Are you developing customer satisfaction or customer loyalty?

For the Holiday season I wanted to share a customer service story with you.  This story is about delivering above customer expectations and what that really means.  You may have heard the saying; “customer satisfaction means nothing but customer loyalty means everything.”  I believe that this is so true and for any business to be truly customer centric we need to always be thinking about how we can empower our people to deliver above customer expectations.  In the Dale Carnegie business I’ve heard that Dorothy Carnegie once said that we need to do 3 things well, talk to the right people, ask the right questions and deliver above expectations.  Great advice for all business people!

About 10 months ago I decided to have corrective laser eye surgery.  The surgery did not go as planned and 10 months later, December 21; I had to get a touch up in one eye.  I had just spent 10 days in Hawaii for a conference and became deathly ill with a cold.  Upon my return we had our company Christmas party and of course I had my business to run.  Needless to say I didn’t get my prescription filled in advance.  I never procrastinate :) So, with my eye surgery scheduled for Friday morning, my wife and I went out Thursday evening to get my eye drops.  The first pharmacy we went to told me that they had one product that I needed but did not have the other one; they were not very busy and said sorry.  The next Pharmacy we went to was another Shoppers Drug Mart and they said the same thing, they had the one product but not the other, so sorry, again they were not very busy.

Lastly we went to a Wal-Mart Pharmacy.  The young pharmacist informed me after a short wait, they were busy, that they too had only one of the eye drop products that I needed.  The Pharmacist asked me when my surgery was, I responded, tomorrow morning. This was the first time anyone had even asked when my surgery was.  She said that they could have the drops in by tomorrow afternoon.   I said that would be ok, I could come by after the surgery; hopefully the courtesy van person would be ok with coming by the store first before dropping me off at home.  The pharmacist said if you have a few minutes please wait, I agreed.  She started making phone calls; she even talked to someone else that just arrived back after a break and that person continued to make phone calls as the young pharmacist helped other customers.  After a few short minutes she informed me that they had called many other local pharmacies and that the Costco pharmacy a few blocks away had what I needed.  I was very surprised; I had already agreed to wait until tomorrow to pick up my prescription at the Wal-Mart Pharmacy.  The young pharmacist had taken the approach that I needed this prescription now and she gave up a sale to get me what I needed now.  WOW, that was impressive!

Where do you think I will get my next prescription?

Anytime you can deliver above expectations your business will prosper, what is your target for exceeding expectations?  Ours is 85%,  are you driving more business or are you driving customers away?

 

Happy New Year!

Leadership - Serving those we lead.

I want to share a leadership story with you.  This was a moment in time where I think something got through my thick skull.  How do people really change?

I had become a sales manager and realized that the skill set required to be a successful Sales Manager was different than the skill set required for a sales person.  You still had to be results driven but you had to do this through other people.  I’m sure many other people have gone through this experience as anyone would, moving into a management and leadership type role.  The owner of the company said that my management skills and knowing how to move the business forward were solid; I just needed to add those leadership skills that would help us move everyone forward.  Our jobs as doers change drastically when we are expected to serve others. 

I decided to take a Dale Carnegie program called Leadership Training for Managers.  I quickly learned about myself and what skills I was going to need to improve on to be a successful leader.  I can’t say that I’ve mastered any of these skills, but we continue to learn and become better at what we do.  I realized that my style was not about relationships but more about doing and getting things done.  To become a better leader I needed to understand that my job was to find out what was important to those I lead, what motivated them, how I could inspire them to do more, be more and ultimately help them get what they wanted.  In business we exist to serve our customers and as a leader we exist to serve our customers, our internal customers and the people we lead.

In my opinion this is what today’s leadership lacks,  the serve others mentality, this is why our job as a leader exists.  Leadership is not about power or authority; it’s about influence and what we can do to help the people we lead get what they want.  As Zig Ziglar once said, “The more time we spend helping others get what they want our success will follow.”  Not the exact quote but I think you get the message.  This is what leadership is about, it’s not about you, it’s all about the people we lead.

So as leaders, how do we get engagement, how do we inspire others, how do we get our teams working at a higher level?  Simple, as leaders we need to know our people at a deeper level, we need to know what is important to them and we need to get them involved in bringing their ideas forward. 

We had a person in a Dale Carnegie course that called me half way through the program that said, even though I did a good job of selling him into the program he didn’t think that it was the right fit for him.  He wanted a program about leadership.  I suggested to him that the bulk of the leadership components of the program were later on and that if he continued to work hard in the program and he felt the same way once the program was completed we would have another conversation.  We never had that conversation, in fact, this person was so happy with the results he decided to come back and join us in the program as an assistant coach!

His realization was that he wasn’t listening to the people he was leading.  He was giving orders and telling people what to do.  Once he stopped giving orders, started asking questions he quickly realized how the culture with his team changed.  People started coming to him with ideas, they were more engaged, they put more effort into what they were doing.  The results were amazing; their warehouse efficiency rating improved tremendously saving the company thousands of dollars.

Leadership involves a mentality that how we do things are usually more important than what we do.  This was my aha moment and it has lead me down this path with Dale Carnegie.  I’m a better person for it and I thank those that have helped me along the way.