IS YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE THIS GOOD?
Over the next few issues of the SalesPulse I am going to precis our sales conference which was entitled “The best of the best in customer engagement”. This edition was written by Estelle Clark, Group Safety and Business Assurance Director at Lloyds Register Read it carefully – it is awesome!
“I have recently been introducing a “Customer Experience Journey” maturity model in Lloyds Register and running some workshops to try to identify the current level of our client focus and to agree some actions that would move us to the next level on the model. It’s quite simple to understand and is customised from many similar models I have used in the past. But, what these workshops desperately need is some examples of exceptional customer care as well as examples of poor service, in order help people understand the distinctions between the levels. And my experience is that getting decent examples of exceptional service is like pulling hens’ teeth, especially if you want an example that absolutely everyone can relate to. And that’s where my story about the Orchid Hotel in Mumbai comes in. It goes like this…….
I was working in Mumbai back in 2003 and needed to take the Air France flight back to Paris. The flight used to depart around 04.30 and you need at least 90 minutes to get through the airport procedures so need to check-in around 03.00. Question is do you stay up all night or go to bed early and prepare for an 02.00 wake-up call? Neither is good but having worked hard all week I didn’t want the effort of trying to keep awake in the terminal so opted for booking a hotel. Where to stay? The only criterion on my list was proximity to the airport terminal. So I booked into the Orchid on the basis that it seemed to be nearest.
Everything worked fine. I gave my name at reception and was asked whether I was on the early Air France flight to Paris. Confirming this, I was offered an 02.00 alarm call and the suggestion that they booked me a taxi at 02.45. They also offered a pot of coffee and suggested that I took a plate of fruit as it would be energising given the limited amount of time that I would actually be in bed. Now I would take an offer of almost anything that would energise me when getting up in the middle of the night so gratefully agreed! The following morning everything worked according to plan and I safely caught the flight.
I didn’t work in Mumbai again for nearly two years and was booked on the same Air France flight to Paris. So based on my previous experience I rebooked into the Orchid. Again I went to reception and gave my name. “Good evening Mrs Clark, we haven’t seen you for some time, we hope it wasn’t anything we did”. I reassured about the previous service and was then asked, “Are you on the early flight to Paris again?” Now I was impressed. Someone must have taken the time to note this information in their CRM system and then they actually used this to make me feel less of a stranger next time I checked in. Confirming that I was indeed on the same flight the receptionist then asked whether I had had enough time and should the alarm call be booked for 02.00. “Yes”, I managed to say now becoming seriously impressed but more was to come. “We’ve booked you a pot of coffee again and a plate of fruit as it is energising”. Wow!!
But the killer blow was still to come. “We’ve ordered a larger plate of fruit as you ate it all last time and we worried that we had not given you enough”!
So, this was something much more impressive than a good CRM system and a professional person at reception. Let’s look at what exactly was needed to be in place for the larger plate of fruit to have been pre-ordered.
The first thing in this extraordinary example is that the person who cleared my room understood that my empty plate was Voice of Customer. I frequently have to explain that it’s not a prerequisite to have a customer satisfaction survey to understand what a customer feels. There are clues at every stage as a customer consumes a service, if one knows how and where to look. And the person who cleared my room in the middle of the night fully understood that their main job was about customer service and not solely efficiency in terms of speed of rooms cleared or whatever presumably because their manager set customer facing KPIs.
Then the example required that the information about my empty plate had to get into the CRM system. Two things impress me here. The hotel leadership must think it worthwhile to capture information about every one of their customers. I had never stayed before, only stayed 5 hours and there was no indication that I would ever stay again. But the information was captured and stored for when I came back. How about that as an example to all those companies who have difficulty ensuring that information about multi million pounds per annum major accounts gets logged? And there was the discipline within Orchid that people made sure that the system was updated.
The second aspect is even more inspirational. I’m assuming that the person who cleared my plate would not have had personal access to the CRM system; my expectation is that they would not have been IT literate, and they may not have been literate at all. So, the entry of the information probably occurred because they spoke to someone else who took the time to enter it there and then.
Two years later I book a room for the second time. When I did this someone retrieved the on-line booking compared it to the CRM record and decided to pre-order my pot of coffee. Isn’t it more normal just to ask the customer whether they would want this? But, to have taken the time to pre-order it is another wow! Just think of the customer focused conversation that must have taken place during the process design to have this step as integral. And what about the killer blow? No process here. Rather someone who upon ordering the coffee didn’t simply reorder the fruit but rather saw the original insight from the person who cleared the room, put themselves in my shoes, and then took the decision to ask the kitchen to send a larger portion. Now I sometimes have some difficulty in helping people to imagine themselves in their customers’ shoes when they have little personal experience of the customer’s circumstances. But, with my stereotype in full swing again, I doubt that the person pre-ordering my coffee often took international flights on business”!
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