Oddities......
further stimuli and thought provocations

CUSTOMER SERVICE AND PROFIT

There is ample evidence that poor customer service puts a company at risk. In an excellent article by John Kemp in Customer Management Journal it is stated that almost  £12billion of revenue is at risk each year if upset customers take their business elsewhere.

And they do.  And I do.  Last week I held a business meeting in the 'bar area' of a 4star hotel in the Midlands,UK.  My business colleague and I sat for two hours discussing various issues.  We had to chase hotel staff to obtain coffee. It took a long time coming.  Having finished our coffee we stared at the dirty cups (and those on other tables too) for over ninety minutes. Nobody took an interest, nobody offered us fresh coffee (thus losing a sale).  The person who originally served us made no eye contact, was disinterested and seemed troubled that we had asked for coffee when apparently she had more important things to do.

So my colleague and I decided NOT to have lunch at the hotel (they lost the business). We went to a local "working man's" pub where the service and food was excellent. The guy behind the bar (at THE GEORGE in Blaby near Leicester, UK) was extremely helpful and did his best.  It made all the difference.

The questions is WHY?  The hotel had the usual customer comments cards in the bedrooms saying how important customer service was. It even had a mission statement about aiming to excel at service. Yet it provided poor service. The pub did not have customer comments cards nor a mission statement - but the service was excellent, the food great (and cheaper too!).

Could somebody please explain?  E-mails please to Dr David Freemantle:  team@superboss.co.uk

It begs the fundamental

CUSTOMER SERVICE QUESTION.......................................

.................as a customer why is it that in certain places people open the doors for you, greet you, smile at you, chat to you, take an interest in you as a customer - and generally make you really feel good and valued?

And in other places this never happens - there is no eye contact and you are ignored? 

David Freemantle is very interested in your answer to this question. He also provides his own answer in his new book THE BUZZ (50 little things to make a great difference to serving your customers) whichis published later this year.

Quote from David Freemantle's new book THE BIZ

(published by Nicholas Brealey in 2004)

There is no such thing as a straight line - except in the mind of a human being.   Any study of nature will reveal lots of curves and jagged edges - but no straight lines.           

You can peer at trees, leaves, flowers, bodies, hair, skin and any other natural substance but you will never detect a straight line.   Nothing in this world grows straight.   Even a drawn straight line is not perfectly straight - but an approximation to straightness.

The best place for straight lines therefore is in the mind of people in determining the boundaries in their lives which should not be crossed.

This is essential for a boss doing the biz.    To motivate people they need to be perfectly clear about the lines they should keep within and never venture across.    Without such lines there is a high risk of disorganisation and disorder.                                                      Flowers at Savill Garden, Windsor Great Park, UK

MISCELLANEOUS FACTS

ONE

"The human brain weights about three pounds.  It contains at least 30 billion neurons, or nerve cells, and one million billion connections or synapses.  If you started counting these synapses right now at a rate of one per second, you would just finish counting them 32 million years from now"

(from Page 15 of the book  WIDER THAN THE SKY - the phenomenal gift of consciousness  by Nobel Prize Winner Geral M Edelman.  Published 2004 by Penguin Allen Lane)

COMMENT: No wonder many human beings do not think alike!

TWO

The CONCISE (I stress CONCISE) OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY has 240,000 words and phrases. Let's assume that these include approximately 40,000 common nouns (like 'angel, man and wedding') together with 4,000 common verbs (like 'approach, marry and succumb') then Steven Pinker estimates that the number of possible five word sentences in the English language (such as 'the angel married the man') is 6.4 trillion.  To crank them all out, taking five seconds per five word sentence, would take a million years.  However a sentence of over twenty words (like this one) is not at all uncommon and it is estimated that there one hundred million trillion of them in English. To count these one would need to be born as Adam or Eve and live for ever (almost)..............

(information provided on Page 7 of the book WORDS AND RULES by Steven Pinker. Published in 1999 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

COMMENT:  No wonder many human beings do not think alike - let alone say the same things!

FURTHER COMMENT:   Every day we are presented with an INFINITE NUMBER OF OPTIONS from which to choose - and this has an impact for good or for bad on customer service, on our individual performance as well as upon the success and failure of the company. No one organisation, despites its attempts with policies, rules, regulations and systems can ever prescribe the exact behaviours and communications needed to please a customer. This is why scripted welcomes and automated communications can often alienate customers. Force-fitting employees into a total compliance with procedures effectively treats them as a robots (programmed to speak and behave in a certain way).  Customer relations means human relations - and this in turn means making positive emotional choices from the infinite number of options presented to us every day (like whether to make eye contact, open the door for a customer, what to say or not to say, how to say it etc.)

Further reading:

"HOW TO CHOOSE - why our greatest successes are a reflection of our small everyday choices" - by David Freemantle.  Published in 2002 by FT Prentice Hall Business.