System Failure

I’ve been travelling for a couple days, which was one day longer than it was supposed to be, so I missed a couple of posts but I did get to experience an appalling inability to meet basic customer requirements that sounds like an ongoing system failure.

I’m talking about Delta Airlines. I was scheduled to fly back from Lexington, Kentucky, on Monday night at 7:30. I heard an announcement that a flight from Atlanta to Lexington had been delayed so I checked with the Delta rep at the gate to see if that was my airplane. It wasn’t. I joked about how lucky I was to get a plane coming from Detroit. She said the flights from Atlanta and Detroit seemed to alternate having trouble.

As take-off time approached, we were told that the plane’s engine wouldn’t start and a mechanic had been called. Twenty minutes later he showed up. About 45 minutes later we were told the plane was ready to go and we trudged out to the last plane leaving Lexington that night.

Once everyone was settled and the door closed, we waited and waited and waited for the engines to start and cheered when they finally kicked in. We taxied for take-off and then we taxied some more. Lexington is a small airport so if you taxi for ten minutes, you know something is wrong and, sure enough, we found ourselves back at the gate. The pilot told us the crew had reached its time limit and couldn’t continue. Did…

Fast Food Customer Focus

When Pal’s Sudden Service, a small fast-food chain in Tennessee, won the Baldrige Award in 2001, its president, Thom Crosby, suddenly realized that winning prohibited them from reapplying for five years. “I called up the head of the program and asked if we could decline the award and stay in the system. He didn’t want to hear that.”

Pal’s continues to conduct annual internal assessments because, as Crosby states, “I’m a real big believer.” Like other world-class companies, Pal’s benefits from asking and answering key questions that reveal how the organization works. The snapshot produced by this exercise becomes the engine for change, improvement, and success.

The questions explore all areas that are critical to an effective management system. Many of the questions have never been asked, which means many of the areas they address have never been evaluated. And therein lays their power.

A few years ago I asked these questions of senior leaders at an organization that dominated market share in its industry. One question in particular solicited a variety of responses. The question was: How do you determine key customer requirements and expectations?

Many of the leaders talked about how they interacted with their customers daily. Others mentioned customer surveys, complaints, and lost customer interviews, among other approaches. Nobody described a process. I asked how they used the information from these sources to determine customer requirements and they said they knew what their customers required because they talked to them every day. In other words, they had no process for determining…

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 and promising changes to keep both from happening. He offered a coupon for a night’s…

Engaging Customers in a Digital Age

In a recent survey of businesses in the UK, mainland Europe, and the U.S., 62% of respondents agreed that differentiating their value proposition by customer service rather than by product was essential or very important (click here for the article). In fact, as customers, 74% said they were likely or very likely to buy more from a company as a result of service excellence that goes beyond expectations.

The Baldrige Criteria ask how you engage customers to serve their needs and build relationships. Engaged customers are loyal, do more business with you, and recommend your products and services to others, which is why more and more companies are taking steps to develop “very satisfied”—as opposed to merely “satisfied”—customers.

One obstacle to engaging customers, according to Pegasystems, which commissioned the survey, is the constraints imposed by legacy Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms. Only 43% of respondents can provide a consistent customer experience across all delivery channels. Part of the problem can be traced to the digital divide: legacy CRM systems don’t have the flexibility to adapt to differing requirements and can’t deliver a high-quality customer response to all customers.

I’m reminded of a story Michael Dell tells in Behind the Cloud by Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler. Benioff had told Dell about an internal networking technology they were using at salesforce.com to create a feedback loop with their customers. Dell adapted the technology to create IdeaStorm, an online community forum that Dell uses to engage customers and elicit and act on their ideas. To date, Dell…