From the book The Simple Truths of Service, please enjoy a story by Mac Anderson called “Inspired by Johnny the Bagger®”: 

Barbara Glanz is a friend of mine who is a speaker and author. A few years ago, she spoke at a convention for a large grocery chain with over 3,000 people attending. Her talk was on creating memories for the customers so they would want to come back. At the end of her speech, she gave out her email address and phone number, and said, “If you have any great service stories, I’d like to hear them.”

Well, about a month later, Barbara gets a call from a young man who introduces himself as Johnny. He said,

“Barbara, I heard what you had to say about service, and I like it! I’m just a bagger in the store and I have Down syndrome, but I wanted to think of a way I could make a difference. I decided that I like sayings, so each day I’m going to pick out one that I like, and my dad and I will print it out on the computer. I’ll cut out the quote in strips and sign my name on the back of each one. The next day when customers come through, I’ll just drop a strip right in their bags and say, ‘I hope you enjoy my quote of the day.’ What do you think, Barbara?”

Barbara said, “Johnny, I think that’s a wonderful idea!”

A few weeks later, Barbara gets another call…this time from the store manager. He says,

“Barbara, you won’t believe what’s happened at our store. I went out into the store and noticed that one line was three times longer than the others. I went to the back of the line and suggested that customers move to another checkout, and they wouldn’t budge—they wanted to see Johnny’s quote of the day! In fact, one lady said, ‘I used to come here once a week, but now I come 2-3 times just to see the smile on Johnny’s face when he drops in his favorite quote.’

So the next day, I round up my team and tell them what Johnny has done to give our customers more than they expected. That afternoon, I see the lady in the floral department cutting off her broken flowers and pinning them on the elderly women in our store. Our guy in the meat department loves Snoopy, so he was putting his favorite Snoopy stickers on the packages, and talking to his customers.

In fact, everybody in our store is finding creative ways to put their mark on service. We’re having the time of our lives, and it seems like everyone in town is talking about us! And you know what, Barbara? It happened for one reason…Johnny decided to do something!”

When it comes to service, we all have our unique gifts to give; however we’ll never make the emotional connection with the customer unless it begins in our heart.

Front line employees need the information to improve the customer expereience one customer at a time.

The old way of providing a procedure to a low skill front line employee and asking them to follow it, is over. Why? Because for a business to succeed today it needs to be remarkable, asking somebody to follow a process will only result in the allowable tolerances (KPI’s) that you set. If the goal and proceedure is not what the customer actually wants, then your going to miss the mark. So how do you let your front line employees change to customer requirements and have the power to make change? Create a closed loop process, and start listening to your customers.

An example of a closed loop process is; a customer requests a service (new service, support call etc), after the experience you send them a survey and they return a response. Depending on the response you can call the customer back and try to find out the root cause of the issue, and try to resolve the issue. You then have an opportunity to work cross functionally to make those improvements that are affecting the customer experience.

I’ve got the closed loop on website change requests in my organisation and in the last week have made the following changes based on client responses:

• Process Change: Updated an incorrect call center process which was missed in a recent organisation change in another business unit
• Product Change: Affected the priorities of our product development plan by passing the feedback to appropriate business unit
• Motivation: Was able to give praise to employees for remarkable service to the business.

What jumps off the page for me is that the feedback the customers have been providing is not relating to somebody having a bad day on the phones, but process and product issues which are otherwise outside the front line employees hands, and this cross functional feedback otherwise gets lost, or at least is only available when the Marketing department runs the yearly client satisfaction survey.

I’ve found a youtube.com clip which goes through a number of these concepts.
(Deborah Eastman – Cheif Marketing Officer Satmetrix Systems)

Its great to hear the NPS is Next to the stock price on their intranet.

Its been a few months now using the net promoter score for my customer experience management, and the list of videos on the Satmetrix website really hit the nail on the head for what i’ve seen as being important factors in building customer loyalty.

One of the video’s by Chris Askew from Lenovo really hit home, he explained his frustration for the word “satisfaction” as it implies being just ok at customer service is satisfactory (accepted). In so many companies this is the case and the aim is only ever for “good” service or satisfied customers, usually only concentrating on answering the phones in an acceptable amount of time, or the issue being resolved, why not delighted customers, or remarkable service.

I experienced this frustration in the early stages of socialising the idea of using NPS. There was a common acceptance of aiming for good customer service. To be successful in todays competitive market, you need to be remarkable. Aiming high will be what grows the business. Being ok at what you do is not going to get your customers telling their friends how “ok” your service was; In fact it will turn others away.

Check out the video its half way down the page:

Lenovo
Chris Askew, SVP Worldwide Services, Lenovo, shares key success factors and performance results from Lenovo’s Net Promoter-based customer experience program. (Net Promoter Conference 2009)
http://www.satmetrix.com/resources/video-insights-2/