REVIEW ME! What are your Positively Outrageous Service Stories? Before the advent of Social Media, one would on average share a positive experience with nine people and a negative experience with sixteen people. Now we share customer experiences with hundreds, if not thousands of people with a potential rippling effect many times more. Encourage your clients, customers and guests to share their Positively Outrageous Service story. Story Structure: What happened specifically? What was the … [Read more...]
My Boss Needs Skills
MY BOSS NEEDS SKILLS Toxicity is Viral Too Toxic bosses or behavior seeps into your customer service. The #1 reason people leave their jobs is not the work but the boss! Are you crafting positions that employees enjoy and leverage their strengths? Joy is contagious and will infect your customer experience positively. Good bosses influence behavior and draw the best out of one allowing one to give. Toxic work environments inhibit happiness hindering the release of Positively Outrageous … [Read more...]
Two Face
TWO FACE Is Your Internal and External Face Congruent? You can’t behave one way with a customer and another internally. Negative humor and sarcasm WILL spill into other areas of your life. Two faces lead to silos, communication breakdowns between departments and defensive postures. Consistency is key. Create WOW internally; it’s infectious creating WOW customer experiences naturally, organically. The antidote is “be for me”, body language, consistency, and disarming through … [Read more...]
Super Hearing
SUPER HEARING “I am for you” What Are You Hearing? Hearing Past the Situation. When we get emotional we push out the logic in a service situation. Diffuse negative emotional situations through “super hearing” creating the bridge from where a customer is emotionally to redeem the solution faster. Start with open-ended powerful questions. “Tell me more” “What else?” … dives deeper into the root of the problem or situation. “What would you like to see happen?” Super Hearing is about “I am for … [Read more...]
Bullet Proof
BULLET PROOF Inoculate Yourself Against the Tornado Develop your super-hero powers in toxic environments and situations. “I’m so glad you got me!” “You’re not yelling at me … you’re angry about the situation.” Diffuse the initial confrontations by not taking it personally and being “unoffendable”. … [Read more...]
Alignment is a Beautiful Thing
ALIGNMENT IS A BEAUTIFUL THING Begin by Defining POS for YOUR Organization “The fish stinks from the head” First, leadership must define and align an organization’s service expectations. Second, align your departments, (in a larger organization). Third, create alignment in your hiring practices to the organization’s service expectations. … [Read more...]
PET PEEVES
Our Periodic Riff on Behaviors That Really Bothers Us! Clearly not Positively Outrageous Service! “There is a certain degree of patience and impatience in everybody. How to balance patience and impatience, and when to show which of them is the very thing everybody must endeavor to master.” ― Ernest Agyemang Yeboah Hiding behind the uniform, kiosk, or desk? Your first duty is to serve! Use your position to engage, deliver what's needed, and love your customers and … [Read more...]
Experience AMAZING-ly Bad Customer Service
REALLY? Tell me this didn't happen... It Did!!! "Although your customers won't love you if you give bad service, your competitors will." - Kate Zabriskie, Founder Business Training Works Boasting about your great customer service is NOT a good idea! “Pride comes before the fall.” You also take away a key principle of Positively Outrageous Service: “RANDOM and UNEXPECTED. Andrew’s real-life scenario gives us three valuable lessons that we can all learn from. … [Read more...]
Engagement: Get the Customer to Play or Get Involved!
Positively Outrageous Service – Principle #3 “Unless you love everybody, you can’t sell anybody.” – Dicky Fox (Jerry Maguire) The third fundamental principle of Positively Outrageous Service: Create engagement by either getting the customer to play or get them involved in other ways. A service experience that is fun makes it highly memorable and lends itself to positive word-of-mouth. Your customer can't help themselves but to tell others! For more on this listen to our 15 minute radio … [Read more...]
Out of Proportion to the Circumstances
Positively Outrageous Service - Principle #2 "I'm in the service business. I mean, our sandwiches are pretty good; I don't know if they're extraordinary. But our service is." "Jimmy John" Liautaud The second key principle of Positively Outrageous Service is creating a service experience that is "out of proportion to the circumstances." It heightens the intensity, engagement and memorability of customer service, or in reality, any relational engagement! For more listen to our 15 minute … [Read more...]