Do we listen to our guests?
Listen to your guests or customers – It seems like such an obvious thing. But do we? Look around you… it’s something that hardly happens or so it seems. How often have we encountered people expressing their frustration for some reason or another? Sometimes they’re not simply frustrated, they’re ticked - and very upset. But the important thing is that successful customer service begins when you listen to your guests.
However, when you treat an observation – let alone a complaint, as an annoyance and do nothing about it - matters can only go downhill. How many view complaints as an incentive to do things better in future? And how many respond to it, look for a solution and give feedback? Very few! Sadly, most everyone in the service sector no longer considers customers as financial dependencies; instead, a customer is just another financial transaction. It is exactly this mindset that underscores how incredibly low the bar is in Sri Lanka’s retail service sector.
Before opening the very first Apple store, Steve Jobs asked employees where they, as customers, had experienced the best customer service. Many employees answered that their best experiences were at a Ritz-Carlton, a Four Seasons, and other five-star resorts. Based on these responses, Steve Jobs borrowed the Ritz-Carlton customer service approach and trained Apple store associates accordingly. Apple employees are taught to use the acronym A-P-P-L-E to provide customer service.
This next story from Sainsbury’s supermarket highlights how your support team should spot great opportunities to do things that are original and out of the ordinary. Three and a half years old Lily Robinson was quite confused by one of Sainsbury’s products called tiger bread. In her eyes, the bread didn’t resemble a tiger at all and in fact looked very much like a giraffe. With a little assistance from mom and dad, she wrote the following letter to Sainsbury’s customer service department.
“Dear Sainsbury, why is tiger bread called tiger bread? It should be called giraffe bread. Love from Lily Robinson age 3 ½”
To her surprise, customer support manager Chris King wrote back to say that he couldn’t agree more. He explained the origins of the name:
“I think renaming tiger bread giraffe bread is a brilliant idea - it looks much more like the blotches on a giraffe than the stripes on a tiger, doesn’t it? It is called tiger bread because the first baker who made it a loooong time ago thought it looked stripey like a tiger. Maybe they were a bit silly.”
Lily’s mom enjoyed the letters and ended up posting them on her blog. Before long, this cute correspondence was a viral hit, and the pressure was on for Sainsbury’s to change the name of the product to the much more appropriate giraffe bread. Knowing the customer was certainly right in this instance—and spotting an unusual opportunity to do something fun—Sainsbury’s changed the name of the bread and put signs around their stores that give a humorous nod to Lily’s original idea.
They say the customer is always right. But not many can claim to be so right they forced a supermarket to change one of its products. By the way, which organisation would listen to a toddler? Sainsbury did.
Ilzaf Keefahs
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