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Showing posts with label Customer service. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Customer service. Show all posts

Friday 27 January 2012

Measuring Happiness

BY Bain Insights, Forbes Contributor

Fred ReichheldFred Reichheld

Happiness has been a hot topic in business lately and I’ve been delighted to see such a serious subject get the attention it deserves in the corner office. In the Jeffersonian tradition, the “pursuit of happiness” is considered an inalienable right on par with life and liberty. Yet, until recently, managers here and elsewhere in the world made little effort to rigorously measure or manage happiness.

That was part of the reason I created the Net Promoter score (NPS) nine years ago. When I was considering various names for the new metric, I thought seriously about calling it the Net Happiness Score. We describe NPS as a measure of loyalty, but the overarching objective of the framework is to make people happy—so happy that they recommend a product or company to friends and loved ones so they can benefit from a similar experience.

Of course, I ended up calling it NPS. I decided against NHS as a name because I feared it might sound too corny or whimsical to hard-minded business execs, causing them to overlook the very real connection between how customers feel about their experience with a company and that company’s profitable, sustainable growth.

But even today we still maintain a not-so-subtle link between NPS and happiness through the emoticons we use to report the scores.  For example, we communicate a Net Promoter Score of 75 with a wall of faces like this:
Net Promoter score emoticon wall

It’s pretty hard to miss the link between NPS and the emotional energy of happy or unhappy people when looking at a picture like this. Using emoticons to represent promoters, passives and detractors requires little additional explanation. What’s more, the happy, passive and angry faces illustrate that making people happy and earning their loyalty creates emotional outcomes, not just economic ones.

“If you figure out how to make employees happy and make customers happy, then the business just kind of takes care of itself,” says Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. “It’s just about delivering happiness.”



Well, it’s not quite that simple since the happiness must deliver profits—but companies already have well-advanced measures to focus efforts on profits. What they have lacked is a rigorous metric for happiness—until the adoption of NPS. Leading practitioners use different language to describe the underlying emotional engine of NPS: Apple talks about enriching lives. Intuit talks about delighting customers. Rackspace talks about “Fanatical Service.”  But they are all talking about the same thing: making customers happier.

As I have noted before, in our work at Bain & Company we find it nearly impossible to separate the notions of employee happiness and customer happiness—they are two sides of the same coin.  There is no way to consistently turn customers into promoters unless they are being served by employees who are equally enthusiastic about their work, and there’s no way employees can be enthusiastic about their work if the customers they deal with all day long are detractors.

Some leaders assume that simply making employees happy will result in happy customers. That is dangerous thinking. When employees come to believe that the job of their leader is to make them happy, the result is almost always entitled but uninspired employees—who help create fewer and fewer happy customers.

Leaders can and should treat their employees well, but they can’t make them happy. True happiness must be earned through meaningful service to others. When a customer scores an employee’s work a 9—or especially a 10—they are giving a standing ovation that provides a real source of sustainable happiness.

What bosses can do is make sure their people are in a position to earn lots of 10s from their customers—by structuring teams correctly, assigning good leaders, providing the right tools and training, supporting them with good policies and putting individuals in roles that play to their strengths. And, as important as any of these, they can install a system that measures the impact employees have on customers and lets employees hear that feedback in a timely manner.

Many loyalty leading companies install employee NPS feedback systems to work in parallel with their customer NPS systems, because they recognize the close and interconnected relationship between customer and employee happiness. Integrating those two systems isn’t always easy—employee feedback has long been the province of the HR department, and employee NPS drifts naturally in that direction.

But loyalty leaders such as Apple Retail and JetBlue work hard to ensure that employee engagement isn’t pursued independently of the goal of delighting customers. Instead, they ensure that they set up a virtuous circle that positions employees to earn “10s” from customers and to hear about it and are rewarded for it. Employee and customer Net Promoter feedback systems remain fully integrated at those companies, because they are part of the same pursuit—the pursuit of happiness.

Fred Reichheld is a fellow at Bain & Company and co-author, with Rob Markey, of The Ultimate Question 2.0: How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World, published in September by HBR Press.

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Sunday 25 September 2011

Customer Service with a Snarl !





Service with a snarl

But Then Again By Mary Schneider

Gone are the days when you can expect politeness and pleasant smiles from your friendly customer service troops.

WHAT’S happening to customer service these days? I feel as if I’m constantly battling with technical support staff and frontline personnel who are becoming more and more rude and inept at their jobs.

Take the other day, for example, when I woke up to find that my car battery was as dead as Paris Hilton’s singing career, forcing me to seek out my nearest car repair shop to get it charged.

As I entered the premises, I was met by a manageress who looked as if she had a lemon stuck to the roof of her mouth. Rather than welcoming my business, she was surly and brusque to the point of rudeness.

Four hours later, when I called to find out how the battery charging was progressing, the Dragon Lady told me, somewhat haughtily, that I had to be patient. Later still, when I called again for another update, she breathed fire down the line and gave me the impression that I was harassing her.

The following morning, a baby-faced mechanic showed up at my house with my super-charged battery, a few tools and a packet of cigarettes.

“Surely, re-installing my battery won’t take so long that you need to have a cigarette break,” I wanted to say, but didn’t.

As he fiddled with the battery, I glanced at the packet of cigarettes lying on my doorstep. The front of the packet had a picture of what looked like a premature baby with an oxygen mask strapped to its tiny face.

“Look what cigarettes can do to unborn babies!” I wanted to say to the young man working beneath my bonnet, but didn’t.

You’d think that someone so youthful and agile would be able to install that battery before you could finish saying: “Did you know that Paris Hilton once cut a record?” But this chap redefined the word “slow”.



I watched impatiently as he attempted to connect the cables to the battery terminals using a spanner that was too big to get the job done – for a full 10 minutes.

Then he turned to me and said: “Do you have a size 10 spanner? I forgot mine.”

Like who did he think I was? The Fix-it Queen? His question would be tantamount to a cardiologist asking his patient if she happened to have a bypass machine in her overnight bag, just before administering the anaesthetic for her heart transplant surgery.

Nonetheless, I did have such a spanner conveniently stashed in a drawer by the front door – where I’d left it after removing the battery the day before. I produced it with a flourish, expecting Babyface to be surprised. But he took it from me as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

After connecting the cables, he spent a gazillion years trying to clamp the battery into place. As I watched him, entire species of animals became extinct, thousands of babies were born (some of them looking like the picture on the cigarette box), continental plates grunted and groaned, and stock markets around the world plunged ever deeper into crisis.

When his slothfulness became unbearable to watch, I withdrew into the living room and began writing a list of things that I needed to do as soon as I was mobile again.

No sooner had I written the first item (get recommendations for a new service centre) when Babyface poked his head around the door and asked for my car key.

Now, my car has two keys. One for the alarm system, and the other for the ignition. How was I to know that he wouldn’t know his arse from his elbow and would attempt to start the car with the wrong key, causing the alarm to go into “let’s disturb the entire neighbourhood” mode.

At this stage I was so agitated, that I took the key from his nicotine stained hand and said, in a somewhat irritated tone: “What have you done?”

He responded by uttering the four words that are guaranteed to make me more agitated: “Now please calm down!”

Ten minutes later, as he was slipping the premature baby into his back pocket, he turned to me and said: “My boss sent me here because I am the only one who can speak English. I usually work with Japanese cars, which are very complicated. Malaysian cars like your Proton Waja are very simple, but I don’t know how to repair them.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or feel sorry for him.

But I do know where not to go if I have a flat battery in the future.

Check out Mary on Facebook at www.facebook.com/mary.schneider.writer. Reader response can be directed to star2@thestar.com.my.

Monday 22 August 2011

3 Powerful Skills You Must Have to Succeed in Sales





by Sharon Michaels

A key to successfully sharing and selling a product, service or idea, is to ask questions and then listen quietly and carefully to the answers. Many of us try too hard to convince people to buy instead of discovering what our future customer or client really wants, needs and desires from us.

To succeed in sales remember these three listening and relationship building skills:

SSincerity – Listen without an agenda, it’s not about your needs.

EEthics – Don’t try to talk someone into something, listen to what they want.

A – Asking – Serve others by asking questions that will assist them in making a wise buying decision.



Building win-win relationships means remembering that it is not about what we want but what the other person wants. Here are three relationship building skills that when used regularly will have you increasing sales and creating satisfied loyal customers.

1. Listening sincerely and without an agenda. The buying process is not about you and your wants and needs, it is about the customer. Too many of us come to the sales table with our own agenda. We are sometimes too busy thinking about quotas, promotions and commissions. It’s not about us, it’s about the wants, needs and expectations of the prospective buyer.

A sales person with an agenda tends to push too hard and often doesn’t listen well. Leave your agenda at home. Sincerely focus on your customer and how your product can best serve their hopes, dreams and goals. Zig Ziglar said it best, “You can have everything in life that you want if you just give enough other people what they want.”

2. Don’t talk someone into something, allow them to make their own buying decision. Doing what is right for everyone involved is the ethical thing to do. I’m reminded of a phrase from Dale Carnegie’s book, How To Win Friends and Influence People, “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.”

Your role in the sales process is to present your product in a clear, concise and truthful manner—with integrity. The best customer is the customer who can make an educated decision based on what is best for them. A loyal customer is an educated customer. You are not in the convincing business, you are in the sharing business. Your job is to ethically offer the product, service or idea, explain the benefits and answer questions. Your customer or client will then make a buying decision based on the information they’ve been given. Making the sale is about asking questions, answering questions and building a trustworthy win-win relationship.

3. You can serve your client/customer best by finding out what they want, need and expect from what you are offering. Sometimes, we are so excited to share everything we know about what we’re offering that we forget it is about your potential customer’s expectations. What is important to you may not be important to them.

I’m reminded of a story: A young mother just starting out with a large network marketing company was excited and eager to share her business with other stay-at-home mothers. She was having coffee with a potential recruit as their children played near by. The young mother was eagerly showing her products and explaining the business potential. She went on and on about how she could stay home with her children and didn’t have to leave the house to conduct business.

The mother who was listening seemed to suddenly turn off her interest and attention. When our eager young network marketing mother asked her friend to join her in the business, the friend replied with a resounding, “No,” The business-building mother was shocked and saddened, “Why?” she asked. “Because,” her friend said, “I want to be able to do something that allows me to get out of the house and socialize with other adults.”

Moral of the story: Ask questions and listen. Don’t assume that what is important to you is important to your future customers.

Successful selling isn’t about what you want, it is about how can you best serve the needs of your customers and clients. Coming from a sincere place of service, will help increase sales and develop loyal client and referral base.

Keeping the three elements of SEA (Sincerity, Ethics, Asking) in mind, you can easily and effortlessly find new customers and clients who will want to do business with you now and in the future. Selling your service, product or idea is about doing the right thing for everyone involved – it is about building win-win relationships.


Sharon Michaels is a business coach and the author of How to Give Yourself the Power to Succeed. She produces and hosts the weekly radio show, Women Enjoying Success and the blog Power to Succeed. Check out her weekly Ezine, Unlimited Success for Women

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