At Southwest Airlines, the “family” approach to customer service and a strong emphasis on culture clearly get results. In an industry where most air carriers are either bankrupt or threatening to go under, Southwest has never had a money-losing year.
Southwest enjoys its competitive advantage largely through the intangibles of people and culture. Competitors can buy the same airplanes, computers and facilities. What they can”™t buy is the customer experience delivered by Southwest people.
In addition to employees making sure planes take off and land on time and that luggage arrives with the passengers, the pilots tell jokes and flight attendants sing silly songs. The airline hires high-energy, fun-loving people who love serving customers.
For the retail and Internet side Gary Ryan Blair, author of “Everything Counts,” quotes Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh. “Our online shoe company has grown its sales from ”˜just about nothing”™ to over $900 million in eight years because of our unrelenting focus on customer satisfaction.”
Blair points out that 75 percent of Zappos”™ customers are repeat buyers. “The CEO”™s goal is to grow the company while maintaining its service-oriented culture and feel of a small company. Because employees know what they are doing they are happier, and that happy employees provide better service.
“Each of Zappos 1,300 employees is required to go through four weeks of customer loyalty training at full salary. After the first week, each is offered $2,000 to leave. This ensures people are there for the love of the job and not the money. Over 97 percent turn down the buyout.”
What can Hudson Valley business leaders learn about instilling a high-performance customer service culture at their companies? Southwest and Zappos provide the following guides.
Focus on customers rather than internal business forms, protocols, and procedures. Rely on a set of well-understood organizational values to drive employees”™ behavior and empower them to help customers.
Customers don”™t want to deal with sales, marketing and shipping to solve their problems. Avoid endless analysis of service issues by admitting there is no “perfect knowledge,” only “good judgment.” Require everyone to work with customers and have them report on what they learned and what they plan to do with this knowledge.
Recognize that budgets and other documents are worthless unless they lead to meaningful customer satisfaction and, if they don”™t lead to that goal, they can be changed. Be a true “intellectual,” valuing complaints on their merits rather than on the status of those who submit them.
Give your people the opportunity to solve problems in areas other than those of direct responsibility and let employees learn each other”™s jobs to develop empathy, learning and unity.
Create a general strategic plan to use as a benchmark, not as a bible, to guide your decisions and actions. Be prepared to pass up revenues and markets to carve out a definable and understandable niche.
In “Flip the Funnel,” author Joseph Jaffe also quotes Zappos”™ Hsieh. “We”™re not a shoe company that happens to give great customer service; we”™re a service company that happens to sell shoes.”
What business are you in? Sustainable profits are the byproduct of creating and delivering outstanding customer service.
Questions for discussion:
What would we have to do to empower our employees to satisfy customer complaints on the spot rather than passing the customer on to a different department or up to a manager?
What level of policies and procedures do we need in order to provide our people with a reasonable guideline? Do we have too many or too few rules and regulations at this time?
Joe Murtagh is The DreamSpeaker, an international keynote speaker, meeting facilitator and business trainer. For questions or comments, Joe@TheDreamSpeaker.com, www.TheDreamSpeaker.com or call 800-239-0058.
