After the detailed description of service failure challenges at Panera Bread (PNRA) in my last blog, I was asked (more than once) why bad customer service failure stories are reported and shared more often than good customer service experience success stories. Certainly the good customer service stories are more fun to tell (and experience), but they require more work because they don't happen as often. The bad customer service stories, on the other hand, seem to find you.
But contributing positive and uplifting thoughts about the best aspects of U.S. retail industry customer service are always worth the effort, so here are some random good customer service experience stories about Disney (DIS), Five Guys, Costco (COST), and the Chinese-restaurant-down-the-street which prove that good customer experiences still exist, courtesy of good employee ownership, good management and good systems support.
Raving Customer Review
Recently I had a conversation with a Hertz employee during the car rental process. He was a recent college grad and even though he had just moved to Orlando a few weeks prior to our conversation, he loved it so far. When I asked him what he loved about it, he said, with no hesitation and plenty of enthusiasm, "There's a Five Guys right across the street!"
People travel from all over the world to visit Orlando, FL every year, and of all the things that were available to the recently transplanted Hertz guy, the thing he liked best was easy access to Five Guys burgers. If there was any doubt in my mind that he might have been exaggerating his affection for Five Guys fare, the doubt was dispelled fifteen minutes later when his Five Guys raving review was still going on. He concluded by telling me how much better it was to walk across the street to get Five Guys whenever he wanted to, instead of the Five Guys road trips he used to take, which were almost 30 miles one way.
Without listing the 923 reasons why the Hertz guy loved Five Guys, it basically boiled down to the product, the people, and the consistently positive experience he had with both. If someone can be so inspired and impassioned about a food item that is available on just about every corner in America, then that is proof to me that there is still room in the U.S. retail industry for excellence, and that even in a frugal retailing landscape, it's still possible to exceed customer expectations in ways that don't have anything to do with discount pricing.
I also remember thinking that it would have been great if Hertz had managed to tap into the core of enthusiasm of this 20-something new hire during the training and orientation process. I don't think that this Five Guys raving fan would have been willing to travel 30 miles to rent a car from Hertz, unfortunately.
Costco Customer Certainty
I accompanied a friend of mine on a trip to Costco (COST) recently. I honestly don't know if I had ever been inside of a Costco before that day. My friend, on the other hand, obviously was a regular loyal customer because he maneuvered his way around the massive sales floor without hesitation. I would have needed an in-store GPS.
When asked, he confirmed my suspicion that he was a regular Costco customer and when I asked him why, he said, with the same conviction as the Five Guys fan, "Because I know whenever I buy something here, it's always going to be good quality." To my friend there was no need for a 15-minute rave, that statement said it all. He then made a beeline to the free sample station of some organic garbanzo bean concoction in a paper cup.
I don't know James Sinegal personally, but it seems to me that he would be pleased with the brand association that at least one customer had made between "Costco" and "quality." But even more than that, I think what James Sinegal would be most pleased about was the use of the word "always." Sinegal has made it clear on more than one occasion that he values long-term planning over short-term returns and "always' is definitely a long-term descriptor. If all the customers that were in Costco that Saturday afternoon had the same level of trust and certainty as my friend, then it's not hard to understand why the Costco parking lot was full, while the Kirkland's and Pier One store we had stopped in prior to that were nearly empty.
The Chinese-Restaurant-Down-the-Street Brand of Service
One of the best "always" retail experiences that's been making a loyal customer out of me happens at the Chinese restaurant down the street. The food is always fresh, hot, and ready when promised. The employees always recognize my voice on the phone, remember my special requests, and call me by name. It makes me happy to spend my money at the Chinese restaurant down the street because they always, always seem genuinely grateful for my business and never ever seem to take my dining dollars for granted.
Just in case you might be wondering how often someone would need to frequent a restaurant in order to get this "always" kind of treatment, the answer is only about once a week. It's not that I'm all that regular, it's that the neighborhood China Star employees are just that good.
Last week I ordered one of my favorite dishes, hold the sauce, hold the rice. When I arrived at the restaurant to pick it up, one of the China Star employees (owners?) greeted me by name, and while he was ringing me up on the cash register he said, "Since you have no rice or sauce, I want to give you a drink!" He allowed me to choose my favorite, and I walked out with a bonus ice cold drink on a hot summer day.
A bottle of water is not that extraordinary. But to me, what was extra-ordinary was the offer. I didn't ask, and he just wanted to be kind. That's the kind of proactive customer service that customers appreciate the most and remember the longest.
The difference between the Chinese-restaurant-down-the-street customer experience and the anonymous nondescript customer experiences at most chain retail stores in the U.S. can be explained with one word - ownership. Stakeholders have ownership, but wage earners generally do not. And it's not that employees don't care, it's that they haven't been given a good enough reason to care.
Obviously the owner of a single small retail business has a vested interest in every single transaction, but generally employees of a large international retail chain have no vested interest beyond doing what's required to secure a steady source of income. Any retail operation, however, can cultivate a Chinese-restaurant-down-the-street brand of customer experience if all employees at all levels are given some kind of reward for customer service success, and some kind of consequence for customer service failures. The more meaningful those rewards and consequences are to the individual employee, the more effectively those rewards and consequences will be in motivating and regulating behavior.
This seems so basic to me that it still surprises me how many retail organizations - large and small - still don't pay attention to it.
Service Successes are System Successes
I watched an Oprah show this week about the "Waiting for Superman" documentary that focuses on the public education system in America. The documentary exposes the combination of bad teachers, bad systems, and bad leaders in the public school system which is producing badly educated children.
What does the public education system have to do with the retail industry? Not much except that leadership is leadership. Systems are systems. Bad outcomes are bad outcomes.
It's just as easy to blame teachers for a bad education experience as it is to blame retail sales people for a bad customer service experience. But the truth of the matter is that you have what you have because "the system" tolerates it. And "the system," of course was created by the leaders. More often than not, customer service failures are nothing more than a symptom of leadership failure.
Systems That Support the People Who Deliver the Service
So, before we start poking at the dark, smelly, underbelly of customer service failures again, I have one wildly successful positive example of a system that supports the people who deliver the customer service.
Disney - how fortunate I was to work for the Disney company at a time in their history when "the system" supported nothing less than service excellence. The expectations for customer service excellence were laid out the first day of employment and every subsequent day of employment. You got promoted for good customer service. You got demoted or fired for bad customer service. Customer compliments were the currency of your Walt Disney World career success.
I haven't worked for Disney for a while, so I'm not certain if "the system" has changed. But the way I - or anybody - could tell if "the system" has changed is by simple observation. If every employee wearing a nametag on Walt Disney World property is smiling, attentive, helpful, friendly, proactive, and annoyingly happy, peppy, and perky, then "the system" is the same. If you can find even one Walt Disney World employee yawning, slouching, leaning, looking bored, being indifferent, cussing, spitting, or scratching in weird places, then things have changed because "the system" simply wouldn't have tolerated those behaviors when I worked there.
Customer Service Conclusions
It's really not that there is so much bad customer service in the U.S. retail industry, it's that there is so much unremarkable customer service. A customer service day should not be considered successful just because no customers complained, screamed, cried, got injured, and nobody died.
The absence of failure does not equal success. Retail leaders first have to embrace that notion and then create the systemic infrastructure which both defines and supports customer service success.
And while retail executives are figuring all of that out, if you want to send me your good customer service stories, I'll have more positive customer service material to blog about. But you're going to have to work hard to outpace the bad customer service stories because, for whatever reason, they get submitted more often.
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Comments
Its true that stakeholders have ownership and can settle or give out freebies, but wage earners generally do not. Sometimes its not that the employees don’t care its that they are not empowered. There is too much red tape in big companies.
Companies should draw a type of guidelineto empower the employees to gve out things to get return business. I worked in a hotel where the shift leaders was empowered to give out free desserts or beverages for regulars or special occasions. Its because the grassroots know your customers likes and dislike. There was another hotel where everything needed to be preapproved before given out. So most of us didn’t want to go through the trouble of going through the red tape. Reason being the management was worried that the privilege will be abused.
check out recent employee whistleblower for Hertz who are awful – I work in UK and European Call Centre in Dublin where we worked into the ground, and constant over bookings and understaffment and monitoring
The System hasn’t changed. I worked at Disney as a part of an internship in 2010 and watched as many other interns were fired for non-Disney behavior. Anything less than the Disney Standard simply will not do for the company. I hope they never change