Guest Service

Outstanding service with immediate action and a personalized email, followed by a handwritten note?? Craziness.

Engaging your people in playing a key role in improving the customer experience is one thing, but what if customer experience is not actually a key element of the business strategy in the first place?

Delivering AWESOME customer service without defining it in a way that’s sustainable and scalable is good enough. It’s not. This is a recipe for inconsistency and consistency is the essential ingredient when we talk about great customer service. Here are five tips that will help you and your team achieve this.

Ignore your customers. Tracy Maylett says to develop your employee experience first to improve your customer service.

From Yahoo: One California Starbucks barista got a major surprise on March 21 when a customer returned to apologize for her behavior from the day before.Andrew Richardson, 20, was floored when he received a handwritten card and $50 bill from his customer named Debbie, whom he admits he didn’t even think was that rude.“On the 20th, this woman, Debbie, came through the drive through while I was working. She was extremely pleasant, and we had some friendly conversation while her drinks were being made,” Richardson, of Bishop, California, told ABC News

In a complete reversal of the hierarchy we’ve been taught, where customers come before everyone else, Branson has built Virgin by putting his employees first.

His reasoning is pretty simple – treat employees badly and they, in turn, will treat customers badly, ruining their brand experience and potentially putting them off your business for life.

And it can be inspiring to see which ones are ahead of the field — across multiple business categories and verticals — so that we can learn what they’re doing right and follow their example on the way to true customer centricity.

Reaching today’s mobile customer is less about directly reaching them via a direct phone call and more about paying attention to the customer journey, where he or she is within that journey and what channel the customer prefers to use – be it live chat, email or social media messaging.

Maturity of social customer engagement and the value of an effort-free customer experience may have been the two main driving forces behind the evolution of customer expectations in 2016. Today’s c…

Both understand (in the case of Sir Richard at Virgin Group) and understood (in the case of Herb Kelleher at Southwest Airlines) the value of putting people and customers first, HR practice second.

As an example, a few years ago I was on a business trip in rural Connecticut. One morning, I went to my rental car and found it was not working. I had about a 20 minute drive and my meeting with a new client was starting in 30 minutes. I went to the front desk’s general manager (this was pre-Uber, obviously) and after making some calls, I was told that the closest taxi was 30 minutes away and the hotel shuttle was already out. Seeing my desperation, the general manager made the very unconventional move of calling the competitor hotel across the street to ask if its shuttle was available and if they would be willing to help out.