I’ve just finished giving a series of customer service talks to Midlands chefs and restaurateurs. One slide which stimulated much interesting discussion included a quote which I found in a journal in 2001. I’ve used it many times since, because it sums up the most important aspect of customer service we measure. It’s from a gentleman called Mark Philpott, at that time the Managing Director of Directors’ Table:

We recruit attitudes, not skills. You can train the skills but the attitudes have to be there. We find them [attitudes] particularly good with Antipodeans. It may be a transient population, but I’d rather have the right people for a year, than the wrong ones for far longer.”

Hospitality, February 2001

Although I’ve never had the pleasure of Mr Philpott’s acquaintance, we clearly sing from the same hymn sheet. On the surface, one might think he’s suggesting that Australians and New Zealanders are better at delivering great service than the British.

Race, however, is far from it. In context, Mr Philpott was saying that people travelling the world and far from their homes have one thing in common: they’re doing it because they are keen to learn. For this reason, their minds act like sponges, ready to absorb vast amounts of knowledge and learn new skills quickly.

Time spent training such folk in the more technical aspects of the job is cut to the bone, questioning the notion that high staff turnover is directly related to poor customer service; an old-fashioned theory if ever there was one. Closer to the mark is the greater the number of employees with a Positive Mental Attitude, the better the quality of service. The latter is largely unaffected by an employee’s length of tenure.

So are Brits working out in Sydney or Auckland just as good? If not, that’s my and Mr Philpott’s joint theory blown out of the water – perhaps some nationalities really are better at delivering service than others.

One of the most weighted standards we incorporate into our mystery customer programmes is:

“Did the member of staff demonstrate a genuine willingness to help?”

In our office, we reckon that you could replace this with either of the following standards and get the same answer every time:

“Did the member of staff have a Positive Mental Attitude?”

or

“Did the member of staff look as if they enjoyed their work?”

There’s no doubt attitudes are more important than skills, since once you have people with the right manner it’s much easier to train them in the nuts and bolts. And if there’s one skill which is pre-eminent in the delivery of first class service, I’d say it’s that of ‘rapport-building’.

Unfortunately, it’s probably also one of the hardest to train. If colleges and schools were to concentrate on developing the capacity of their students to know instinctively how to treat someone they’ve never met before, I can’t help but think employers would be fighting to employ them and as a nation, our service standards would improve.

But is this an attitude or a skill? The concept of ‘rapport’ is constantly misunderstood – but that’s a topic for another time.

Richard Morrey

Managing Director

Trust you

Feel Valued by you

In fact, whenever you have a meeting, at the start of the meeting ask yourselves how your meeting will influence either of the above. If you can’t answer it, abandon the meeting and go and do something productive instead!

Something that has a significant effect on the “Trust” element is the Tangible aspect of your business. By this, I mean the appearance of the physical - facilities, equipment, vehicles, staff, communication materials etc.

We recently conducted a survey of 750 managers and 750 customers. We gave each group a list of 10 aspects of customer service and asked them to rank each aspect in terms of importance. Tangibles, was on the list. The managers ranked it at number 1 by a long way, and the customers at number 2 by a nose (behind Courtesy).

The more the tangible aspect affects the customer’s safety and security the more it has the potential to dent the trust, the less loyal they are and so on, and this frequently happens in the customer’s subconscious mind so they’ll rarely tell you about it.

For example, imagine the scene. You are on an aeroplane, on the tarmac awaiting take-off. You drop down the table from the seat-back in front of you. There are coffee stains and crumbs present. Your conscious mind will be thinking “there are coffee stains and crumbs”, but what will be happening in the subconscious mind? At the extreme it will be “I’m going to die”! “I am about to go to 30,000 feet in a metal tube with this company, whilst sitting on thousands of litres of high octane fuel. If they can’t get the things I can see right, what the hell are their servicing and maintenance procedures like?” No matter how good the cabin crew’s courtesy, there will be a serious, if subconscious, negative charge against this experience and the airline’s image.

The above is an extreme, but relevant, example. Although not all businesses hold the lives of their customers in their hands in every transaction, the tangible aspects still significantly influence the customer’s mind and their perceptions.

Hygiene has a significant impact on customers’ feelings of safety and security as they do business with you, and there is no better public example of your organisation’s commitment to hygiene, and indeed a very visible and effective advertisement of how your organisation handles “attention to detail”, than the state of your toilets! Although this is important for any business, it’s as serious as the airline example above if you serve food. The public state of your toilets is the customer perception of the hygiene standards in your kitchen.

As holidays approach, just in the last week I’ve heard twice, independently, people talking about how good the toilets are in Spanish restaurants compared with the UK. There’s a pub in a village near me which is always very quiet. When people talk about why they don’t drink there, the condition of the beer or service of the bar staff is rarely mentioned, but the dire state of the toilets, without fail, always is. I’m not sure if it’s unique to the British, but we love talking about our toilets!

The tangible aspects are the first impression the customer has of your business. The first impression is supposedly formed in 7 seconds according to psychologists. Not only do first impressions linger, but these 7 seconds could be the difference between whether your customer walks through your door or not. Whether it’s spelling errors on your web site, the cleanliness of your windows or the state of your staff’s shoes, the importance cannot be underestimated. And if you operate company vehicles, what better way to stand out in a crowd in our often miserable British weather, than by having the shiniest cleanest vehicles on the road, advertising (often subconsciously), to an increasingly populated audience on our motorways, your commitment to attention to detail.

Richard Morrey

Managing Director

We recently received a challenge from a client to a mystery customer’s comments. The client is a very popular tourist attraction and our mystery customer had criticised the state of the toilets in the car park. Quite justifiably on the face of it, the manager had asked us not to score the attraction down because the toilets were not under his control; in fact they and the car park were under the control of the local council.

Now I’m sure you can see both points of view here. It’s unfair that the manager should be scored down risking his league table position and his bonus because of something outside his control, and of course we obliged and corrected the score. But the most important thing here is that the feedback must not be ignored. There are serious implications in the bigger picture – the mystery customer perceived that the toilets were under the management of the attraction, and in customer service the hard fact is PERCEPTION = REALITY in the customer’s eyes. How many other customers experienced the same, and went away with a negative impression to undoubtedly pass on to friends, colleagues and neighbours? And where toilets are concerned it will be a big negative, and one that will stay in a customer’s mind for a long time, but that’s a topic for another time!

Of course the issue of whether something is under your control or not is debatable and subjective. There is a scale of the degree to which something is under your control. Car parks are a common case in point (and road signage too), frequently at the extreme end of the scale where control is minimal because the land will often not be in the ownership of our client. And car parks are so important too, as they are the first and last impression the customer has, and there is the issue of security too. There is still a degree of control though and, as in the above case, the council can be (and was) lobbied with our reports used as evidence.

There is often the opportunity to exceed expectations too. Sometimes a car park is quite obviously in public ownership, but because of your location, customer perceptions and your favourability can still be influenced. I can think of a city centre restaurant we recently inspected where they didn’t have their own car park and guests had to use an adjacent public car park. The restaurant positioned a security officer in the car park in the evenings, dressed in Day-Glo jacket with the restaurant’s name and logo clearly visible both on the uniform and the side of his car. Great first impressions generating trust and confidence in the restaurant, as well as an impressive high visibility public image to passing potential customers.

Security staff. This brings me nicely onto that group of people who would fall in the middle of the scale of control – sub-contractors. Whilst not your staff, you have control over the award of the contract and therefore they should be included in any mystery shopping programme, as the customer will always perceive them as you whether they get rude or excellent service from them. In fact I believe, wherever possible, and you enter into a formal contract with a sub-contractor, a term of the contract should be that the sub-contractor’s staff should wear your uniform with your logo on it. The customer will always hold you accountable for their actions any way, so you may as well benefit from the image/advertising. Not just security staff, but grounds staff, maintenance and cleaning staff too.

Then there are those less formal sub-contractors too, such as car valets, florists and taxi drivers whom you book for your customers. For example if a guest has a wonderful stay in a hotel, and asks the receptionist to book a taxi to the airport on departure. A filthy dirty smelly taxi turns up with a rude driver. The guest won’t remember AJ’s Cabs when they reflect on this negative last impression experience. Who will they blame? What a shame!

As managers and business people it is sometimes all too easy to become blinkered as we focus on the things that are under our day to day control, primarily our staff. It’s important though to take a “helicopter moment” occasionally. Rise above the business and see the “whole” customer experience.

To quote Robert Burns:

O wad some Power the giftie gie us,
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us

Are you mystery shopping the whole customer experience? Please call me if we can help.

Richard Morrey

Managing Director

Here we look at the art of “reception”. Frequently the first face-to-face impression your customers have of you and your organisation.

Whether you impress or fail at this crucial interface will significantly impact on how your customer perceives you thereafter. The reception experience will influence not just how much they spend, but whether they do business with you at all.

Let’s strip away the commercial aspects of the experience and get down to the basic human experience by talking “anthropologically”. You and your business are a community. You all know each other. You could argue you spend as much time with your work colleagues as you do with those most intimate to you, your family. You socialise together. You are friends; otherwise you wouldn’t be such a good team. There are bonds between you. Such bonds naturally exclude other “strangers”. This is part of our natural survival mentality as a race. Have you ever walked into a pub for the first time and you immediately feel like an outsider because there is a clique of regulars in the bar? This is how your first-time customer feels, if not consciously, certainly subconsciously.

No matter how friendly and approachable you feel you are, there will be an element of this in every first time customer experience. The quicker you can break down these barriers the better.

There are three things the first-time customer wants when they arrive on your premises –

Recognition

Relation

Admission

1. Recognition

This is the status of “citizen” in your “village”. To be treated with importance, as someone who has rights, and to be treated with respect. Above all they want to be valued. And if we start talking commercially again, this should come naturally, because they have money to spend! You’d be amazed how often it doesn’t come naturally though, even in these difficult times. I bet you can think of a time when you’ve encountered a “snooty” receptionist looking down at you from behind the desk.

2. Relation

The customer wants an ally. If you have to work behind a desk, it’s the mental equivalent of coming around from behind the desk and saying “I’m on your side”. The customer wants someone who genuinely wants to help, with emphasis on the “genuinely” rather than the scripted “How may I help you?” through a false smile. Communication skills are most important here, more specifically empathy and rapport-building skills. Genuine hospitality is all important, and that includes the offer of a drink where possible, especially if a small wait is necessary. It is so important that your reception colleagues get into the shoes of the customer. What are they here for? How far have they travelled? Frequently, depending on the answers to these questions, customers will feel tired, tense, bewildered, even dirty and wanting the loo to freshen up. Ideal opportunities for you to help and put them at ease.

3. Admission

To get to where they want to go as quickly as possible, and be a part of your “community”. Remove the barriers both physical and procedural as much as is practically possible. Bear in mind that because of the “bewilderment” aspect above, most of the information you give them will be cognitively unmanageable. So restrict it to the information most important to them. How long will it be before the sales person will be available, where is the departure gate or the hotel bedroom? Make directions as simple and as visual as possible to avoid the customer feeling awkward or stupid later.

I recently had my car serviced, and was immediately warmly greeted by name as I walked through the door, because the service receptionist had spotted my car registration as I pulled into the car park. How’s that for Recognition?

Similarly I recently stayed at a hotel (off duty!) where I was greeted by name immediately at the door by the receptionist (Recognition). I was taken straight to my room, with the receptionist building rapport and imparting useful information in the lift and en route (Relation). The completed registration card was already on my dressing table just needing a signature. I never experienced the barrier of a desk. How did they know my name? My car registration had been picked up from their guest history records. The doorman had passed on the message to reception as I pulled on to the car park. How’s that for Admission?

Recognition, Relation, Admission applies to all types of businesses. Please call if you’re interested in measuring and developing the way you receive your customers.

Richard Morrey

What prompted us to write on this topic this month, was that a client called in recently to say that they were naturally disappointed that they’d received such a poor score as a result of a mystery e-mail enquiry that went unanswered. They had no record of the enquiry and wondered if we could look into it.

We did and were able to provide evidence that the e-mail was sent from our mystery customer’s server. Armed with this detail they were able to investigate further with their IT department to find that, due to a technical error on a web site, customer enquiries were not being received by their sales staff. Thanks to their mystery customer programme the situation could be identified and rectified quickly, but how many sales were lost in the mean time?

Amongst all our clients, this wasn’t the first time this has happened, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. Mistakes happen, especially in such a technical world these days, and it always prompts us to get our systems checked.

Of course it’s not always possible for customers to get through to the required sales person instantly. We recently did a little in-house survey. We randomly selected 500 recent e-mail and telephone mystery enquiries where the enquirer had left a message to be contacted back. 26 of these were not contacted back. That’s 5.2%.

94.8% success rate sounds good, doesn’t it?  That’s the equivalent of 70 unsafe landings at Heathrow airport today! Or 87 new born babies dropped at birth today!  If you have 500 enquiries this week or month, can you afford to ignore over 20 of them?

We investigated the 26 that weren’t responded to, to determine why. For the e-mail enquiries, the most common reason was due to a technical error. For the telephone enquiries the two most common reasons were:

1.                   The message wasn’t conveyed from the telephonist to the sales person

2.                   The incorrect telephone number/e-mail address was taken. In such cases, on further checking in the report, sure enough the standard “Was your telephone number repeated back to you?” was answered with a “No”. If a real customer, they’ve gone forever!

We carry out thousands of mystery sales enquiries every month, from a couple calling a hotel regarding a wedding reception through to someone calling a solicitor’s practice regarding a divorce; from a student enquiring about a university course, through to a school enquiring about hiring modular classroom accommodation.

Audio recordings of telephone enquiries can be made too, providing an excellent training and appraisal resource. It may sound a bit “Big Brother-ish” at first, but if your staff know their enquiry handling may be listened to by someone senior in the organisation, and good practice is seen to be praised and rewarded, up go your response scores!

You may be thinking… “I haven’t got time to listen to lots of telephone call recordings!” For the Managing Director of one of our clients, we supply a CD every month of calls to his organisation, which he listens to in the car between meetings. You can even put the calls on your ipod!

As with all our mystery customer programmes, our mystery enquiries are from real customers, not telephone market researchers. By “real”, we mean someone who has recently been in the market (possibly with your main competitor) or has the potential to be in the market in the not too distant future. Frequently our mystery enquirers are actually in the market at the time. There have been several instances recently where our mystery customers honoured their restaurant table booking outside their brief, and one mystery customer recently bought the Porsche they were enquiring about. There’s payback for you!

Would you like to know how well your sales enquiries are handled?

If you would be interested in monitoring how well your sales enquiries are responded to then contact us for an informal discussion. We assure you we will respond!

Whether the mystery enquiry is by telephone, by e-mail, or an unannounced walk-in, we can help. If handled well, some enquiries can be followed by an appointment or showaround and we can report on that too.   Some are enquiries to our clients themselves, others are to their competitors* for benchmarking purposes.

* With competitor mystery shopping we subscribe to the Market Research Society’s Code of Conduct which states “The length of time spent with a staff member should reflect the market and the type of enquiry. The time should be kept as short as possible and should not be seen to waste the competitor’s resources in any way other than a normal customer enquiry might do.” Telephone calls to competitors cannot be audio recorded for ethical and legal reasons.

It seems that many business advisors are recommending that organisations resist the temptation to reduce their prices in 2009 during these difficult times. On the face of it, it can make economic sense to drop prices to maintain volumes and customer loyalty, and many would claim that to refrain from discounting is tough advice to take in the current economic climate. It does make good sense though because it’s been proven in the past that if you drop your prices, it’s much harder to put them back up again when we start to emerge from a recession.

The key to maintaining customer loyalty is to deliver great value, and the most effective way to do this is not the quick fix of slashing prices, but to develop a reputation for delivering fantastic customer service. Consumers talk more to each other about experiences than they do prices. We therefore recommend businesses concentrate on driving customer advocacy, customer loyalty, and customer spend upwards by delivering amazing experiences for their customers.

And of course, what gets measured gets done. Which is why new enquiries for our services are as buoyant as ever, along with the loyalty from our existing clients which says they’re committed for the long term. Delivering better service than your competitors is more important than ever for survival in a recession.

It was interesting to hear “Brand Britain” discussed on this morning’s Today programme on BBC Radio 4. Do we have a reputation for poor service in the UK? Although he was talking specifically about the hospitality industry, the Chairman of VisitBritain had some very interesting and valid points to make which reinforces the above. You can listen to the interview here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7817000/7817380.stm

In the interview Alex Polizzi, Channel Five’s Hotel Inspector also refers to her dissatisfaction with the hotel star rating system in the UK. This was coincidentally the subject of our December article. Our Managing Director was invited by VisitBritain to write an article on the topic, which you can read here: http://www.insights.org.uk/articleitem.aspx?title=Star+Ratings+Vs+Online+Reviews#

We’ve carried out some research and our Managing Director has been invited by VisitBritain to write an article. Due to be published later this month, keep an eye out for it at

http://www.insights.org.uk/latestarticles.aspx?year=2008&month=12

Mystery shopping is an ideal way for exhibition organisers to get a customer's eye view of all the many component services that have to knit together to deliver a successful exhibition. Or for individual stand holders to monitor selling skills.

For example, last weekend we did some work for the BBC at the Good Food Show - "The reports are very useful thank you, with good thorough comments" Clare Cox, Marketing Manager, BBC Haymarket Exhibitions.

Please contact us if we can help with your exhibition or exhibition stand.

Of course there is the Professional Complainer. We've all encountered him! He'll never be happy whatever we do. But thankfully he is a rare animal and most complaints offer a hugely valuable opportunity to learn and develop your customer service. Unfortunately a complaint is often perceived as the opposite. The words "Mr. Manager, we've got a complaint at the desk" can ring mental alarm bells and emotions of fear and danger.

Treating a complaint positively and with the value it deserves can be a great bonus to your business for 2 reasons:

1. The Iceberg Theory - Statistics suggest that for every complaint, there are likely to be on average another 24 people who have had a similar experience. So the complaint is the tip of the iceberg, the bit you are lucky enough to be able to see and learn from. Below the surface of the water (the dangerous bit) are another 24 people who not only won't return, but will also have told on average 9 others instead of you. So that's a further 216 negative messages further below the waterline. And, you guessed it, on average these people each told 5, so that's a further 1080 even further down hidden from you. Obviously these are just statistics but very valid ones at that carried out by Technical Assistance Research Programmes (TARP).

2. TARP also suggests that, if handled correctly, a complaining customer, will be more satisfied with your service afterwards than if they'd never had the cause to complain in the first place. Not only more satisfied, but more loyal and a powerful advocate for your business spreading a positive message and melting that iceberg.

You'll know the phrase "The customer is always right". Sometimes factually incorrect of course and it should probably be replaced with "The customer should always think they're right". It can be tempting once you've dealt effectively with a factually incorrect complaining customer to dismiss the complaint out of hand and take no further action, but it can often be very enlightening to ask the question "Why did they perceive it that way?"

Of course complaints can vary significantly in their severity. Their importance can be very subjective and the most effective way to melt your icebergs is to use a mystery customer programme, which is what we do best. Think of it as positive global warming!

What is the most effective way to deal with complaints? Watch this space...

Without a doubt, the main reason a customer complains is the same as it was twenty years ago - "Someone didn't get what was promised". Trade Puffing is the act of a business "puffing out its chest" to say we're better than our competitors. This is frequently done by making a promise or a guarantee.

What tends to happen is the marketing department of Business A makes a promise to out-perform a promise made by Business B. Of course the marketing department of Business B then reacts with a counter-promise to out-perform Business A and so on. However in recent years the time period between "boasts" has gradually decreased due to an increasingly competitive market place and the ever increasing ease of communicating with potential customers through the media and information technology.

Take a banking example as a hypothetical case:

10 years ago Bank A says we'll give you an answer to your mortgage application within 2 weeks

5 years later along comes Bank B saying we'll give you an answer within a week

2 years later Bank A says we'll give you an answer by close of business next day - unheard of!

A year later Bank B says we'll give you an answer within 2 hours

A month later Bank A says we'll give you an instant answer

And so on...

Of course such boasts increase customer expectations, and as a result expectations have risen exponentially. In many businesses so quickly in fact, that the operations department of a business frequently can't keep up with the evermore rigorous boasts made by the marketing department. And when customer expectations aren't met? ... A complaint is the result. Or is it?

In fact most people won't complain, but vote with their feet instead... but that's another story known as the Iceberg Theory. Watch this space for more details and how it can help your business...

• Less conspicuous luxury is being seen among the very wealthy. In fact, the most casually dressed customers- usually always in jeans - are likely to be among the wealthiest. Dress codes, therefore, are increasingly less likely to be enforced in five-star hotels.
• Too much technology is not a luxury, it bamboozles and irritates the customer. Technology should be at a level that eases the comfort of guests. More important is ensuring that the basics, such as the television, are fully operational and of the very best quality.
• Seamless service is of the utmost importance, with staff being able to predict what the customer wants.
• Customers are increasingly prepared to pay a premium for food and drink which is from sound, ethical, traceable sources. This means a demand for more local, organic, biodynamic and Fairtrade ingredients - at any price.

Courtesy of Caterer and Hotelkeeper, Reed Business Information Ltd.

All we'd add is the importance of treating every guest as an individual. The needs of the business and leisure guest are most certainly different. There are opportunities for developing guest loyalty and guest advocacy by training your team in the art of rapport building, and an appreciation of body language to help anticipate individual needs, and adopting your procedures accordingly with flexibility. The welcome at reception playing no small part.