Up to now I’ve been fairly positive about Nando’s – a good choice for a cheap and cheerful meal out – but nothing that’s been worthy of a mention or even a recommendation.

Last night my son – on his third or fourth glass of ‘bottomless soft drink’ – pointed out that his Fanta orange tasted of nothing much. I pointed this out to the manager who admitted that they had  run out of syrup and immediately offered a juice or something else by way of compensation but my son, full to bursting already, declined. She then took our order for dessert and coffee. My wife and other son ordered their highly-addictive nata custard tarts. The manager looked doubtful that they had two left and had to apologise again.
Shortly afterwards the desserts and coffee arrived – one nata replaced with a coconut cake and accompanied by another apology – but the real surprise was the accompanying bill with nata, cake and coffees all gratis.
We weren’t  at all bothered by Putney Nando’s minor failings – running out of stock might be mildly inconvenient but it wasn’t a major problem – so it almost seemed over-the-top to give out free desserts and coffee. However what the manager clearly realised was that over-compensating for our minor inconvenience would pay goodwill dividends far in excess of the lost income.

Having done my share of complaints strategy reviews it’s something that not all companies seem to grasp: too often compensation gets proceduralised to the point where individual flair and imagination is squeezed out. My take-away from the Nando’s experience (no pun intended) is that over-compensating for minor failings will only benefit your business.
Unfortunately Portugal look like they are going out of the tournament so my support will be short lived. My support for Nando’s has definitely increased though…

You can read perceptive reviews of this new film from the director of Juno elsewhere so I won’t dwell on the plot too much except to say that it’s one of the few movies I have seen (possibly the only one come to think of it) that deals with customer service and loyalty so explicitly.

Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, an executive at the sharp end of HR outsourcing i.e. his firm gets hired to do that tricky job of telling people they don’t have one any more. (An authentic note is struck by using non-actors’ recreation of their own reactions to hearing such news – and if you go and see it, stick around for the phone message half way through the end credits.)

It’s a bitter-sweet tale which is driven by Bingham’s isolation from any major emotional connection: he’s all smooth-talking and sincere in the act of firing (hey, ever since ER we’d all like George Clooney to deliver bad news to us) but it goes no further than the few minutes of  the interview. Since his job involves flying from city to city day in, day out he has constructed a world where he is largely insulated from the harsh reality of his day job (and also the harsh reality of life, but I don’t want to spoil the plot too much) by the niceties of superior service – the kind of service that loyal, valued customers of airlines, hotels and car rental would expect to get.

The nice thing about Up In The Air is that it resists the temptation to poke fun and the whole ‘have a nice day sir’ ethic of customer service. But I found myself wondering if that was the point: Bingham’s interactions with service personnel are as impersonal as his firing interviews with his clients’ staff and they are conspiring to create and sustain his sense of emotional alienation.

Does this invalidate my whole approach – that superior service is about leaving the customer with a positive emotional connection? Are bland platitudes the best we can expect? And is this basically wrong?

The answer is both yes and no: I still get my morning cappuccino in Pret A Manger on the way to work and 99% of the time it’s served with a phrase along the lines of milk-and-sugar-are-right-behind-you-by-the-door-you-have-a-lovely-day-now. On the one hand it’s bland and meaningless – everyone gets the same treatment – but on the other hand it makes me think, momentarily, that someone cares that I have a nice day. And that’s better than being served in near silence.

Superior service is about creating moments of magic that cut through the bland phraseology of day to day transactions – but it needs to build on a bedrock of basic politeness that those phrases represent. That way superior service gets to be a regular occurrence. So I salute Pret for providing me with cappuccino and a cliché because I know that it forms the basis of a culture where moments of superior service do happen.

In a film this is harder to avoid and perhaps unfortunately the film falls prey to a bit of product placement. Since this website has nothing to gain by mentioning a well-known brand of carbonated drink we won’t dwell too much on the significance of a bright red can in a blasted and grey cityscape but it’s interesting that this is one of the few brands to make an appearance in a film which otherwise replicates the alienating lack of context present in the novel.

Presenting your product as a rare moment of joy in a bleak and unremittingly harsh environment might seem like a great piece of placement but it struck me that it’s analogous to organisations that claim to be number 1 for customer service in their particular sector, when their sector – telecoms, utilities, financial services for example – doesn’t always enjoy the best reputation for service.

Similarly the current, almost Road-like weather that we are experiencing in the UK at the moment provides organisations with an opportunity to provide exceptional or outstanding customer experiences. Customers’ expectations will most likely be lower so just keeping the usual level of service in difficult circumstances might appear exceptional.

My insurance company took the opportunity at the weekend to lower my expectations by e-mailing me to say that

“Due to the current adverse weather conditions we are experiencing a much higher than normal call volume. If you have been trying to contact us recently, you may have experienced a delay in your call being answered for which we apologise.”

Well, I guess I’m lucky that I’m not in a situation that requires me to call them but wouldn’t it be better for customers that do have to call them if they were able to compensate for the increased demand with an increase in staff?

I’m left with the impression that whilst the company in question shows an admirable honesty in admitting that it might be providing a less-than-expected service level it’s not taking the opportunity to be the service equivalent of that comforting and nostalgic can of cola in the middle of a stressful world.

Opinion seems to be divided on this – on the one hand there are 5566 people who feel strongly enough to sign an online petition but other commentators consider this to be a storm in a tastefully-designed teacup. To explore the Futura-fans’ (Futurists?) view for a moment, this can be seen as a gross betrayal of what they value most in the brand i.e. its design values. My view is that, taken alone, this is something that the majority of customers won’t notice – in fact despite being a fan of IKEA design generally and classic fonts in particular, the offending catalogue appeared in my house without causing me any undue distress – but if it is accompanied by a dropping off in other aspects of the brand that IKEA customers value – product quality, durability, price and so forth – then IKEA will start to suffer. IKEA probably don’t need to pay too much attention to the 5566 Futurists until they start complaining about something else.

Interestingly, the originators of the offending font, Microsoft, are tapping into the wisdom of the larger crowd of system-geeks who care deeply that the replacement for the much-lamented Vista operating system will hit all the right buttons. According to Stephen Rose, senior community manager at Microsoft, interviewed for 1to1 Weekly, they are monitoring and engaging with all kinds of posts in various user forums. Let’s hope this pays off: I’m unlikely to be an early adopter but I’ll be more inclined to upgrade if the product gets a positive press when it’s launched.

Both stories illustrate the importance of generating and sustaining trust with your customers, something that I’m feeling a lack of in relation to one of my other passions – rugby. I support Harlequins – something I used to be proud of until the ‘Bloodgate’ scandal, whereby one of the players faked a blood injury to enable a last-minute tactical substitution in a crucial cup tie. The ploy didn’t pay off and was subsequently discovered – as was the revelation of similar episodes in previous seasons. Here’s a classic betrayal of values: most rugby fans go to matches to watch a fast, furious and skilful sport – undertaken with a spirit of fair play (even though most matches will feature a fair number of dodgy tactics in the heat of the moment) and when a team is shown to have held those values in contempt, even in relatively isolated occurrences, then loyal customers will feel a lot less passionate about the brand. It remains to be seen whether the team’s first home game next Saturday will produce a display of skill and speed to turn this disenchanted customer back on.

Font footnote: the highly entertaining kids’ film ‘Shorts’ contains a character (a human one) called Helvetica Black… absolutely nothing to do with the customer loyalty, except that that one joke will make me a bit more likely to go to the next film director Robert Rodriguez comes out with. Ah, the power of the font geek!

OK, so it wasn’t quite like that but that’s how it felt…

The occasion was what must be a relatively new rite of passage for children and their parents: “my first mobile” happens in most families these days and, at some point, can be followed by the transition from pay-as-you-go to a monthly contract.
As my son’s social life expands my wife and I figured it would be better to pay a small monthly contract fee rather than regularly forking out for a pay-as-you-go top-up and, as the handset was falling apart anyway, it seemed to be time for a change.

’ve been reasonably impressed by Carphone Warehouse’s shop service in the past so we went to the branch in Putney to see what was on offer. The service we received in the shop was first class: we were looking for the smallest possible tariff and didn’t want to buy a flashy handset that would be instant mugger-bait on the mean streets of south-west London. The assistant looked put us under no pressure to buy anything more than what we wanted and waded through the vast amount of information in search of the best deal. When we changed our mind about the handset half way through the transaction she was completely un-fazed and maintained a good humour throughout. We walked out with the deal we wanted and a handset that has a camera that will keep my son’s Facebook page supplied with high quality images for the foreseeable future.

So far so good but there had to be a catch. The PAYG account was with O2 but the new account was with T-Mobile. We wanted to keep the same number and there’s a reasonably straightforward process to do this: to kick it off you phone your mobile supplier and say you want to leave.  Cue the emotional exchange above.

Now I define a superior customer experience as one that leaves you with a positive emotional connection with the service provider and both my Carphone Warehouse and O2 experiences had a strong emotional content. In the case of Carphone Warehouse it was overwhelmingly positive. In the case of O2 – despite the gusto with which the service advisor attempted to reclaim the lost business – it was fairly negative: I felt like I was in the wrong somehow.

I still have my mobile contract with O2 for about another year (and I felt I had to reassure the advisor during our conversation that the break-up wasn’t total) but I  be searching for the best deal via Carphone Warehouse this time next year. O2, get your handkerchief ready…

So what does this have to do with customer experience and other worthy topics? Well I’m sure you’ve got the idea that I had a pretty good experience at this show but that’s not really the point. As I noted before, the essence of great improvisation is being able to listen and respond in the moment. When this works well – in the case of great jazz musicians and great comics – the finished product sounds as good as something that had been thoroughly composed or written beforehand.

Listening and responding skills still don’t get enough attention in business and, perhaps surprisingly, this is just as true in customer service. Organisations have a desire to systematise and encode the behaviours they want from their service staff – absolutely fine if you need to give guidance on how to deal with difficult or stressful situations but problematic if you take it too far and prescribe behaviours that would be seen as normal or polite.

Many years ago I sat in a sales meeting and cringed as a colleague read out a pre-written introduction to the meeting. It sounded incredibly false and stilted and, as far as I recall, we didn’t get any business. I was new to the organisation at the time so I thought it was normal but now I wonder why I didn’t ask the sales person why they felt the need to script something that should have set everyone at their ease. I guess like a lot of business situations the need to manage perceived risks takes precedence over the need to be human (and therefore fallible).

In improv comedy the mistakes are part of the entertainment but, if you had too many, it would become tedious. Similarly in business we need to be fallible but also have enough expertise to limit mistakes to an acceptable level. Building a rapport with customers is a vital part of this.

So, in summary, the service lessons from the world of improvisation are:

• Build a rapport with your customers (audience)
• Admit that the price of being human is the occasional mistake
• Listen to what’s going on in the moment and be prepared to respond
• Use your expertise and experience to give you the confidence to break or invent rules as necessary

And – my personal take away from the week-end – Wallaby Lacrosse is a great starting point for comedy. Don’t see it? Well you had to be there, I guess.

Best business book - Making Change Happen
Making Change Happen by Jane Northcote got a thumbs-up from me back in March and I am still referring to it in my consulting work, so in terms of practicality it’s one of the best I’ve come across. It’s also highly readable which is unfortunately still rare in a lot of business writing. It’s highly recommended for anyone in charge of change either explicitly or implicitly in all kinds of organisations.

Best customer service website – 1to1
Difficult category to judge – there are plenty of excellent ones out there but in terms of usefulness, insight and readability Don Peppers and Martha Rogers’ 1to1 Media gets my vote.

Biggest customer service failure - BA
Back in March I had my own experience of BA’s occasional ability to miss an opportunity to turn a mediocre experience into a good one, but it was eclipsed by the spectacular own-goal that was the opening of Terminal 5. A real shame as Terminal 5 itself is a great piece of architecture and, if it is a good idea to build more terminals (which it probably isn’t) is what they should all be like.

Best response to customer feedback – Moto
I’ve had some pretty disappointing feedback responses over the last year but Moto’s phone call from a strongly empathising manager at Grantham North in June was far and away the best. I haven’t been back to see how the refurbishment of the country’s drabbest service station has gone but will report if and when I do.

Most misguided customer feedback idea – Department of Health
An idea so misguided it gets a category all to itself: the UK Government’s latest brainwave “to do for healthcare what Amazon has done for the book trade and Trip Adviser for the travel industry” (minister Ben Bradshaw reported in the Guardian yesterday) – that is, to solicit candid feedback on GP performance. Open Chord has helped clients obtain better customer feedback over the past year but it has been in situations where the transactions customers rate are more or less standardised. Customer feedback needs to be tailored to the specific situation: GP-patient “transactions” are massively more complex than buying a book on Amazon and so to get meaningful feedback – i.e. that helps the service provider improve their service – a much more sophisticated means of obtaining feedback would be required. There are more issues than I have space to discuss here and we might return to it in future but in the meantime it’s a very bad idea.

Best overall customer experience
There are a few contenders for this ultimate accolade (unfortunately just a few, but maybe I should get out more) and the nominations are:

• Pret a Manger – for having a culture where correcting bad customer experience is automatic
• Ipswich Novotel – for a genuinely warm welcome and a friendly manner from all staff
• 42 The Calls, Leeds – for a similarly excellent service and feeling of comfort and luxury
• Richer Sounds – for making the stressful business of choosing and buying a new TV both easy and relatively cheap.

And the winner is… Ipswich Novotel (and Novotel generally, since I had a similar experience at the Leeds Novotel not long afterwards) but it was a close call with Pret.

So that’s it for 2008 – hopefully there will be more contenders this time next year – and winners are invited to contact me via this site to receive suitable rewards.

Michelle James’ description of what, to many people, would be the stuff of nightmares – performing a play made up on the spur of the moment given just two locations supplied by the audience – is a remarkably good distillation of the essence of improvisation. In improvisation you are acting ‘in the moment’ and responding to what other characters are saying. The success of a performance depends to some extent on luck but also to the energy you bring to keep the whole thing going. And of course trust, collaboration and a readiness to share an agenda with other actors are absolutely essential.

Much of this was in evidence at the London Jazz Festival which this year was the biggest ever. That in itself presents a challenge – there’s just too much to see – but the three concerts I got to all illustrated different degrees of freedom within a set of constraints.

One of my favourite guitarists, Bill Frisell, was performing his music for films, including two Buster Keaton shorts. Here the level of improvisation was constrained by the need to illustrate the visuals – particularly in the Keaton, where the various pratfalls needed to be accompanied by the appropriate bangs and crashes – but there was still a great degree of interplay between the musicians.

A further degree of freedom was illustrated by piano legend Herbie Hancock with his sextet of virtuoso musicians. Here each musician got the opportunity to solo at great length, demonstrating astonishing technique but always listening out and responding to the others. Hancock himself – now 68 – had a timeless, ageless air about him as he was in total engagement with his music.

Finally – and coincidentally the concerts became less constrained by form as I progressed – I saw a group of Norwegian improvisers in an event – Punkt – where improvised sets were then re-mixed by DJs and played back – with further improvisation – in another. Here there were almost no constraints – at least in the non-remix sets – and whilst the results weren’t always that interesting (to my ears), the air of invention and exploration was undeniable.

So – if you’ve made it this far – what do these way-out improv types teach us about customer service? Firstly, listening and responding is the key skill that distinguishes a flashy-but-boring performance from a genuinely exciting one and the same is true for interactions with customers: empathy in other words. Secondly, creating trust between participants is critical – most obviously in the improvised theatre example – and this goes as much for the trust between customer and service provider and between the different parts of the service provider’s organisation. Finally – and there may be more parallels we could develop – having a good level of skill to rely on is essential: I do play the guitar and have a few skills that would carry me through a few bars of improvisation but my acting skills aren’t well developed enough to entertain more than a few games of charades. However successful improvising is also about having confidence and removing self-imposed constraints – unlearning techniques (and bad habits) as much as learning new ones.

Great service happens when people are able to throw away the script to do the right thing for the customer and when they can trust all the actors in their organisation to work the same way.

How much improvisation takes place in your organisation?

Confession time: I am a bit of an e-mail junkie and I have never really understood why people complain about the amount of e-mails they receive. However what I realised tonight is that I have just got particularly good at processing e-mail - so volume doesn’t really bother me - without thinking whether it’s a particularly appropriate tool for every kind of communication.

It’s become a bit of a cliche that, a lot of the time, it’s better to pick up the phone and talk to someone. Yet that requires thinking about the conversation and being prepared for it to go differently from your plan. Plus it requires time to call, leave messages and play telephone tag for a day or two.

Social media - blogs, wikis, online fora - provide a better way of communicating when collaboration is required or when you simply want to share something. (Confession time again: I have recently dithered over sending someone an e-mail link to an article when I could simply publish the link somewhere - on this blog for example! - and let the recipient know that it was there along with loads of other good stuff.)

If there was a consensus that emerged at the end of the evening it was probably that we needed to use e-mail and other tools that are appropriate to the application in question.

And then we all went home to check our inboxes - or at least I did. But I probably deleted more than usual…

To be honest, my idea of a short break over the August Bank Holiday weekend was not, originally, to stay in a chain hotel in Ipswich – a town which, generally, doesn’t feature in people’s top 10 holiday destinations. However, leaving booking to the last minute, meant that the original plan for a country hotel somewhere in East Anglia started to look like a tour of potential candidates for Five’s The Hotel Inspector. An attractive advance booking price at Novotel, Ipswich  meant a change of plan to use Ipswich as a touring base/bed for the night while we explored the delights of Suffolk.

As it turned out there was a lot more going on in Ipswich than we had expected and so we spent more time in the hotel than originally planned. And this turned out to be a good thing…

What struck us about the hotel was the genuinely friendly service from all staff, particularly those on reception and in the dining room. What struck me was that they took a real interest in how good a time you were having which is what you expect in a hotel but rarely experience.

Stuck in the middle of a roundabout, next to an identikit leisure park the hotel itself doesn’t immediately strike you as a great place to stay but the attitude of the staff makes it somewhere I would definitely consider going back to.

The acid test comes this weekend where a trip to Leeds means an overnight stay and given a choice we chose another Novotel – so, yes, great customer service does mean you get more business. I’ll be interested to see if the experience is the same.