When thinking of the crème de le crème of customer service, grand experience and brand solidity, the Ritz-Carlton comes to mind first.
Other companies worth a mention are Walt Disney, McDonalds, DHL, Zappos, IKEA, Harley Davidson, Amazon and ING...
They make it their business to find the industry best standard, beat it and predict what will make the customer a life time loyal. Along side, making sure you get what you pay for.
The Ritz-Carlton publish the 'key to success' publicly (The Gold Standards), and offer training on the simple steps of service. So do Walt Disney!
At The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, L.L.C., "We are Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen."
But what makes a customer think differently about your brand and why do we favour some brands over another? Things like reliability, consistency, quality and amongst many more - the key is predicting what a customer wants before they want it and then delighting them when they get it.
How can we adapt this type of thinking to other industries and liberate it into our internal customer service?
On my hunt for the above I found most of the 'top in class' companies attribute this to internal education, training that enhances capability and backstage advantage.
There is an ecosystem and complexity to this, however here are my top four tips on becoming Ritzy:
1. Know who you are dealing with:
For both Internal and External customers - get to know not only their names and titles but also how they tick, what motivates them, and anything else that helps you to empathise and understand. Do research if you have to. Knowledge is definitely power as it helps find ways to influence and communicate with them in a way that makes them trust you. Be the customer whisperer!
2. Know why your customers exist:
If you are looking at internal customers - do you understand and appreciate why your area of the business exists and the value you drive for your customer? It's important for every task and process you deliver on to ask why it exists and the output you are trying to drive. Another element to this is the customer journey (or ecosystem). A refreshing perspective I suggest would be to speak to internal marketing, understand customer segments and metrics. Therefore you can understand the value chain of information flows from purchase to pocket.
3. FEEDBACK!
Why is everyone so scared of feedback? Constructive feedback drives improvement. In this case no news is not good news. If every month you are producing something and there is no 360 feedback channel then it's probably useless or being changed after the fact. Think google reviews - what would your customer rate you out of five stars? Try it.
4. Innovate with data - i.e. customer viability
I'm a massive fan of surveys and focus groups but there are other ways to source or find data. For ideas and those 'solutionairs', it’s good to use customer feedback to test viability. But depending on what you are trying to achieve, both baselining your success and setting goals on measurement of that success is always a winner. That, and using a combination of internal and external data sets from R&D, for example, is going to help drive proactive innovation.
To close off, customer centricity is a culture and applies to ALL industries globally. It's not about a purchase, it's about the personality and professionalism of your brand.
There is a lot of choice and options out there so if you are too relaxed and don't 'Ritz' your customer, you can trust that someone else will.
Good luck ;)
Tameryn
For reference - definitions of the Customer:
By definition from Wikipedia: "a customer is the recipient of a good, service, product or an idea - obtained from a seller, vendor, or supplier via a financial transaction or exchange for money or some other valuable consideration."
In Six Sigma - "Internal customer: The recipient (person or department) within an organization of another person’s or department’s output (product, service or information)" - ASQ