“Five-Star Customer Service” is old enough to drink. You’re a customer. Are things better for you?
My first book turns 21 this year.
I’ve spent the better part of my career speaking to business leaders about how they can elevate the customer experience throughout their organizations.
It used to be hard for me to get through to them. The problem wasn’t that they disagreed with me. What CEO doesn’t want his company to be seen by his peers as best in class for treating their customers right?
The problem was the opposite. The guys at the top got it. They agreed with me in principle. As audience members, they would often write down an insight on what a five-star exemplar was doing. They’d shake my hand firmly, thank me for flying out, bring me in to keynote their annual kickoff meeting so all their people could hear how it’s supposed to be done…
The only problem was, I wasn’t getting through. These CEOs’ self image told them that they were five-star service exemplars themselves.
Yet their managers weren’t so sure. Four-star, maybe. Not five. Not across the entire organization, surely. In their department yes, but for the company as a whole?
Their frontline employees were even less convinced. Three stars, company-wide. They personally were doing their best, but as a company? Nowhere near five stars.
And their customers. Their poor customers. The only people who ever deserve a vote. Because let’s face it, the customer lives at the receiving end of your service. And customers are the least convinced of all that your service is worth mentioning - unless maybe in a scathing review on yelp or Google.
No. The customers weren’t living the CEO’s five-star dream. Most customers experience interactions with the companies in their lives at the two-star level, disappointing to mildly annoying, or even one-star, aggravating to infuriating.
You get it. You’re a customer. Each week you buy from dozens of companies, and when you add in doctors offices and insurance companies, cell phone carriers, gas stations, highway construction, park staff, websites, apps; those dozens add up to hundreds of customer experiences each week, for each and every one of us.
What’s your average rating of the service you receive? Are you traveling through life from one peak of five stars to the next? Is your average experience four stars? Three? Let’s be honest.
Three star service should be unremarkable, yet it’s so rare it actually surprises a lot of us when we notice it.
“Wow,” you sometimes think. “That was less horrible than I was expecting.”
It finally struck me how to get through to a CEO. You can’t talk to them about their business. After all, if they were embarrassed by the service level their company provided, they’d have fixed it long ago.
No, that isn’t the way to get through. Instead, you have to make them think as a customer. Even the wealthy can’t insulate themselves in a five-star service cocoon all day every day, though many try. Don’t they experience substandard levels of service sometimes, out in the world?
And when they do, how does it make them feel? Angry. Impatient? Powerless? Belittled?
And what about the leader of the organization whose processes or people are providing this poor service? Do you think they realize it?
If they did realize it, wouldn’t they have done something to change it by now?
This is where I’ll pause. Most of my audience won’t get it at first. But then one will. Then a couple more.
With a sharp bunch - and CEOs are often at least fairly intelligent, as a general rule - a murmur will travel through the room.
“Oh. I see what you did there,” I can sometimes hear. “Maybe some of us aren’t leading five-star organizations the way we think we are,” someone else may say.
That’s when the work begins.
My company: BenevolentCapitalGroup.com
My book on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0cvERtI0