Making promises to customers through your marketing is easy.
Actually servicing them well enough to ensure they are truly satisfied is another thing entirely. Many businesses make the mistake of promising gold, and delivering lead, but there are plenty of examples of really outstanding service around us every day.
In this article, I want to share some recent real-life examples of superstar level customer service, hopefully, to inspire you with the importance of this in your business.
The two examples I’m going to share with you, are literally worlds apart in terms of both the size of the brand/business, and the markets they operate in. But they both prove the mantra that customer service is critical to any business.
Recently, my wife was flying to Melbourne for a short trip. When she got on the plane, she noticed a few red marks on the armrest and then a few minutes into the flight she noticed more red splashes on the wall next to her seat. It turns out it was blood, which is pretty disgusting. She brought the blood to the attention of the steward who was terribly apologetic, and they cleaned it up as best as they could.
After the flight, and upon returning home, my wife decided to let management know about this with the intention of finding out why the plane hadn’t been cleaned after the previous sector. She was also concerned about what would have happened if a child got into a similar situation and had touched the blood, and so forth.
Very rapidly, she received a return phone call from a senior manager who not only informed her that they had changed their cleaning policy as of the moment of her report so that it wouldn’t occur in the future.
The speed of the response and the seniority of the person calling proved that Virgin has customer service at the heart of their operations.
In another circumstance, we were recently having a Sunday night dinner at the local RSL club in Beenleigh, and I ordered a Chicken Parmigiana, which I had done on several occasions prior to this night. This night the chicken was completely tasteless, dry and basically inedible.
I informed one of the staff, who took the meal away and offered a replacement meal, but the taste of the meal had sort of taken my appetite away. Within a minute or two the manager came over and repeated the offer of a replacement meal which I declined. She then offered dessert and coffee and absolutely did her best to apologise for the poor quality of the meal.
I wasn’t overly worried about it, other than the poor taste but I was genuinely touched by the care and attention of the manager in wanting to see it was made right with us.
In both these situations, the staff and management responded to the complaint quickly with fair and reasonable responses for the situation, but also with genuine care to handle the situation.
One is a major household brand, the other a local RSL club and yet their approach was the same.
Of course, we’d like to think our business would deliver in the first place, but none of us is perfect, and often our care and attention to fixing a mistake, oversight or quality problem is actually what makes us superstars in the mind of the customer.
I trust these two examples of customer service, and your own experiences in recent months with good and bad service will remind you as a business owner that delivering superstar service is a ‘ticket to the game’, an expectation and a differentiator in business today.
Best wishes delivering your own superstar service.
Originally published on Smallville.
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