Customer surveys are a brilliant idea, no? No, not always. When you try to measure superior service and the emotional connection a customer has with you or your product, it can be difficult to get data that really helps pinpoint where and how to improve. In this article I will highlight some pitfalls in satisfaction surveys and measures and suggest some simpler approaches to measurement that will help drive the right kind of change. (more…)

This week I will be putting up three posts on the emotional element of superior service. I will be covering:
1) How creating an emotional connection can build customer loyalty
2) Where customer surveys can let you down
3) Why, paradoxically, customers don’t always come first

First, let’s look at how a positive emotional connection can build loyalty better than loyalty schemes. (more…)

Harvard Business School professor John Quelch writes in the HBS Online discussion forum this week on How To Be a Customer. It reinforces the point made in the earlier post on this blog about the customer’s role in getting superior service. To summarise, Quelch suggests five approaches: (more…)

At the risk of turning this blog into a restaurant column, John Maeda’s excellent simplicity blog features an interesting item on his visit to a restaurant where his white table napkin was removed and replaced with a black one. Maeda treats this as an example of trust - by demonstrating an attention to detail. (more…)

The discussions on superior service examples yielded a detailed response from management consultant Jane Northcote (www.janenorthcote.com) whose take on superior service recognises that it’s a two-way transaction. Jane writes:

Customer service is traditionally regarded as an attribute of a company: Waitrose provides “good” customer service, An electronics discount  store provides “bad” customer service. Equally, however, it is true that customer service is an attribute of the customer.  Some people experience good customer service, and others bad, even from the same organisation. Why is this? (more…)

Delivering superior service requires organisations to develop five essential capabilities in their service organisations. These are all straightforward: getting the basics right, making a personal connection, focusing resources, flexing the rules and going the extra ‘mile’.

In setting up this blog I initiated online discussion fora in the Ecademy and LinkedIn business networking sites under the question “When was the last time you experienced superior customer service?” (more…)

A recent post on the Wikinomics blog raises the question of how much time the use of Facebook and other social networking wastes at work. A recent study suggests 233 million working hours are lost each month due to Facebook. Rather than using shock statistics to impose a knee-jerk ban, companies should recognise the potential benefits of social networking to deliver superior service. (more…)

If you want to lay the foundation for a great customer experience it’s a good idea to start with the look and feel of your location – both physical and virtual.

Let’s consider physical location – if you want a good post on virtual location take a look at a recent post on the 1to1 marketing blog - and I’ll indulge in another of my specious comparisons by comparing British and European motorway service stations. (more…)

Two restaurant visits in the space of a week reinforced my view that it’s getting the basics right that distinguishes a superior service from a purely functional one.

Back in August we were celebrating my eldest son’s birthday and arranged a couple of meals. The first was at the acclaimed South London restaurant Chez Bruce and the second was at Locale, an Italian restaurant near the London Eye. These are two very different restaurants: (more…)

This category features stories of organisations which have provided me and other contributors with a good example of superior service. Where possible I will provide feedback to the organisation in question and, if they are willing (they should be!), I will share with you the critical success factors they have put in place to deliver superior service.

But first a warning: (more…)