Is humor part of your service recovery plan

A super short sample of how one Southwest Airlines employee changed our experience by bringing his authentic self to work. For yet one more example pick up the July August 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review and enjoy the How I did it story about Zappos. Taken from CEO Tony Haish's book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose, the article describes Zappos commitment to "providing the wow experience". Three ideas paralleling "The Southwest Airlines Way" include:

People don't make the difference.
The right people make the difference. Zappos move to Las Vegas was predicated on finding a work force that understood 24 hour customer service. Last year they had 25,000 applicants for 250 positions.

No Scripts
Scripts may guarantee consistency, but they obliterate personality. Real connections happen when real people are allowed to be themselves. Even though only 5% of Zappos sales are made by phone at some point most customers want to talk to someone. This is what others have described as "The moment of truth". Opportunities like these are not made of information, but emotion. My wife described her "aha" experience when shopping for a pair of yellow sandals. They couldn't be chrome yellow, sunshine or even daisy yellow. Her moment of truth came with the description "yellow, like the icing on a vanilla Zinger".




Metrics are a double edged sword
Most organizations use very narrow performance metrics to quantify performance, pitting departments against each other for top honors. Airlines as an example often segment the employees necessary for ground operations (baggage handlers, gate agents, ticket agents, etc.) into their own competitive teams. Southwest Airlines groups teams into customer experience outcomes like "on time departures". Instead of 18 competing teams SWA has one score for all team members. Similarly Zappos has chosen to ignore the traditional "average handle time" metric in favor of simply delivering great customer service. This includes, according to this article, providing assistance to a group of late night revelers who needed someone to care that they really, really needed pizza and a six hour session in shoe therapy.

Read More articles like this at http://randymorgan.com/redshoescrolls.html

Category:

Comedy

Tags:

• Affective Leadership
• Emotional Intelligence
• Keynote
• Randy Morgan
• CSP
• Reframing
• Managing Emotions
• Red Shoe Speaker
• Boise
• Service Recovery
• Motivation