Creating a Unique Customer Experience

Like me, you will probably never travel to Bogota, Columbia, but that doesn’t make Andres Carne de Res any less interesting. It’s a restaurant—two actually, one in Bogota and one a half-hour outside of Bogota—that offers such a unique experience that it’s full all the time without promoting itself. You can get a sense of its uniqueness by checking out its Web site here. It’s in Spanish but you don’t have to understand Spanish to enjoy it.

Kaihan Krippendorff wrote about the restaurant on Fast Company’s Web site. He teaches a service innovation class using an 8-P framework that helps companies find the disruptive innovations that will differentiate it from the competition. Andres Carne de Res is a case study in disruptive innovation:

1. Product. Check out the restaurant’s amazing menus on its Web site. It pastes yellow butterflies to its local beer bottles and serves wine in hand-painted bottles. While the products may be different from those of its competitors, they certainly are packaged and presented in unique ways.

2. Price. Krippendorff got a menu that was a metal case about the size of shirt box that had a scroll inside and you turned a handle to roll it up or down to see menu items and prices.

3. Place. Andres Carne de Res is only open from Thursday to Sunday but it’s packed every night.

4. Promotion. The restaurant doesn’t do any. Word-of-mouth is enough.

5. Position. Call it…

Do You Trust Your Customers?

Peter Merholz has a great article on Harvard Business review about “What Trust Brings to Amazon, Zappos, and USAA.” His key point: Trust your customers, do something bold that reflects your organization’s values, and your competitors will never catch up.

He offers three examples.

The first is Amazon, which offered honest customer reviews about every product on its site right from the start. Remember, online retail was still a new concept and people were reluctant to buy something they hadn’t paged through or tried on or tested. Amazon trusted its customers to provide honest feedback and they did. And Amazon redefined the retail experience.

The second example is Zappos, which offered free shipping both ways on any shoe purchase with one-year no-questions-asked returns. It knew people would hesitate to buy shoes they couldn’t try on and they trusted their customers not to buy shoes, wear them for 364 days, and return them. And they were right.

The third example is USAA, which I’ve written about on Baldrige.com before. USAA allows its customers to take a picture of their paycheck and “deposit” it by email. Most financial institutions follow policies and procedures that demonstrate disdain for their customers. USAA trusts its customers, and that allows it to offer services no competitors can match.

Very few organizations can act like Amazon, Zappos, and USAA even if they want to. First, you have to know what your value proposition is. Are you selling low…

An Online Gold Mine

I was halfway into “Lost” when an alarm blared in my hotel room. A recorded voice told me to exit the hotel using the stairs. I did what most people probably do, which was check the hallway and look out the window. I didn’t see or smell a fire. I started putting my shoes on when a different voice announced that we should stay where we were while they assessed the threat. I watched “Lost.” A few minutes later, the first voice once again demanded that we leave the building. I was on the 17^th floor and was in no hurry to comply, but I finished getting my shoes on, grabbed my wallet, phone, and briefcase, and headed for the stairs. I never got there: The second voice explained that it was a false alarm and we could return to our rooms.

A month later I stayed in the same hotel. Same thing happened, although they were more efficient this time: They told us to ignore the alarm before I could get my shoes on.

The next morning, the hotel forgot my wake-up call.

When they sent an email asking me to take a short survey, I did, explaining why the false alarms and missed call accounted for the low scores and the likelihood that I wouldn’t stay there again.

A week later I received an email from one of the hotel’s managers apologizing for the alarms and missed call…

Walk in Your Customer’s Body Armor

USAA insures military members and their families. It does this really well: Its customer retention rate is 97.8%.

The company’s call centers are critical to serving customers located around the world. Its call center reps spend six months in training before answering customers’ calls. They eat MREs (meals ready to eat), find out what it feels like to wear Kevlar vests and flak helmets, and receive deployment letters to get them thinking about what such letters mean to the families they affect.

USAA understands its customers’ needs. It was founded by 25 Army officers in 1922; almost a quarter of its management and new hires have served in the military. It has ranked number 1 or 2 every year for the four years of the BusinessWeek and J.D. Powers Customer Service Champions list. No other company has come close to matching its performance. (“USAA’s Battle Plan,” Jena McGregor, BusinessWeek, February 18, 2010)

Mobile customers require mobile banking and insurance solutions. With USAA, a service member can use his iPhone to send a photo of his check to the USAA bank and it is deposited in his account. He can find out his balance with a text message. Later this year, he should be able to email or text-message money to family and friends for immediate deposit. He can use his phone to initiate a claim from the scene of an accident. If he’s looking at new cars, he can use his…