Ignore Your Customers (and They'll Go Away)

The Simple Playbook for Delivering the Ultimate Customer Service Experience

Micah Solomon

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781400214938
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour
• Index: Business

The ultimate guide to transforming your customer service, company culture, and customer experience, endorsed by all the top names in the field.

Great customer service may be today's most essential competitive advantage. This book gives a step-by-step plan to craft a customer service culture and customer experience so powerful that they'll transform your organization and boost your company's bottom line.   You'll enjoy inspirational and hilarious tales from the trenches as author Micah Solomon, one of the world's best-known customer service consultants and thought leaders, brings you with him on hands-on adventures assessing and transforming customer service in a variety of industries.

In Ignore Your Customers (and They'll Go Away), you will find:

• Exclusive customer service secrets and proven turnaround methodologies showing you how to perform effective and lasting customer service transformation within your company.
• A dive into one of the hottest topics in business today: company culture, specifically how to build and sustain a customer-centric company culture.
• Case studies and anecdotes from the great customer-centric companies of our time.

 

Each chapter concludes with a Business Reading Group Guide and a point-by-point summary to maximize your memory retention and make every insight actionable.

Drawing on a wealth of stories assembled from today's most innovative and successful companies including Amazon, USAA, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, Nordstrom, MOD Pizza, and more, Solomon reveals what it takes to turn an average customer interaction into one that drives customer engagement and lifelong loyalty.

1

AUTOMATIC POSITIVITY

Stop me if you’ve heard this one already. An agent in the Zappos call center once spent a staggering amount of time (ten hours and twenty-nine minutes) on the telephone with a customer who’d called in for help deciding on the perfect pair of Uggs. This topped even the previous record at Zappos, a similarly jaw-dropping eight hours and forty-seven minutes.

The ten-plus hour Zappos phone call quickly became legendary. Late-night host Jimmy Fallon even covered it in a human-interest segment where he brought in an actor to play the Zappos employee, whom he then united on air with the Uggs-seeking customer.

When I first heard about the marathon Zappos phone call, there was one detail missing that I felt compelled to track down, so I put the question to Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh the first chance I got.

Did the employee get a bathroom break? For that matter, did the customer?

I wish I’d used my wristwatch to time the silence that followed, but eventually Tony (who had clearly expected a different line of questioning) responded.

“I’m not actually sure,” he told me, peering back from beneath his new Mohawk hairdo—the first Mohawk I’d seen on a gainfully employed master of the universe. Eventually, Jamie Naughton, the Zappos chief of staff, rescued the conversation by confirming that both the Zappos employee and the customer on the other end of the line did, in fact, take breaks in the course of the phone call to use the bathroom.

“Well, that’s good news—but, even with empty bladders,” I persisted, “what did they talk about for ten hours? Was it really Uggs for all that time?”

Tony looked at me with growing exasperation. “They talked about whatever friends would talk about.”

Point taken.

And even more to the point: Although talking with a customer for ten straight hours is indefensible by traditional call center logic (where a call is supposed to only take five to eight minutes) it makes business sense if you think of the ten-hour phone call as a flag that Zappos has hoisted high in the air to illustrate to its employees just how far they should be ready to go to make an emotional connection with a customer.

The marathon call is now an important part of Zappos company lore, akin to the tire-refund legend at Nordstrom: an illustration that no matter what a customer wants from an agent at Zappos, it’s the agent’s job to make sure that the customer gets it, even if it takes ten hours.

And twenty-nine minutes.

Automatic Positivity

Don’t worry; the way that I myself go about building great, customer-oriented companies does not require indulging in ten-hour phone calls à la Zappos, but it does require that you apply focus, passion, and even theatricality (a Zappos specialty) to create what I call “automatic positivity.” This is where an organization’s go-to position is to say yes to customer requests, rather than defaulting to an easy “no” or one of the many synonyms for no.

In other words, here’s the sentiment that should be on the tip of every employee tongue, straining to come out:

The answer is yes! Now what was your question?

That you should strive to tell your customers “yes” might seem self-evident. Yet a single misguided employee can easily find a dozen opportunities, every single shift, to say no to your customers. That is why it’s essential that employees get the message from their leaders, loud and clear, that the goal is to try to find a way to accommodate their customers, whether or not a manager is around to approve it.

When Your Attempts to Say Yes Slam into Reality

But what happens when an attempt to say yes slams into the obstacles that inevitably come up in the rough-and-tumble world of serving customers, the scenarios where the answer must in fact be no? When this is the case, there’s almost always a way to soften the blow.

The solution, generally, is to restrain yourself from delivering this final no without having a yes to offer in the same breath. Offer an alternative solution and an apology that is likely to make your “no” easier to accept: “I’m sorry, Mr. Henderson. Although we are unable to ship all eight pieces of luggage you ordered on our website to Madagascar without charge, would it help if we shipped the suitcase you plan on giving to your wife overnight at our expense?”

Look at the lengths that Joanne Hassis, a salesperson par excellence at Nordstrom, will go to avoid disappointing a customer (i.e., me) with a “no.” Not long ago, my favorite short-sleeve shirts, which I had been buying from Nordstrom for years, were discontinued by Nordstrom’s supplier, and, as a result, Joanne was no longer able to sell them to me. Rather than just saying, “Sorry, Micah—that’ll be a no,” she found a solution, even though it came from a competing site with private label shirts that Joanne felt would work as a substitute. While this didn’t make any money directly for Joanne or Nordstrom, you can bet that I’m now more faithful than ever about buying the rest of my wardrobe from Joanne—and about recommending her services to others as well. (As, in fact, I’ve done here.)

HEALTH, SAFETY, AND SECURITY EXCEPTIONS TO “YES”

There is a set of scenarios where you shouldn’t even be trying to get to yes.

This is when the request has risky safety, health, or security implications.

So, please don’t misapply this chapter’s advice in any of the following ways:

• “Sure, I’ll bypass our passcode verification procedures and get you into your account, since you’ve forgotten your password.”

• “Feel free to keep drinking at our bar far beyond the point of sobriety.”

• “Yeah, that’s fine if you prop open our swimming pool safety gate to make load-in and load-out easier for your kid’s birthday party.”

• “We don’t mind if you move your chair in front of that marked emergency exit.”

• “I’ll be happy to drive you to the airport even though I’ve had a few after-work drinks.”

. . . and so forth.

Though providing alternatives if you have to say no is important in every industry, in the hospitality industry it’s officially required behavior at any hotel that is striving to achieve a rating of five stars from Forbes. At Ocean House, a double five-star (Forbes-rated), double five-diamond (AAA rated) resort in Rhode Island, situations where they aren’t able to deliver a yes to a guest are rare indeed, but here’s a hypothetical one: a guest wanting to have breakfast in their restaurant when the hour is pushing noon. I asked Daniel Hostettler, the president of Ocean House, how he would handle this situation: “First off, we wouldn’t tell them the dining area is closed unless absolutely necessary. And if that is necessary, we would offer to serve them by the fireplace in the living room area, or on the outdoor verandah, if the weather is suitable.”

Even when the “no” is due to external circumstances rather than the limitations of their property, Hostettler’s team tries to create “alternative yeses” to accommodate their guests.

Not long ago, the Ocean House staff learned that a couple was headed their way who had planned to honeymoon in the Caribbean until their intended destination was all but destroyed in a hurricane. As a consolation, the couple was redirecting their travel plans to the Rhode Island coast for a non-tropical, but just as beachy, honeymoon trip. Hostettler and staff anticipated the couple’s arrival by gathering sand and seashells from the hotel’s own beach (a chilly task—it was November in New England), digging two margaritas into the sand and placing the resulting tableau on the nightstand with a note that read, “We’re bringing the Caribbean to you,” further setting the scene with calypso music on the guestroom sound system, intended to put the couple in a tropical mood when they walked in.

HOW ONE TECH COMPANY MODELS AUTOMATIC POSITIVITY BY SAYING YES EVEN TO NON-CUSTOMERS

Tomas Gorny, cofounder and CEO of Nextiva, one of the fastest-growing business communications companies in the US, tells me that in order to make sure his employees are delivering Amazing Service (a concept so central to the company that they’ve actually trademarked the term; I’ve looked it up: it’s US Trademark # 4574257), Gorny encourages his team to provide amazing service even to people who aren’t, realistically speaking, prospects, people with no current ability to use Nextiva’s services.

Here’s how far Nextiva will go to provide support even to those who aren’t yet customers: When a tweet appeared in Nextiva’s twitter feed asking about a service Nextiva didn’t even offer (VoIP service in a particular country overseas), within minutes a response appeared back from ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword by Tom Feeney, Safelite AutoGlass President and CEO
• Preface by Frankie Littleford, JetBlue Vice President of Customer Support, Experience, Operations, and Recovery
• Author’s Note: The Best Job in the World (Mine!)
• Introduction: Shoot for the Moon: Why the Highest Level of Customer Service is the Only One Worth Aiming for
• 1: Automatic Positivity
• 2: The Secrets of Building the World’s Best Customer Service Culture—Yours
• 3: Talent Management: Recruiting, Selecting, and Nurturing the Team Who Will Power Your Success
• 4: The Power of “Wow”: Creating Stories That Customers Will Remember—and Spread
• 5: The Experience Means Everything
• 6: Building a Backbone to Support the Smiles
• 7: Stepford Customer Service: Avoiding the Deadly Stigma of Inauthenticity
• 8: It’s a Wild, Wild Tech-Driven World (And There’s No Turning Back)
• 9: Going Social: How “Word of Thumb” is Changing Your World
• 10: The Cliff of Dissatisfaction
• 11: Do You Read Books Backward? (If So, You’ll Be Starting Here.)
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author