Seeing things from the customer's perspective

I spend some part of every week teaching English to my colleagues at InfoJobs. They are great students and great professionals, and I feel very fortunate to work with them. I've been teaching for some time now, and yet I make mistakes all the time.
Probably the most significant continuous mistake I make is failing to look at what we're doing from the student perspective. People talk a lot about looking at things from the customer's perspective, but this isn't necessarily so easy.
Why not? It should be simple to "put yourself into the other person's shoes", right? But as a teacher of my native language, so much is second nature to me that it does require a certain amount of deconstruction to teach effectively.
It seems that the same could be said of products, services, and spaces.
What's obvious to the creators of  transactional spaces  may not help, serve, or please the customer, user or patient. When was the last time you went into a shop, hospital or government office and said "Wow!" (in a good way)? Do you generally find that spaces intended to serve you have been created with your comfort, ease, or pleasure in mind? Even virtual spaces, which would seem to offer a lot of potential for engagement without the kind of spatial and climatic boundaries "brick-and-mortar" places face, are often disappointing, if not totally frustrating.
For my students, encountering new material in class could be compared to walking into a building. How do you know which way to go? Do you feel welcome? Is what's happening clear? Is the signage helpful? Is there something to discover? Will your activity be active or passive? What landscape of emotions is evoked? What will happen if you make a mistake? Will there be enough time to find your way around? How will you feel when you leave? Will you take away any gifts or souvenirs? How will you remember your experience?
The vulnerability of students, patients, and customers is impressive, sometimes overwhelming, but may offer a real opportunity: a positive new experience paves the way for more openness towards experience in the future.

Exceptional service stories

Most people have a story about really execrable service.

Many people also have a story about exceptional service.

I imagine that most business owners would prefer to have their business featured in the second category.

When it comes to exceptional service stories, some analysis might be in order from the business point of view. For example, you could wonder whether the amazing service your customer received is part of an integrated service culture in your organization, or simply a "random act" of kindness, leadership, or good sense.

This kind of analysis is important, because while it may be easy to have a few star people on your team, the ones all your customers want to work with, it's much more difficult to inculcate a service culture supported by intelligent processes which ensure some level of consistency.

Why is consistency so important? Exceptional service stories help to illustrate why. Imagine that I rave to you about the amazing service at a restaurant in our city. Our server was so on top of things, everything was so smooth, she went out of her way and really made my celebration lunch a fabulous event. She did everything she could to make it fantastic!

You think: perfect. I have an important celebration coming up, so I'll go there. You reserve, you go, you have high expectations, and from the start you feel like you're in a completely different restaurant than the one I described. Nothing is smooth, no one seems to being taking care of you, and you're really, really disappointed.

You feel like you're in a different restaurant because you are. Without that special server (or manager, or account rep, or mail carrier), everything is different.

So, the question is, what can you learn from exceptional service stories that you can use to improve the experience of all your customers? One thing you could do would be to simply start collecting these stories and looking for potentially extendable best practices. What are the great people doing that we should make into standard practice? The concept here is to copy success.
A quick template for copying success could be:

1. Collect exceptional service stories



2. Detect spreadable best practices



3. Train your people on these practices



4. Incorporate these into your standard procedures



5. Monitor and improve!

Product or service?

One conflict or potential source of confusion in business is the product vs. service question. What are we selling?
Although there are a huge number of businesses selling services only, many of the businesses we work with every day are selling products of one kind or another. The problem is that selling the product generally requires some kind of service, and this is where a lot of businesses really fail, be they brick-and-mortar or online. Part of the problem is often that a company believes too much in the product, which can produce a kind of blindness to what the customer has to go through (survive?) in order to obtain or enjoy it. A few examples:

• Restaurants with with truly great food in which the inattention or incompetence of the server deprives you of the pleasure of your meal.


• Clunky, difficult e-commerce sites.


• Shops designed for everyone's convenience except the customer's.

I think the underlying idea in all of these cases is that the product is soooooo good that people will do what they must in order to obtain it.
I don't know about you, but I'm less and less likely to put up with bad service to obtain any product which I consider optional. Obviously we're all held hostage at one point or another by government bureaucracies, monopolies, health care providers, and internal service providers in our own organizations. Unfortunately, our agency might be quite limited in these situations. But when it comes to having lunch or buying a book or a pair of shoes, for me bad service is increasingly unacceptable. Why should I support that kind of business?
For businesspeople, it's worth asking what you're making your customers do in order to get to your product, and whether you're susceptible to another provider with better service.
And of course, there's always the human factor to take into account: that ice cream sure tastes better when it's served by someone who cares.

Is it about being nice?

Is service just something about being nice?
It's certainly true that people with a deep sense of service are usually really nice!
But from a business or organizational standpoint, simply being nice isn't enough.
Organizations need systems to help nice people do their jobs effectively. It's sad to go into a shop, restaurant, government office, etc. and see nice people struggling with cumbersome systems, or badly designed systems, or no system at all. You can tell they're trying, they're smiling through, they're doing their best, but they're swimming upstream. And if they're great at their jobs, mobile, or living in a town with more than one diner, they'll be moving on to a place that better supports their efforts.
So... If nice people can flourish in their work if they have a good system, can people who aren't so nice give good service if the system is really good?
I know my answer, but what do you think?

Who is my customer?

When something seems obvious, it might be a good time to question it.

For example, I probably think I know who my customer is, in demographic terms perhaps, or based on unit sale, or browser, or any number of features. If I tend to think in terms of similarities or differences, it can be easy to think my customer is "like me" or "not like me."

But who is my customer, really?

A habitat for happiness: Chip Conley of Joie de Vivre

One of my favorite TED talks is this one from Chip Conley. As the owner of the Joie de Vivre hotel chain, he has a lot of insight into creating meaningful experiences for guests. A key point here is that great experiences for guests or customers come from within the organization, from the real commitment and feeling that emanate from those who give service.

Why does service have a bad name?

It's certainly worth saying up front that one big reason service has a bad name, and can be a tough sell, is because it used to be (and still is) denigrated in many societies.
Part of my family comes from the American south, where for a long time it wasn't customary to see "white people" waiting tables, cleaning, caring for other people's children, or working at gas stations.
I remember my grandmother being truly scandalized and confused when I was working as a waitress in California. In her view, this kind of work was beneath me.
Her view opened my eyes. It hadn't really occurred to me that any kind of work could be beneath me. Work could be difficult, low paid, more or less to my liking; many things, but not beneath me. But looking at it through her eyes, I understood that waiting tables wasn't regarded very well by people like my grandmother. She had always worked in office jobs, what we used to call "white collar" jobs (or, believe it or not, "pink collar" jobs, the ones dominated by women); she'd never put on an apron at work.
I stopped to consider my job, and my coworkers. It was certainly true that a lot of them hadn't been to college and weren't planning to go. But they were really good at their jobs, and they taught me a lot. Most of the waitresses I worked with could remember a ton of information, carry seven or eight plates of food, multitask circles around most people I had ever met, and do it all more or less charmingly. Many of them were truly kind and willing to make an extra effort for people who needed it. And yet some huge number of people in our society were thinking that our work was low, not respectable, even as they enjoyed that timely coffee refill, that sympathetic ear.
So I'd like to pause in my story now, to ask, what do you think? When you hear or see the word service, what comes to mind? If you don't work in service, would it be "beneath you"? And if you do, have you experienced negative attitudes from those around you towards your work?