It’s not the one thousand dollar things that upset the customer, but the five buck things that bug them.
—Earl Fletcher
Sales and Management Trainer, Volkswagen Canada
New arrivals to the combat zones of Vietnam quickly learned that the difference between a veteran and a novice was far more than war stories. They had an expression for it on the front lines: “grunt eyes.” Grunts were the enlisted ranks of the infantry—low rank, little prestige, people whose job description started and ended with the simple requirement, “Do what the ‘old man’ tells you to do.”
Those with grunt eyes were able to see things a new in-country recruit would completely miss. And there was little correlation with rank. Whether you were a captain or a private, you only acquired grunt eyes in the field, paying attention to every sight, sound, smell, impulse, clue, and condition that often could make the difference between life and death. It was something learned, not something taught. The common skeptic’s question, immortalized in the movie Full Metal Jacket, was “I see you talk the talk, but do you walk the walk?”
As a manager, you’ve no doubt learned a fair amount of service talk in recent years. But have you also learned the service walk? Have you developed grunt eyes attuned to your own frontline conditions? Do you really notice and understand the subtleties of what you see? The survival of your business is riding on it. According to our survey research, about 22 percent of the difference between passionate and dispassionate customers can be accounted for by an organization’s ability to recognize and manage the details that really matter for customers.
Attention to details is a prime characteristic of Knock Your Socks Off Service.
Fred Smith, founder and chairman of FedEx, begins many of his visits to various cities by hopping into a FedEx delivery van and riding with a driver to see his operations where they most affect the customer. Bill Marriott, chairman of the hotel chain that bears the family name, often takes a turn at the front desk checking in guests. If he sees a dirty ashtray in the lobby, he empties it. If there is trash in the parking lot, he picks it up.
Similarly, grunt-eyed managers and front liners alike at Walt Disney World and Disneyland, Chick-fil-A restaurants, Lands’ End, Lexus dealerships, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and thousands of other dedicated businesses pick up trash, polish counters, straighten displays, spruce up plants, and worry over the 101 details that together combine to make their customers’ experiences with them memorable for all the right reasons.
Managers in these organizations know that it’s the little service problems—small-scale neglect—that often lead to bigger ones. It’s a belief that mirrors the “broken windows” theory on how to control crime first expounded by sociologists James Wilson and George Kelling in an Atlantic Monthly article. A broken window, graffiti-scarred building, littered sidewalk, or abandoned building does no great harm to a neighborhood if promptly fixed. But if left unaddressed, it sends a signal to criminals that no one cares about the neighborhood and encourages them to break in, vandalize, deal drugs, and more. Soon, more serious crimes like burglary, robbery, rape, and even murder begin to occur. When Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York, he used the philosophy to great effect to clean up large parts of New York City. What is the corollary for the business world? When the details are overlooked and little things are left to fester, it can breed indifference and sloppiness on a larger level among service staff.
But attention to details involves more than just playing janitor so your people will know they should imitate your concern for what the customer sees. It also means remembering that details are at the heart of the moments of truth—those moments when the customer is in contact with your organization and forms an opinion of the quality of what you do. At Romano’s Macaroni Grill, every general manager is expected to do the “little thing” of greeting and talking to customers to ensure they enjoy their visits. To Vic Pisano, the general manager of the original Macaroni Grill, simply showing you care about guests goes a long way toward creating repeat business. “You welcome everyone who comes in the door, you make sure the food is good, and you make sure the people you serve are happy,” he says. The only way to do that, Pisano says, is by visiting tables and talking to customers.19
Manage the moments of truth well and you earn an A or a B on customers’ highly subjective report cards. Ignore them, or manage them poorly, and customers give you a D or an F. Then they start looking for someone more likely to make the grade. Even more challenging is the fact that customers who grade service as a C are vulnerable to customer exit the minute someone closer, cheaper, or just plain different enters the scene.
Every customer typically goes through many, many moments of truth to get a particular need met. As mentioned earlier, a moment of truth is any encounter a customer has in which he or she has an opportunity to give the organization a thumbs up or down. But it’s not easy to figure out which of the hundreds of moments of truth customers experience might be deal breakers—interactions where the quality of service rendered has an inordinate influence on whether they decide to keep doing business with you—and which have a lesser effect on their repurchase intentions. Traditional measurement and analysis can help you zero in on customer priorities, both the large-scale kind, such as market research and detailed customer surveys, and more anecdotal and fragmented forms, like customer comment cards, surveys attached to e-mails, phone calls, and impromptu conversations with customers you meet on and off the job.
Not all moments of truth are created equal in the eyes of customers. In other words, before you make your people crazy by mandating that phones will be answered within two rings, make sure your customers consider that an important service quality factor. What impact does a quick answer have on overall satisfaction or customers’ decisions to keep doing business with you? Or how about mandating that employees say “hello” to each and every customer that enters a retail business? While management might see these as vital service dimensions, customers often view it differently. View other details from the customer’s standpoint as well. It will save you a lot of headaches, as well as resources spent on making improvements that have little or no effect on customer loyalty.
Defining the details in general is only a starting point. You can’t manage service in absentia. You need to develop your own grunt eyes when it comes to service, making sure you walk the walk as well as talk the talk.
To take the “service walk,” start by determining how your services look to your customers based on their prepurchase expectations. When you enter a bank, a car repair shop, a theater, a fast-food restaurant, a doctor’s office, or an airplane, you have some notion of what ought to occur. The first thing you do is compare what’s actually happening to that expectation. And when it doesn’t match up, you can find yourself disoriented and confused—whether because you’re dismayed or dazzled.
• If you walked into a Subway, Chick-fil-A, or McDonald’s and found candles and fine china on the tables, with waiters in tuxedos hovering nearby, you’d think you were in the wrong place—or in the middle of a Saturday Night Live skit.
• By the same token, if you arrived for dinner at five-star Chez Ritzy and encountered the standard Burger King or McDonald’s decor, menu, and service style, you would also wonder what was afoot.
From that starting point, service quality becomes a function of experience—what happens to you as the customer. That’s why it’s so important to see and evaluate your services the way your clients do. The math involved is relatively simple. If the experience matches their expectations, they’ll judge it to be satisfactory, though hardly memorable. When it turns out differently than they expected, it becomes more memorable precisely because of its lower or higher than expected quality.
Two factors are considered by the customer: experience and outcome—what happens to them and what they get. Both must match expectations for service to be judged satisfactory; both must exceed expectations for service to be viewed as superior. But if either is substandard, the customer’s combined rating will drop off the bottom of the charts.
• When the meal (outcome) is wonderful, but you have to go through hell (experience) to get it, such as waiting forever for your meal or arriving home to find items missing from a drive-thru order, the net score will be negative.
• Likewise, even when you're treated like a king by the car repair shop (experience), if your car still doesn't work properly (outcome), the net score is negative. In other words, an incompetent physical administered by a personable and humorous doctor will not satisfy. But neither will a competent physical administered by a brusque, arrogant physician—or one who hasn’t bathed since the last full moon. Ditto for a cheery and courteous customer service rep who places you on hold numerous times to consult with coworkers, then eventually disconnects you, in a well-meaning but bumbling attempt to answer a question he should be able to quickly address on his own.
The caring is as important as the care to winning the customer’s loyalty. You have to do both to succeed.
Many organizations put a great deal of time and energy into managing and monitoring the service outcome—the check was cashed, the operation was completed, and the account was closed. Outcomes, by and large, are easy to define and count. But paying attention to all the little details involved in the service experience is a lot tougher. It’s difficult to identify and define, let alone measure and evaluate, everything the customer has to go through to get to that outcome. But that’s what you, and everyone working with and for you, must learn to do as part of your service walk.
To see just how detailed your customer-level journey can be, consider the variables involved only at the points where a customer might enter your delivery processes in these various settings:
• A Parking Lot: Is it easy to access, well lit, clearly marked, and safe to use? Are the parking lot’s users (customers) favored over the parking lot’s owners (your people, especially internal VIPs)? Is it clear from wherever the customers have to park which door should be entered? Ask yourself, “If the customer’s experience in the parking lot were a picture of our whole service system, what would it tell them about what we value, how we feel about customers, and where our priorities lie?”
• An Admitting Office, a Reception Area, or a Security Check-In: How is the area kept? Is it comfortable, clean, and user-friendly? Is it easy for customers to figure out where to go, who to see, and what to do? Are there resources, aids, supports, and guides if the customer gets confused, bored, or lost? Are such materials current and professional, or does their age qualify them as museum pieces? What is done to manage wait time? What would a picture of this scene tell the customer about the rest of the service delivery systems they’ll shortly be encountering?
• Objects, Forms, Websites, Systems, or Procedures: Are they clearly written, professionally produced, easily navigated, and truly necessary? Will they be perceived as user friendly and customer focused or as confusing and awkwardly designed? Are there responses to negative customer reviews on the website, or are they left there to signal no one cares? Can instructions or procedures be understood by the customer without the aid of a dictionary, an interpreter, or an information technology guru? The most precious commodity for many customers today is time, and if you waste it with a confusing website design or cumbersome administrative procedures, customers probably won’t return for more punishment.
• Inbound Call Center: Is the system large enough and sophisticated enough to handle the call load, easy to understand and use, efficient, and time effective? Must your customers negotiate their way through a long and involved voicemail system made up of seemingly endless menus of buttons to push before encountering a live human voice? Are phone encounters rushed to meet an artificial time standard, or prolonged well beyond the time the customer has allotted for your assistance due to poor staff training or a bored service rep’s desire for chit chat? Is your last question to the customer a closed question (indicating a desire to stop the interaction) or an open question (communicating interest in the customer)? If the customer must be transferred, how will it feel and sound on their end of the line? Are you tracking first call resolution or first contact resolution? Remember: The first call might actually be the customer's third attempt to communicate with your company. What do they experience when they’re put on hold: silence, elevator music, boring advertisements, long waits? Today, customers grade you based on the effort they must expend to deal with you.
The service walk can be taken solo, but it’s an equally valid tactic as something you do with one or several of your frontline people. From time to time, ask some of them to join you in trying on the customer’s clodhoppers. Let them tell you what they see when they use their own grunt eyes to reexamine aspects of the service delivery processes and experiences that have become taken for granted over time. Ask them to point out weak spots, bottlenecks, points of both pride and embarrassment, and areas for improvement identified by customers and their own firsthand knowledge of what is involved in taking care of business.
If it’s not practical to get them to accompany you, ask them to sample your service on their own. Encourage them to monitor customer review websites like Yelp. Have them critique how user friendly your website is, or ask them if they received a response to a Facebook or Twitter comment or how easy it is to access the options they need (including live help) on your voicemail system. Asking for your staff’s input has the added benefit of making them feel more valued and respected.
The more you encourage frontline people to see themselves as responsible for the service experience—and the processes that make those experiences successful or difficult—the more willing and empowered they will feel to truly take care of their customers.
Jan Carlzon, architect of the well-documented service turnaround at Scandinavian Airline Systems (SAS), once summarized the journey from hip-deep red ink to basic black on the bottom line as a matter of details, details, details: “We never started out to become 1,000 percent better at anything; just 1 percent better at a thousand different things that are important to the customer—and it worked.”
But at SAS, just as at USAA, Southwest Airlines, Ace Hardware, Hotel Monaco, UPS, and countless other outstanding service providers, managers continue to not only talk the talk, but walk the walk.
You don’t improve service and quality in general. You improve service and quality in specific.
—Dr. Rodney Dueck
Park Nicollet Medical Centers, Minneapolis, Minnesota