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Harness the Power of the Personal Touch
Gone are the days when a company could hope to succeed by
offering a good product and backing it up with respectable
customer service.
In today's overstocked, cutthroat global economy, consumers
demand a superior experience from start to finish. Notable names
like the Ritz-Carlton hotel chain, Chico's, and the Container
Store, among others, meet the challenge by devising outstanding
brand promises -- they "overpromise" -- to attract customers,
and then "overdeliver" by giving those customers more than they
ever expected, at the Human TouchPoint and at every other point
of contact with their customers.
By making sure that their Human, Product, and System TouchPoints
are all honed to perfection, they are practicing a winning
technique that I call TouchPoint Branding.
The Human TouchPoint occurs the moment a member of your sales,
service, or technical staff interacts in person or over the
phone with a customer. The value of the Human TouchPoint derives
from the fact that your frontline people can support your
innovative brand promise in ways that only fellow humans are
capable of -- by empathizing with customers, for instance,
clearing up misunderstandings, and tailoring solutions to a
customer's particular circumstance. They can bend, and sometimes
break, the rules in a customer-friendly fashion.
In other words, they can overdeliver in ways that trigger
instant customer gratification and long-lasting loyalty.
The downside is the unpredictability of human emotions. The
degree to which the Human TouchPoint fulfills your brand promise
depends on how the customer feels about interacting with your
employee.
Control and consistency can never be guaranteed, which makes the
Human TouchPoint less reliable than the other two critical
points of customer contact. But the unpredictability can be
mitigated by intensive training and a corporate culture and
hiring policies that stress the importance of personal
interaction. The personal touch reigns supreme at the
Ritz-Carlton hotel chain, a subsidiary of Marriott
International.
People staying at a Ritz-Carlton hotel expect more than a
comfortable bed and a hot shower. They want what the chain's
founder, Cesar Ritz, defined as "the luxury hotel experience,"
and that means extraordinary human service with a winning smile.
The hotel's fine linens, handcrafted furniture, and
French-milled soaps are part of the luxury experience, but not
the centerpiece. Each Ritz facility is a study in personal
service, a global Human TouchPoint. At the Ritz Paris, for
example, a staff of more than 500 serves only 106 rooms, 56
suites, and 11 apartments.
At Ritz-Carlton hotels, the bellmen are authorized to spend as
much as $2,000 to help solve a customer's problem. Ask for
directions to a location inside the hotel and you'll get a
personal escort. All requests are met with the response, "It
would be my pleasure, Sir (or Madam)." The
phrase, "that's not
my job," is expressly forbidden.
The Container Store, a purveyor of storage and organization
products, is a role model for that kind of service and grounds
its brand promise in a simple reality: It hires fewer frontline
people than its competitors, but it trains and coaches them
superbly and pays them from 50 percent to 100 percent more than
the going industry average. The result: extremely motivated and
enthusiastic employees who happily greet customers and seem to
enjoy their jobs. They also listen carefully, respond
intelligently, and suggest ingenious space- and time-saving
solutions designed to simplify a customer's life.
To attain this preferred environment, the company espouses a set
of guiding principles that stress the Golden Rule, flexibility,
and intense training. Indeed, all first-year, full-time
Container Store employees receive 235 hours of training, as
compared to the industry average of seven hours. New part-timers
and even veterans receive extensive training, too. All new
employees, including office staff, spend their first week
working in a store. An exceedingly low turnover rate -- a
product of a pleasurable working environment -- is what makes
this regimen affordable for the company. W
When approaching a customer's problem, Container Store employees
are encouraged to think big, to expand the boundaries in order
to devise a great solution that not only wows the customer, but,
as it usually turns out, also sells more product. Having hired
the best people, paid them handsomely, trained them thoroughly,
and indoctrinated them in the culture, the company expects them
to perform at their peak. And they do.
It's true that Human TouchPoints are critical in virtually every
business, but, as I said before, they do have their limits. Many
organizations rely on their frontline people more than they
should, consigning their company's fate to the vagaries of
unpredictable human relationships. It's critical that you
recognize the pros and cons of the Human TouchPoint, and do what
you must to minimize the drawbacks.
Look around your business. Have you assigned sufficient
resources to hiring and training the right salespeople and
service representatives? Does your company's culture support
them and inspire them to magnificent achievement? Have you
created an environment of mutual trust between leaders,
employees, and customers? Are you providing the proper rewards
and incentives? If you can answer yes to all of these questions,
you have most likely designed a Human TouchPoint that advances
your brand promise. The payoff will be a higher level of sales
and profitability.
About the author:
Create breakthrough brands and deliver extraordinary customer
experiences with tips from Rick Barrera's new book, Overpromise
and Overdeliver; The Secrets of Unshakable Customer Loyalty.
Free excerpt available at http://www.overpromise.com the
Overpromise Website
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