Woo, Wow, and Win
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Woo, Wow, and Win

Thomas A. Stewart, Patricia O'Connell

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  1. 336 pages
  2. English
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eBook - ePub

Woo, Wow, and Win

Thomas A. Stewart, Patricia O'Connell

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About This Book

In this pioneering guide, two business authorities introduce the new discipline of Service Design and reveal why trying new strategies for pleasing customers isn't enough to differentiate your business—it needs to be designed for service from the ground up.

Woo, Wow, and Win reveals the importance of designing your company around service, and offers clear, practical strategies based on the idea that the design of services is markedly different than manufacturing. Bestselling authors and business experts Thomas A. Stewart and Patricia O'Connell contend that most companies, both digital and brick-and-mortar, B2B or B2C; are not designed for service—to provide an experience that matches a customer's expectations with every interaction and serves the company's needs. When customers have more choices than ever before, study after study reveals that it's the experience that makes the difference. To provide great experiences that keep customers coming back, businesses must design their services with as much care as their products.

Service Design is proactive—it is about delivering on your promise to customers in accordance with your strategy, not about acceding to customer dictates. Woo, Wow, and Win teaches you how to create "Ahhh" moments when the customer makes a positive judgment, and to avoid Ow" moments—when you lose a sale or worse, customer trust.

Whether you're giving a haircut, selling life insurance, or managing an office building, your customer is as much a part of your business as your employees are. Together, you and customers create a bank of trust; fueled by knowledge of each other's skills and preferences. This is Customer Capital, the authors explain, and it is jointly owned. But it's up to you to manage it profitably.

Innovative yet grounded in real world examples, Woo, Wow, andWin is the key strategy for winning customers—and keeping them.

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Information

Year
2016
ISBN
9780062415707
Subtopic
Marketing
PART I
Setting Out
CHAPTER 1
The Road to “Ahhh!”
Membership has its privileges,” according to one well-known charge card company. To Jeff Potter, CEO of membership-based commuter airline Surf Air, those privileges are convenience, comfort, camaraderie, and connections. He learned the value of membership as CEO of Exclusive Resorts, a luxury vacation club. “Membership gives people something in common from the very start. It makes people more invested in your product or service,” he says.
Surf Air subscribers pay a monthly fee (currently $1,950, plus a one-time membership fee) for unlimited flights between any cities on its system in California and Nevada. That is a great deal for many business customers: a Los Angeles lawyer who needs to be in Sacramento several times a month; a tech mogul who weekends in Tahoe; consultants with clients scattered around California; a restaurateur with properties in different cities. It is an even better deal because of the ingenious (a word we do not use lightly) aspects of the carrier’s service design.
Surf Air flies only Pilatus PC-12 NG aircraft—nine-passenger craft that have the feel of a private plane. That eliminates security screening and a lengthy check-in process, because Transportation Security Administration rules exempt planes carrying fewer than ten passengers from the time-consuming checks. Surf Air’s use of the membership-based revenue model and small, largely underutilized regional airports means passengers waste almost no time on the ground; the economics of the business are so attractive that the airline can make a profit on a flight just 60 percent full. It can—and will—fly scheduled flights with even one passenger.
A stint as CEO of Frontier Airlines gave Potter insight into the issues that bedevil both commercial airlines and their passengers—issues that he and his partners sought to resolve when designing Surf Air. “Airlines ranked 36 out of 40 industries in the Net Promoter Score, yet domestic travel was booming,” Potter recalls. “We saw an opportunity to cater to the frequent traveler, to be the equivalent of high-speed rail: addressing local markets, people who need to travel a small corridor quickly at an affordable cost.”
Flying Surf Air is indeed a different experience: The airline has practically eliminated the airport. You can arrive just fifteen minutes before flight time; free snacks and beverages await passengers in the preflight area; you do not need a boarding pass; there is no security check; there is no boarding group scrum at the gate; luggage is taken from you planeside and delivered moments after you walk off. “When our members first come in, they’re very confused,” says Potter. “They’re used to loudspeakers and bright lights and being corralled.”
The radically simplified customer journey eliminates backstage hassle, too. Surf Air needs no baggage-handling system and employs no flight attendants. Because it is a subscription model, it needs no algorithms to set fares, has no tickets to process—the whole IT system is much simpler.
For all that members enjoy the luxury, convenience, and relative economy that Surf Air offers, those are not the most important things to members. “People constantly point out that flying commercially between LAX and SFO—a ninety-minute flight—actually takes three to four hours more because of all the things we have eliminated,” says Potter. “Our surveys show the number-one thing people value is time. We like to think we’re not saving them time—we’re giving it back to them.”
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“The number-one thing people value is time.” That is the crux of the Surf Air experience—and its design. Think about the last customer satisfaction survey you received. (We know better than to ask about your last flight.) Did that survey seek to capture what was important to you? If it was from a hotel, it probably asked you to evaluate check-in and checkout, the cleanliness of your room, the promptness of room service, and a number of similar items, on a scale of 1 to 5 or 1 to 7, then asked if you would be likely to return or recommend the place to others.
And, if you’re like us, you felt that the survey had little to do with your stay. Check-in? Sure, it was fine, no problems. The room? Sure, it was clean, no problems. Return? Sure, next time I’m in Atlanta and depending on where my meetings are. But the survey missed the point: It should have been about your experience: how you felt about the stay, if you got what you expected, whether it was distinctive or special, or just another night in another hotel in another city—fine, no problem.
That survey wasn’t really gauging your satisfaction or experience. It was measuring whether the employees did what they were supposed to do—smiled at check-in, vacuumed the room, delivered breakfast on time. The survey was headquarters’s way of measuring how well managers and their teams complied with instructions.
Those not-about-you surveys are a symptom of a surprising fact: Most companies are not actually designed to serve. In large part, service industry operating models—their org charts, processes, incentives—have been adapted from manufacturing, where measures are based on quantity and quality of output: how many widgets, how few defects. These models are designed from production out, not from customer back.
The result of our industrial legacy: Company after company is underwhelming its customers and leaving money on the table. Not just services businesses; industrial companies—makers of things—underperform, too, because they do not make the most of opportunities to create great customer experience as well as great products. Services, the most important sector of the economy, the biggest employer and creator of wealth, are too much managed by guess and by gosh.
Now think about your last memorable interaction with a company—via their website, in person, on the phone, through social media. Maybe you bought something online, tried a new restaurant, had your car serviced, or patronized a local store. It could be a professional experience—working with a supplier or distributor, dealing with an advertising agency.
How would you rate your experience? Was it great? So good you have become a Loyalist or Evangelist? Was it lousy? So bad you’ll never return? Or was it meh—not bad but not distinctive? Perhaps most important of all—was it what you expected?
Now imagine your customers’ interactions with your own company’s services, products, or personnel. What are their experiences like? What matters to them? Do you know? Or are you only imagining or reciting meaningless stats like the ones on that hotel survey?
The key that unlocks meaningful service is design—the deliberate laying out and execution of a plan to create and deliver the experience you want your customer to get, every time. Understanding experience from the customer’s perspective is where the Road to Ahhh begins. The road takes you to where you can deliver superior customer experience, but it takes you beyond that. We believe that companies that apply the principles of service design will create not just satisfied customers but strategic strength: that the road to Ahhh leads to a competitive position others will be unable to match or attack.
Most of the time, most companies treat most customers reasonably well. Sure, sometimes something goes drastically wrong; sometimes something goes spectacularly right—usually when an employee steps forward in a special effort. But overall, companies deserve a grade of B or B minus. That is not good enough. We think grade-A service experiences should be the norm, and we believe they can be. How? By understanding and applying the principles of service design, to ensure that a great customer experience is reliably, replicably, scalably delivered, time and again, in a way that satisfies you and your customer.
Experiences matter. Experiences are journeys. Journeys are designed. These statements are fundamental to understanding service design and delivery. A large and growing management and psychological literature shows that people derive more happiness from new experiences—a day by the sea, a night at the opera—than from new things. Moreover, the pleasure of a new object diminishes over time (as every child knows on December 26), while the pleasure of experience grows (as every adult knows, enjoying those warm holiday memories). But an experience is rarely about one thing. Experiences happen over time and often over space: They are journeys, whether physical (like a flight from Dallas to Detroit) or temporal (like a relationship with an insurance company) or intellectual (like a six-week consulting engagement). For customers, these journeys involve need, planning, anticipation, embarkation, the event itself, disembarkation, and a memory. Companies need to analyze, design, and deliver at every stage of the journey, and at every point of contact—every touchpoint—because every moment is an opportunity to engage or alienate your customer.
You need to imagine and shape your customer’s experience of the journey as a whole. Though a problem at any stage can damage the experience, it is not enough just to fix the parts. Journeys are not just linear; they are complex adaptive systems. The experience of the whole affects each stage and vice versa; something that happens at the third stage not only influences the fourth but causes your customer to reevaluate what came before. And—since you want your customer to come back—each journey affects subsequent journeys.
When service is designed well and delivered expertly, it is because there is alignment among your strategic goals, your customer’s wants and needs, and what actually happens between you. That alignment is a function of ten things:
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Empathy: Developing products, services, and experiences from the customer’s point of view; taking full account of how your customers use and interact with you
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Expectation: Ensuring that customers know what to expect from their interaction with you
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Emotion: Knowing the emotions your customer brings to your relationship, and guiding customers to a satisfied feeling about working with you
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Elegance: Providing offerings that are clean, simple, easy to work with, and complete—nothing superfluous, nothing omitted
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Engagement: Communicating with customers—and they with you—at every point of contact, to understand their experience and how to improve it
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Execution: Reliably meeting all the expectations you have set
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Engineering: Possessing technical excellence (for example, compared to peers, but also to general business standards) and eliminating waste of materials, time, and effort, so that no extraneous effort is necessary on the part of you or your customer
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Economics: Pricing your services appropriately, so that the customer gets value for money and you the profit you expect
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Experimentation: Building processes for improvement and innovation into the daily work of your business; developing capabilities to develop and roll out new offerings
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Equivalence: Managing the customer, your team, and partner organizations so that you, the seller/service provider, are satisfied, too.
The first five of these emphasize the customer’s side of the relationship; the second five are mostly about you, the provider. These ten elements form the basis for an SD2 Report Card that helps you measure how successful your company, department, or function is in creating a superior experience with and for your customers. It also allows you to benchmark yourself against your goals and your competitors, or to compare business units within a company. (We show you how to construct your report card in part four, p. 244.)
Together, these ten elements constitute a system—they work together. To what end? Relationships, according to Victor Ermoli, who leads the service design department at the prestigious Savannah College of Art and Design. “Service design is a system for developing the relationship between an entity—a bank, a law firm, a health care system, a store, a church—and its customers,” says Ermoli.
It is difficult to think of a transaction between a ...

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