Who Cares about the Customer?

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon

People who know me know that I have a keen interest in customer service. I even regale friends and colleagues with tales of my misadventures as a customer, like trying to get my hotel stays posted to my rewards account and other annoyances we all experience. And how many blog postings have you read about airline service?

It all came to mind today, as I was reading a posting on communication challenges for first responders. It asked the critical questions, who are the actual stakeholders or customers and how are they best served.  I think we often don’t consider the wants and needs of our customers, the fact that different customers or customer groups have different needs, and that a loyal customer is far more valuable than having to find and engage new customers. A recent restaurantowner.com posting reported the lifetime value of a loyal pizza customer is $13,000 and a loyal high-end hotel guest is over $100,000! And the cost of finding new customer is how much in your industry?

The Baldrige Criteria Customer Focus category asks all the important questions about customer engagement and how you obtain and use information from your customers to gain that engagement. Do you have information or data to share on customer engagement strategies, customer experience nightmares we can use to learn, or the cost of acquiring new customers? Please share your thoughts!

I’ll leave you with a heart-warming video of how one person can make a difference and build customer loyalty.

Comments

[GreenDriver LasVegas]

This is the part of the Baldrige model that most frustrates me as a customer! We, as customers, ALLOW so many businesses to walk all over us and still return, dollar in hand, to repeat the misery. We effectively TEACH these organizations that customer satisfaction is not only not required, but absolutely unnecessary. Example: many businesses are closed on the 1-2 days a week most convenient for customers to visit. What do we do? We adjust our schedules then to go into the bank, the dry-cleaners, the auto service repair shop, the salon, the doctor's office, etc. during our work days. With so many businesses absolutely ambivalent (or possibly unaware??) of customer needs and satisfaction, we consumers have no choice but to go through nightmare experiences. I may possibly tattoo your above statistics to my forehead, Dr. Hertz, for all businesses to view!

[Terry Rusconi]

Harry, you are right on the money. So often, organizations feel that building a new building or creating a glitzier product with more bells and whistles will increase satisfaction. What they fail to understand, and what the video shows, is loyalty is an attribute of the heart. Only, by focusing on truly understanding the needs of the customer (what is closest to their hearts) can we then create systems, processes and products which touch their hearts and earn their loyalty. Now the question, how do we write that into the criteria? :)

[Jan Englert]

If I had a nickel for every time a nurse or an aide in a hospital did "the heart thing" by shaving the patient when it was not a part of the "regular routine" or by washing the hair of some long term patient or by rubbing a little extra lotion on the driest of dry skin, positioning the patient in their favorite "comfort position" with rolled towels and pillows placed just right, before the family visitation time, I would be a rich woman! These simple, from the heart ... "how would YOU like to be treated" gestures are the essence of customer service. May we all think of the Johnnys of this world in every aspect of our daily lives... with customers at work and with our families. God Bless you, Harry for posting the key to customer service ..... HEART!

[Larry Potterfield]

At MidwayUSA, we have established our #1 Goal as Customer Satisfaction, and posted it throughout our facilities and on our website. This gives us a good approach and part if our deployment. (AD)

Next, we identifified our Customer's Key Requirements, first by brainstorming then confirming through surveys.

We survey our Customers regularly to mesure our performance -- currently running 93%, up 2 points from 2007.

Our main Customer Listening Post is "The Larry Line", which allows Customers to provide comments to the Founder and CEO via phone or email. Great learning tool. (ADL)

Our Strategic Planning Process is well-aligned with our goals. (ADLI) Larry

[John Shoemaker]

I have always enjoyed hearing Harry's customer services stories/nightmares. Unfortunately, like most of us, I have had a few of my own.

Several years ago I was scheduled to give a presentation in Grand Junction, Colorado. The evening before the presentation, I took a flight from Kansas City to Denver. In Denver, I changed planes for Grand Junction.

The flight left on time and it appeared to be another uneventful trip, always the best kind. We were in the air just west of Denver, however, when the captain announced that the plane was experiencing mechanical difficulties and that we would have to return to the airport in Denver. I am sure that none of us were overjoyed but things happen.

We waited on the plane at the gate while the repairs were being made. After about an hour the captain announced that, although the repairs had been completed, the flight was being cancelled. A severe rainstorm was approaching Denver and all outbound flights had been cancelled.

I went to the airline service center together with the other 80 plus passengers on the flight. We were told that the first flight to Grand Junction would not leave until about 10:00 am the next morning. That wasn’t very helpful since I was scheduled to begin my presentation at 8:00 am. I ended up renting a car and driving 200 miles in the dark through heavy rain across the mountains arriving in Grand Junction at about 4:00 am, four hours before my presentation.

I know how difficult it is to provide world class service on a continuous basis and am usually willing to cut service providers some slack. Often it is not so much what happens but how they respond that determines customer satisfaction. In this case, the airline lost more than 80 customers by failing to respond to customers in a difficult situation.

At the airline service center we were told that our tickets would not be refunded because the flight was cancelled due to weather. One of the passengers angrily pointed out that the weather would have been irrelevant had we not turned back to Denver for repairs. The airline’s response was that even though the plane turned back for mechanical reasons, that was not why the flight was cancelled.

Nobody blamed the airlines for the mechanical difficulties. Nobody blamed the airlines for the weather. We were angry because the airlines made absolutely no attempt to make the situation right for the more than 80 people on the plane, most of whom are now ex-customers. And, as we know, dissatisfied customers are much more likely to share their customer service experiences than those who are satisfied.