurements such as defect reduction metrics are important in service as well as in manufacturing, but there is something more here as well: In service-focused businesses, our customers don't tend to quantify the source of their happiness with a generalised glow, a vague feeling that they like us and want to return, and a desire to tell their friends about us. That is the only sort of "value assessment" our loyal customers tend to assign to superb service.

so can the "efficiency value" concept really help us serve our customers better? It can, we believe - so long as you restrict its territory a bit. We do want to be highly efficient - especially behind the scenes. Improving behind-the-scenes efficiency also serves our customers well by reducing errors, improving delivery time, and keeping staff fresh and alert.

Similarly, in online commerce, behind-the-scenes streamlining of customer choices through analysis of customer patterns increases value for company and customers want to proverbially "help out in the back" by doing their own account management, this can increase your efficiency and help you provide faster service at a lower price. We recommend such self-service be voluntary in most business contexts, or that you at least include systems that monitor customer frustration levels an provide them with many escape hatches - like effective, well-staffed online support chat and a toll-free hotline, just in case they get stuck. 

Write-Offs lead to Write-Offs

It doesn't always feel good to go to extreme lengths to pacify a customer. It can be hard to remember the upside, to know that your work is ultimately going to pay of. So here is an overriding philosophy which can help you through thankless moments: Individual customer are irreplaceable. Regardless of the size of your market segment, once you start writing customers, we can predict the day in the future when you will be out of business. Think you have a huge market and it is okay to kiss off customers and replace them down the road? Making this assumption will let imports chip away at the edges until there was little remaining as a core.

My suggestion is that you think of every one of your customers as a core customer - and treat the loss of a customer as a tragedy to be avoided.

Who should handle customer complaints?

Everyone should handle customer complaints. Of course, not everyone is going to be equally involve in customer service, nor should each employee be trained in the most specialised service. We do believe it is important that all employees participate to some degree - to the extent of their trainability and the extent to which they interact with the customers.
But who should handle cases that can't be resolved by a staffer on the front line? In other words, who should serve as "the manager" for a customer who demands to "speak with a manager"? Here are a couple of guideline:

• Empower your employees to be able to resolve the issue whenever possible without getting to the "manager" level.
• When unavoidable, you need the designated "manager" to stand out in 2 areas: as a sharp and eager problem solver and as a virtuoso at connecting empathically with people. If you have hired and trained appropriately, all of your staff will have some strength in these areas. But only about 1 in 10 will be unusually gifted in both areas. Those 10% should be your designated service "manager" - if indeed you choose to have such a position.

If you are going to involved the whole company in customer service, you should involved them fully: entrust them with broad discretionary powers to respond flexibly, creatively, and intensively to service errors.
So in order to keep customers happy, your people will need to be able to respond in an empowered and immediate way to service failures - without waiting for a manager's okay. This carte blanche approach has grown even more important in these days of customer rebellions Twittering out of control: Only with immediate and broad discretionary powers is there a chance your frontline employees will be able to defuse complaints before they get posted online.

Excellence Service Tips Part 3

1. The goal of an excellent service organisation is to deliver outstanding results with average employees
2. Many companies design service models for employees they don't have - for a payroll filled superstars when, in fact, there's a healthy range of talent and initiative on the team. Capture this reality in the design of the business model
3. Successful employee management systems have 4 main components: selection, training, job design and performance management. These components must be internally consistent and aligned with the rest of the service model. There's no such thing as good or bad selection. The issued is whether it's consistent with the rest of the employee management system and whether the system is consistent with the rest of the service model
4. IT solutions can help or hurt your employees' productivity, often in dramatic ways. IT tools that work are sensitive to the employee experience, including how and when data is entered in the rhythm of a particular job. The best solutions are developed in tandem with the role itself - not piled on after a job design is already in place
5. The average service employee is overwhelmed by the increasing complexity of his or her job. When a company identifies a gap like this between operational complexity and employee sophistication, it has 2 choices: train and hire differently or redesign the job so that your current team can do it

How should you compensate a customer for a service or product failure?

It depends. And that variability, in fact, is what's most important. Customers have diverse values and preferences- so your people who placate disgruntled customers need to be given enormous discretion. Still, there are principles that apply:

• Most customers understand that things can and will go wrong. What they do not understand, accept, or find interesting are excuses. For example, they don't care about your org chart. You mentioning that a problem originated in a different department is of no interest to them.
• Don't panic. Customers' sense of trust and camaraderie increases after a problem is successfully resolved, compared to if you had never had the problem in the first place. This makes sense, since you now have a shared experience. You have solved something by working closely together.
• Avoid assuming you know what solution a customer wants or "should" want.Ask. And if a customer makes a request that sounds extreme or absurd, don't rush to dismiss it. Even if it seems on its face impossible, there may be a creative way to make the requested solution, or something a lot like it, happen.
• Don't strive for "fairness" or "justice". Our archetypal doting Italian mama doesn't investigate whether her bambino obeyed the sidewalk speed limit before comforting him, and a customer's warm feelings for a company aren't about fairness. They're about being treated especially well.
• Learn from customer issues, but don't use them as an opportunity to discipline or train your staff in front of your customer. This may sound obvious, but it happens quite often. Watch out for this flaw, special when you're under stress.
• Don't imagine you are doing something special for a customer by making things how they should have been in the first place. The chance to get it right the first time? It's gone. So re-creating how things should have been is just a first step. You need to then give the customer something extra. Mam bandages a knee and offers a lollipop. If you aren't sure which "extra" to offer a particular customer, just make it clear you want to offer something. If the customer doesn't like red lollipops or doesn't eat sugar, she will let you know. Then you can decide together on a different treat.
• Keep in mind the lifetime value of a loyal customer. A loyal customer is likely worth a small fortune to your company when considered over a decade or two of regular purchases. Research shows that the lifetime value of a loyal customer to be up to $100,000 and occasionally more. It is well worth figuring out that number and keeping it in mind if you ever feel that temptation to quarrel with a customer over, say, an overnight shipping bill.

Excellence Service Tips Part 2

1. Service excellence must be funded in some way. If not, you risk delivering gratuitous service, service features that are donated to customers but never paid for in any way.
2. There are 4 ways to fund a premium service experience: (a) get customers to pay you extra for it, (b) reduce costs in ways that also improve service, (c) improve service in ways that also reduce costs, or (d) get customers to enjoy doing some of the work for you.
3. Extra service fees aren't inherently good or bad. Their success depends on the specific contract you have with customers.
4. A loyalty program is one way to get paid for  premium service experience. True loyalty programs-programs that increase customers' willingness to pay a premium price- are rare, largely because most loyalty programs are mislabelled retention programs.
5. For self-service to be part of an uncommon service experience, customers must prefer self-service to a full-service alternative. 

CEO of Zappos saying

In 2009, the CEO Tong Hsieh spelled out the company's approach more explicitly:

We view most of the money that we put into the customer experience as our marketing dollars. The number one driver of our business is repeat customers and word of mouth, so most of the money that we would have spent on paid advertising we put toward things like free shipping both ways, surpeise upgrades to overnight shipping, our call centre, and our warehouse, which run 24/7- which isn't actually the most efficient way to run the warehouse. The most efficient way is to let the orders pile up, but because we run it 24/7 to get our orders out as quickly as possible, customers can order as late as midnight Eastern(time), and it is on their doorstep 8 hours later. That creates that 'Wow!" effect, and they remember that for a long time. And then they tell their friends.

The saying above shows us that such revenue doesn't strictly comes from marketing strategies or even advertising. Most of all, it comes from service which makes people keep talking about it and it tends to sink into your customers first thought.

Excellence Service Tips Part 1

1. To achieve service excellence, you must underperform in strategic ways. This means delivering on the service dimensions your customer value most, and then making it possible-profitable and sustainable-- by performing poorly on the dimensions they value least. In other words, you must be bad in the service of good.
2. The primary obstacle to service excellence is not the ambition to be great, but the stomach to be bad. This is an emotional obstacle.
3. It's difficult to compete without understanding your customers' needs and how well your competitors are meeting those needs. Fortunately, customers are typically very willing to give you that information. And it's cheap and easy to ask them for it.
4. There is an important distinction between marketing and operating segments. Marketing segments tell us how to identify and communicate with different kinds of customers. Operating segments tells us how to serve customers differently. There is rarely a one-to-one mapping between these segments.
5. There are 2 key ways to improve service: (a)meet your customers' existing needs more effectively, or (b)convince your customers that they need something you already do well.
6. There is a different between financial models and service models. Service companies need to be "bilingual" to excel.