Midweek Marketing: Delta Builds Customer Experience One Detail at a Time
“Success is the sum of the details.” Harvey S. Firestone
I’ve been an unapologetic critic of the money losing and seemingly customer hating airline industry for many years. Anyone who has flown a million miles or more has a good view to the workings of this flying bus business (with apologies to bus companies), and the view is mostly unpleasant. (Not always, just mostly.)
Imagine my surprise when I deviated on my return trip from my normal dealings with United, and flew Delta, and I actually enjoyed the experience. I checked my calendar and it wasn’t April Fools Day or Halloween, so all of the truly good-natured, helpful and smiling Delta employees might have actually meant it.
With more than ample time on my hands in two airports, I decided to go on an anthropological expedition of Delta operations. Here’s what I saw:
7 Details that Made the Delta Experience Delightful:
1. Happy, smiling employees serving customers. From gate agents to the flight crews, I didn’t run into a single Delta employee who didn’t smile and offer help. Yes, I used the “s” and the “h” words here. These people seemed genuinely happy to work with customers. (Related post: Smiles, Sales and Leadership.)
2. A lack of grumpy employees. Yeah I know this is redundant with my first point, but I’m still kind of shocked. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve observed the crews from other airlines (mostly United) bad-mouth their firm when they think no one is listening (sorry, I was walking behind you), or just visibly show the world that they didn’t give a damn. My favorite was the United flight attendant who wore a button that said, and I quote: “This airline sucks.” While some people accuse me of dreaming that one up, I almost needed to go into therapy after seeing that display of callous disregard for firm, clients and self.
3. Readily available help. Traveler help was everywhere, including an abundance of small kiosks offering: “Missed Your Connection? Scan Your Ticket Here for Alternatives.” Getting help when things go bad is one of the more stressful elements of flying, and here was an attempt to ease this burden. Nice. The ground-agents waiting to greet passengers and offer personal success were always there…and always smiling.
4. Easy access to the necessities of travel life. The world of business travel survives and thrives on plug-ins for power, internet access, good food and clean restrooms. A+ in the Delta terminals for these critical travel comforts.
5. Company Pride on Display! Every Delta plane sported a decal indicating that Delta had been named one of the World’s Most Admired Corporations (tops in the airline industry) according to Fortune. OK, a little chest thumping is OK if you can back it up.
6. Employee Pride on Display! Every plane had a decal on it under the Fortune banner indicating an employee who had excelled at their job. Nice…what a badge of pride if your name hits the list. (I seem to recall that this is a long-standing practice, and if so, it’s still a good idea.)
7. Pleasant flight crews who seemed to enjoy their jobs. The banter by the pilots seemed extraordinarily friendly and the rest of the flight crew engaged with customers in way that only Southwest seems to have ever cared about.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
While I’m not certain that my two terminal/two flight experience offers a valid sample set, the experience with Delta yesterday was noticeably different than the gross majority of my other airline experiences. Someone seems to be paying attention at Delta. It almost sounds like good leadership and excellent marketing… and great execution…concepts sorely lacking in much of the rest of this industry. The great experience is most definitely in the details.
I’m looking forward to my next opportunity to see if I was lucky or if they’re truly good. And for executives and marketers everywhere, It behooves you to give your employees reasons to smile and serve. The customers are watching.
Leadership Caffeine Podcast-Bob Lucas on Customer Service
For managers and executives, customer service is either a golden opportunity or, as some seem to treat it…a cost center. However, perhaps one of the outcomes of this great recession and the on-going economic malaise…is that many organizations and managers are waking up to the reality that they need to try just a little harder to earn and retain our business.
Enter Robert W. Lucas, an expert, and the author of a number of top selling books on customer service, with some valuable guidance for managers, executives and customer service professionals from his latest, Please Every Customer-Delivering Stellar Customer Service Across Cultures.
I caught up with Bob recently to talk about customer service and to learn more about the importance of culture in customer service delivery. I also spent some time picking his brain on why some organizations just don’t seem to get it when it comes to this service area. Bob was a fascinating and engaging guest and his ideas and perspectives are valuable for all of us. Enjoy!
Leadership Caffeine Podcast Episode 5: Bob Lucas on Customer Service [ 26:32 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadBob is a Managing Partner at Global Performance Strategies and his books are found at Amazon.com and other booksellers.
Show Sound-Bites:
- The importance of cultural awareness when it comes to delivering quality customer service.
- The need for firms to break the mold of cookie-cutter training and delivery of customer service.
- Why some organizations seem to have missed the memo on delivering great customer service.
- What managers should be looking for in hiring and developing today’s customer service professionals.
- Valuable career advice for today’s customer service professionals.
- Why great customer service just might start in the home.
About The Leadership Caffeine Podcast:
The purpose of this show is to connect with leaders, management thinkers, authors, educators, entrepreneurs and anyone else passionate about improving and innovating in leadership and management. If you are interested in being a guest on the show, contact Art Petty.
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About Art Petty:
Art Petty is a Leadership & Career Coach helping motivated professionals of all levels achieve their potential. In addition to working with highly motivated professionals, Art frequently works with project teams in pursuit of high performance. Art’s second book, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development, will be published in September of 2011.
Contact Art via e-mail to discuss a coaching, workshop or speaking engagement.
Frontline Leaders Help Our Firms Go and Grow
Fred Hassan’s article, The Frontline Advantage, in the May 2011 Harvard Business Review (subscription required), turns the spotlight on the too-easily ignored and truly critical frontline leaders who make our organizations go and grow. Frontline leaders are of course the managers and supervisors directly responsible for those doing the work.
“Typically, they make up 50% to 60% of a company’s management ranks and directly supervise as much as 80% of the workforce.”
Underscoring the importance of this group of leaders, Hassan offers:
“It is the frontline managers who must motivate and bolster the morale of the people who do the work-those who design, make and sell the products or services to the customers. These managers are central to a company’s business strategy because they oversee its execution.”
While there’s much I don’t like about this article, including my interpretation of Hassan’s royal CEO and sometime turn-around miracle worker taking a pampered and well-facilitated walk amongst the common folk tone, his core theme: frontline leaders are really important is spot on. (In Hassan’s defense, he clearly highlights that his advice is for other CEOs.)
Great Front-line Leaders Create “Hustle and Flow”
Regular readers know I’ve got a problem with stores and businesses where customers seem to serve as inconveniences to sourpuss cashiers, unhelpful shelf-stockers and clusters of employees gabbing about something other than improving customer service. While those workers are just plain wrong, the responsibility for their performance falls squarely on the frontline leaders.
Alternatively, the businesses where you are welcomed, greeted with a smile by every employee you encounter and where your problems are politely and promptly solved, and where the energy level seems to say, “let’s help, and let’s be prompt about it,” owe their success to great people selection and day-to-day leadership of good frontline leaders.
Great frontline leaders create great experiences for their employees. This flows immediately and directly to customers. And then it flows to the top and bottom lines.
Wrinkly-Shirted Bridge Lizards Need Not Apply:
During an interview for Practical Lessons in Leadership, one of the managers at a company we visited, indicated that the frontline leaders who did the most damage were the Wrinkly-Shirted managers, who preferred to spy on everyone from behind the one-way glass on the “bridge” above the retail floor, rather than interact with employees and customers.
The visual image of a green, scale-covered manager wearing a wrinkled corporate-issue button down shirt, standing on high with a tongue occasionally flickering out, and glowering at everyone through beady, black eyes, is a powerful and fitting image of the worst-kind of frontline leader.
Five Reasons why Great Front-Line Leaders are Priceless:
1. Frontline leaders are close to the customer. They know how the customers respond to every brilliant and not-so-brilliant idea that rolls out of corporate. They know the tastes and habits and brand preferences and problems of their customers, and they know what’s going on with competition in detail, long before corporate types have analyzed the latest competitive press release. These individuals are treasure-troves of real-time, detailed customer and market information.
2. Hassan is right…frontline leaders are the ones who execute on strategy. Everyone else plans, talks, reports, critiques and thinks about strategy execution…front-line leaders live it. Want to do a better job executing on plans where it counts…educate and support the frontline leaders and let them know how important they are in this process.
3. Frontline leaders directly determine how right or wrong the working environment (atmosphere) is for the employees serving the customers. A healthy, respectful working environment where employees are given quality feedback, supported for development and encouraged to cultivate new schools through training and job rotation, goes a long way to creating that “Hustle and Flow” referenced earlier.
4. Today’s quality frontline leaders are tomorrow’s effective general managers and executives. Learning the business from the front is infinitely more valuable than attempting to absorb it from on high. Give me someone who has worked in the trenches with the troops over the classroom educated chair sitter any day.
5. Great frontline leaders drive results. One of my favorite examples: the most valuable sales person in every organization may very well be the field sales manager who supports, coaches, motivates, and helps his/her salespeople move towards success. The same holds true for great frontline leaders everywhere.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
I’m always glad to see positive coverage of this critical group of organizational leaders. Hassan’s article serves to remind us how important it is to pay attention to and support our frontline leaders. Based on my informal “smile test,” there are a fair number of frontline leaders who need to be doing something else. Soon. And for those who get it…here’s hoping you run your organization some day. Just don’t forget where you came from.
The Meeting to Decide Whether to Outsource the Call Center
Note from Art: this is a rave. I was on the receiving end of one too many miserable support experiences recently, and this is my, “I’m Madder than Hell…” response. Back soon with my regularly scheduled and much milder content on management and leadership.
Executive One: The numbers are undeniable. The money we’ll save by outsourcing the call center to (insert country where English is neither a primary or secondary language) will add a full percentage point to our earnings this year. The savings come from paying below poverty-level wages and instead of a building, we’re giving the people Burner Phones and letting them work wherever they want.
Executive Two: Has anyone thought about the customers?
Executive Three: Screw the customers. If they don’t like the service, they can switch to one of our competitors. And we all know that our competitors do the same thing. We’re just keeping up. I fully support this initiative.
Executive Two: Won’t this adversely impact our image?
Executive One: We’ve done extensive polling, and we project that our customer satisfaction ratings will move slightly from their current “Dissatisfied” to “Genuinely Pissed Off.” We can live with that. This keeps us well ahead of our two competitors who have ratings of “Hate Beyond Comprehension.” Heck, we might even pick up some customers if we market this right.
CEO: Do the people in this call center speak English?
Executive One: Yes, a bit. We’re exposing them to one new Dr. Seuss book every month. You should hear them read “Green Eggs and Ham.” And remember, our manuals are written in a combination of Kanji, Sanskrit and Pig Latin, so the customers will feel relieved to connect with someone who they can partially understand.
Executive Three: My favorite is Yertle the Turtle. Bet they’ll love that one.
Executive One’s Lackey: Don’t forget, we’ve created a fail-safe system to reduce call volume. The phone menu is a lot like playing “Angry Birds” blindfolded, and we suspect that 40% of callers will never reach the level where they connect to a real person.
Executive One: That’s right, Lackey. Thanks for reminding us. This is actually part of our corporate “Educate America” program, where we encourage more people to think for themselves and solve their own problems. And if someone is really stumped on an issue they can always use Twitter to get help.
CEO: Brilliant…I’ve been looking for a social media strategy and you just nailed it.
CEO: One last question, who do I call if I have a problem with one of our products?
Executive One: No worries, we’ve got our best local engineers available on call to take questions from the executive group.
CEO: Brilliant, how fast can we get this started.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
To all of the Executive One’s and CEO’s who perpetrate these miserable systems and services on customers, in my most heartfelt tone, you are complete asses.
If Dante were writing his Diving Comedy today, there would be a special level of hell reserved just for you. I suspect it would involve a miserable support call where you never get the answer, lasting for what seems like eternity. After all, that’s what you do to us.
Get a clue. Respect your customers. Put the support help in the market you are doing business in…and if that happens to be here in America, hire, train and support some Americans. I for one am tired of the crap you pass off for support.
As for you geniuses who have decided that live support is only at the end of an instant message, your level in hell is currently under construction.
Smiles, Sales and Leadership
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Performance, Surviving Lousy Leaders
The smile may be the single most powerful sales tool ever.
I enjoy observing how the help in stores engage with their customers. What you see and hear speaks volumes about the leaders they work for.
Want to know how people feel about their jobs and their bosses? It’s on their faces. Employees mirror the treatment they receive from their leaders. While this theme begs some additional reading in the emerging field of social neuroscience (Goleman et. al), it really comes down to common sense.
My Experience in the Big Box: Welcome to Zombieland!
Walk into some big box stores and spend a few minutes observing people. The cashiers don’t make eye contact with their customers and a smile is a rare sighting. The few available floor clerks seem to head the other way when a customer with a puzzled look on his face enters the area. You get the impression that some transformation has taken place, sucking the joy of life out of the employees.
Seriously, for people to be so socially cold, they truly must hate their work, their boss or whatever fate brought them there. Evidence wasn’t far away during a recent, rare visit, as I was able to observe someone in a suit (probably corporate) dressing down a small team of employees (in front of customers) for clearly not following some arcane procedure somewhere. The employees were staring at their shoes, while this creepy, arrogant little reject from leader school attempted to showcase his authority.
I couldn’t wait to get of out that store, and I wondered why it was that compelled me to walk through the doors in the first place. The bosses own responsibility for creating that hell-like, night of the living dead atmosphere.
A Little Honey, A Little Vinegar on Main Street
Once I recovered from the big box experience, I continued my holiday rounds on our community’s Main Street, where I experienced both the good and the bad from small business leadership.
I visited one of my wife’s favorite shops and shop owners, where I was greeted with a handshake and personally walked through the process of selecting items that I have no qualifications to select. I spent at least twice as much as I intended and left feeling great.
The treatment was fantastic, and it appeared to be the de facto standard for everyone who walked in the door. The employees dealt with customers in the same happy, respectful and helpful fashion as their boss, and the cash register was clearly ringing.
Now, I needed one more item, and this great shop owner sent me down the block to another Main street merchant, where once again, I was back in retail leadership hell.
I walked into the brightly colored store (good) and observed the owner and an employee huddled over something that must have been really important. I said “hello” and received two clearly annoyed stares followed by a curt and unsmiling greeting. Intrigued, I mentioned the shop owner that had sent me this way, and this time was met with silence. I milled around a little, found what I was looking for, and decided that the lack of interest on their part was mutual. I set the item down, went home and ordered it on-line. No smile, no interest, no sale.
As an aside, all of you sales and marketing pros, contemplate what just happened in this last incident. A customer with need and money (highly qualified), was sent to the store (a referral) by a store owner (high credibility, high probability of making a purchase) , and all of that hard work was flushed down the toilet of indifference. Repeat that a few times over every month and one might bet (hope) this store is no longer around next year. A qualified lead and a valued referral…all retail road kill due to indifference.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The greatest selling technique ever, might just be direct eye contact and a smile. Leaders, send someone out to shop in your stores or visit your place of business and observe how employees are dealing with customers. The results might truly frighten you. And then do something about it!
And leaders, in what parallel universe do you come from where “not giving a crap” about your customers is a good plan? I don’t care if you’re the general manager of a Big Box or, the owner of a small retailer, know that one of the unarguable rules of the universe is that happy employees make happy customers.
Give your employees a reason to smile, and they’ll make you smile at the top and bottom lines.
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