What Customers Like About You : Adding Emotional Value for Service Excellence and Competitive Advantage

312 Pages·1999·1.21 MB·English

by  David Freemantle

P
RAISE FOR
W HAT CUSTOMERS LIKE ABOUT YOU
“What Customers Like About You makes a powerful case for
adding emotional value to your customer service and then
demonstrates how to do it.”
People Management
“Full of valuable advice . . . Freemantle demolishes several
myths and supplies a brilliant chapter on recruitment that alone
makes his book a must.”
Management Today
“Full of tips on how to instill the crucial mindset into frontline
staff. Try the one-hour e-value course on your team.”
Director
“Words of wisdom which have wide relevance at a time when
customer service is increasingly under attack.”
Evening Standard
“Challenges managers to re-evaluate their approach.”
The Times
“There are lots of case studies, many of which are inspirational.”
Financial Times
“A valuable addition to the bookshelf . . . useful in untangling
the behavioural problems associated with customer care.”
Professional Manager
“His arguments are strong and clearly presented. This book is
full of practical good sense.”
Business Life
This book is dedicated to…
…the Freemantle family
who seem to be born writers and travelers
…my late father George who taught me many of the lessons in this
book
…my mother Nora who has always loved writing and traveling
…my brother Mike who is also a writer and traveler, his wife Mary
and their own family of wandering children, Helen, Dominic,
Charlotte andLizzie
…my “grown-up” children, includingKate who travels much and
Tom who is the exception and favors the world of music, together with
his wife Nicky and their son (my grandson) Louis George
…my “younger” daughter Ruth-Elena who is displaying an
increasing talent as a writer
…my step-daughter Linnet who has traveled to more countries than
I can remember.
And finally
…my beautiful wife Mechi who traveled all the way fromVenezuela
to spend her life with me and travels with me when she can and
writes to me when she can’t.
W
HAT
C L
USTOMERS IKE
A Y
BOUT OU
Adding Emotional Value for
Service Excellence and
Competitive Advantage
D F
AVID REEMANTLE
NI C H O L A S BR E A L E Y
PU B L I S H I N G
L O N D O N
This edition first published by
Nicholas Brealey Publishing Limited in 1999
First published in hardback in 1998
Reprinted 1999
36 John Street 1163 E. Ogden Avenue, Suite 705-229
London Naperville
WC1N 2AT, UK IL 60563-8535, USA
Tel: [phone] Tel: (888) BREALEY
Fax: [phone] Fax: [phone]
http://www.nbrealey-books.com
© David Freemantle 1998
The right of David Freemantle to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Freemantle, David.
What customers like about you : adding emotional value for service
excellence and competitive advantage / David Freemantle.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-85788-201-6 (alk. paper)
1. Customer loyalty. 2. Customer relations. 3. Service
industries. I. Title.
HF5415.525.F73 1998
658.8′12--DC21 98-30598
CIP
ISBN1-85788-201-6 (hardback)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording and/or otherwise without the prior writ-
ten permission of the publishers. This book may not be lent, resold, hired out
or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form, binding or cover other
than that in which it is published, without the prior consent of the publishers.
Printed in Finland by Werner Söderström Oy.
C
ONTENTS
Acknowledgements vi
1 The importance of being liked 1
2 Adding emotional value 19
3 Likeable customer service 37
4 Emotional connectivity 51
5 The importance of integrity 68
6 Creative customer service 86
7 Everyday likeable behaviors 103
8 Influencing how customers feel about you 123
9 Why it isn’t fashionable to be liked 145
10 The likeable organization 171
11 The likeable leader 191
12 Recruiting people your customers like 211
13 Training people to be liked by your customers 225
14 Dealing with customers you dislike 237
15 Finding out what your customers like 251
16 The one-hour course for adding emotional value 269
Appendix I Emotionally connected stars 281
Appendix II Suggested further reading 286
Appendix III Clusters 290
Appendix IV Emotions 292
Appendix V Emotional range 294
Appendix VI Customer service integrity tests 295
Index 299
A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Two years ago I set out on my travels to find out why some
companies excelled at customer service and others failed,
despite their genuine efforts to achieve it. A large number of peo-
ple around the world contributed to this research in some shape
or form. Each one of them “added emotional value” in helping
me find the answer – the answer being of course that as customer
service “stars” they added emotional value to the service they pro-
vide their customers.
These stars who, together with their teams, gave me their time,
mostly in face-to-face meetings together with telephone calls and
occasionally in writing, are listed in Appendix I. I am incredibly
grateful to them all.
I am also grateful to my publisher Nicholas Brealey, who has
taken an immense personal interest in this book and helped
improve it beyond recognition.
Finally, I am forever grateful to my wife Mechi who provided
me with much emotional support and who has helped me learn
the lessons of adding emotional value. She epitomizes much of
what I advocate in this book.
1
T I
HE MPORTANCE
B L
OF EING IKED
SOMETHINGISGOINGWRONG. DESPITETHEEXTENSIVEANDSINCERE
efforts of many senior executives to increase profits through bet-
ter marketing and better customer service, many companies are still
failing to deliver the goods.
Ever since Tom Peters’ book In Search of Excellencewas published
in 1982 a great deal of attention has been paid to customer service
and methods for improving it. I have yet to come across a single com-
pany anywhere in the world which does not say that customer service
is important. Most companies I know have initiated some form of
customer service improvement program.
Yet despite all these initiatives, customer satisfaction levels are
falling. A report in the December 1995 issue of Fortune stated that
in the previous year, overall customer satisfaction ratings in the USA
had declined one full percentage point from 74.8 to 73.7 percent.
Another report in the January 1998 issue of the Harvard Business
Reviewrevealed that “customer satisfaction rates in the United States
are at an all-time low, while complaints, boycotts, and other expres-
sions of consumer discontent rise.”
In September 1997 the UK National Consumer Council reported
that customer service is getting worse – 43 percent of people surveyed
had made at least one complaint about service levels in the previous year.
The comparable figure from five years previously was only 25 percent.
2 WHATCUSTOMERS LIKE ABOUT YOU
According to a research report published in November 1996 by
the Henley Centre in the UK, this decline in service levels is costing
companies billions in lost revenue. The researchers estimated that a 1
percent cut in customer service problems could generate an extra £16
million ($25 million) in profits for a typical medium-sized company
over five years.
The same paradox applies to marketing. As companies strive to
outmarket their competitors new vogues in marketing techniques are
created, vogues which the gurus promulgate and many companies try
to emulate. For example, over the last few years “relationship mar-
keting” has become popular. Yet there now seem to be severe doubts
about its efficacy. A major article in the Harvard Business Review
(January 1998) was entitled “Preventing the premature death of rela-
tionship marketing”. To quote: “ironically, the very things that mar-
keteers are doing to build relationships with customers are often the
things that are destroying those relationships”.
Business schools have jumped on the bandwagon and have focused
on improving customer service and marketing to boost profitability.
But despite all this accumulated knowledge and apparent wisdom,
over 46 percent of companies named in the Fortune 500 during the
1980s have disappeared from the list. There are daily reports in the
financial press of large organizations struggling to survive, of yet
another well-known company posting a “profits warning”.
Where did these companies go wrong? Many of them were apply-
ing the latest theories, systems and practices advocated by the
experts. Yet these did not work for them.
The small number of companies which are consistently successful
rarely comply with the theories, analyses and practices advocated by
business school professors, despite the soundness of their proponents’
reasoning and the comprehensive nature of their facts. One only has
to look at SouthWest Airlines and Herb Kelleher to conclude that
perhaps you have to be “nuts” (in other words, totally irrational) to
be successful! Conversely, you might also conclude that we are trying
to be too rational in analyzing and determining the routes to success.
In preparation for this book I sought to investigate this paradox,
why the application of all of the theories about excellence in customer
service rarely led to success. My studies led me to many different
companies around the world. I talked with senior executives as well
as front-line people. Initially, my intention was to focus on customer
service and try to establish why a small number of companies were so
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING LIKED 3
good at it while so many others that advocated the importance of ser-
vice were actually unable to provide it.
As my study progressed, a pattern of attributes emerged that
could be related not only to success in customer service but also to
marketing and the way the company was managed. In fact, this pat-
tern could be related to success in business in general and the overall
attainment of competitive advantage.
T
HE ONE CRITICAL FACTOR
These attributes derived from one simple factor, a factor which in my
view is a critical missing link in all those companies that have consis-
tently pursued business success but failed to achieve it.
The factor simply relates to doing the things your customers like.
The degree to which customers like your company and the people
who represent it has a critical impact on business success. Simply put,
if customers like your company there is a higher probability that they
will buy from you than if they do not.
The degree to which customers like your company (and its peo-
ple) is a function of the emotional value you add to the relationship.
Of course, the relationship extends beyond the people customers deal
with to the product and the brand. Brands such as Harley-Davidson,
Virgin and Body Shop have an incredibly high degree of emotional
value. This is enhanced by the people who sell and deliver the prod-
uct. Harley-Davidson enthusiasts like to be served by Harley-
Davidson enthusiasts.
To quote Jesper Kunde from his book Corporate Religion:
Emotional values are replacing physical attributes as the funda-
mental market influencer … For example it’s no coincidence that
the Coca-Cola Company has created an emotional universe that
human beings all over the world can identify with. It’s in Coca-
Cola’s ESP [emotional selling point] that the real answer lies,
which equates to an unconcerned American lifestyle and happy
people.
When there is no emotional value in a relationship there is effectively
no relationship, at best an incidental and momentary interaction as a
customer undertakes a transaction and walks away.