John DiJulius | Customer Experience Blog

Getting to Benny

Making Price Irrelevant…

How to get to “Benny” – One of my consulting clients is a large professional service firm, trying to differentiate themselves from all the other firms competing with the exact same services offered. There are the typical challenges when helping an organization transform into what we like to call a Customer Service Revolution. It starts with the top executives truly focusing and committing long-term to demonstrate this is not flavor of the month, program of the year or management by best seller. In some industries it is changing an old paradigm, a stale stubborn mindset that screams: “We are not in the hospitality industry. I am a professional who brings a highly-valued skill set and intellectual capital that my clients desperately need.”

This organization is guilty of the same, which is what the key decision makers recognized and why they determined to change their culture.  After the first year, everyone was excited about the momentum that the “Project Client Xperience” had produced. Yet there was still a great deal of work to be done.  A percentage of the professional service providers, including partners, had not totally bought in.  At one of our regional workshops, I had one of the more influential partners (let’s call him Larry) ask if he could share a story with the group. His story was about how one of their largest long-term clients had recently changed their CEO.  Any time an organization changes a CEO, all vendors are in danger of being replaced. So Larry went on to share that he knew he had to quickly demonstrate to the new CEO (let’s call him Greg Benedict) how valuable and how brilliant they were, before it was decided to start shopping their services.

Larry admitted it was a struggle; every meeting they had that the CEO attended was short and very transactional. Every time Larry and his associates tried to make small talk, share advice or demonstrate their expertise, Greg, who is known by his close friends as “Benny,” was not interested in engaging in anything more than the facts. He just wanted bottom line answers. Larry knew that once their current contract was up, they were going to lose this large long-term client.

That is when Larry started thinking about all the “Project Client Xperience” training, systems and tools they had been going through. He admitted while he didn’t put much stock into it, he decided he had nothing to lose. So the first thing he did was figure out what Secret Service  he could do on Greg. He realized that there was very little customer intelligence he had learned in the few meetings. He remembered about F.O.R.D. (family, occupation, recreation & dreams), but figured it was virtually impossible to find any of this out until he started doing some research online, especially via social media.  Through that, he discovered (most notably) that Greg was an avid triathlon competitor and was a big supporter of MS causes.

At the end of their next meeting, Larry briefly mentioned that he was aware that Greg competed in triathlons and how it was a “bucket list” item of his own to compete in one. Larry said, “Greg’s eyes lit up like cannon balls! Next thing you know, we are in his office and he is showing me pictures on his walls of different events that he was in and telling stories. He told me that if he could do it — anyone could. Over the next few weeks he was sending me advice, books and articles on how to train. I also found he has a daughter who is challenged with Multiple Sclerosis and that is why he is such a big supporter.”

Larry said several months later he was competing in his first triathlon with new buddy, Greg. Additionally, he has since become a supporter of the annual event Greg holds every year for MS.  Larry went on to tell the group how Greg’s company renewed their annual contract with Larry’s firm, but best of all, Larry said, every note or email he gets from Greg is signed “Benny.”

How well do you truly create emotional connections with your clients?

 

 

You can’t change the experience until you change the paradigm

I have worked with several hospitals and medical facilities over the years and I don’t think there is any tougher or more important jobs out there than taking care of people’s health. Their Service Vision, however, is one of the easiest and clearest to figure out, yet I have found that the medical industry typically does a very poor job in connecting the roles of their employees to that Service Vision.

The Ritz-Carlton Group Hospital

This is an exercise I do when working with hospitals and medical centers: Imagine The Ritz-Carlton has decided to open and manage a hospital. What would that look like? How would they approach things differently? Let’s look at some of the titles hospitals use for their employees: (1) tray passers, (2) receptionists, (3) nurses, and (4) patients.

The person who is in charge of delivering food to the patient is a Tray Passer. I asked why are they called that, and the response was, “That is what they have always been called.” How proud would you be if someone asked, “What is it that you do?” How difficult is it to get Tray Passers to realize the part they play in the company’s Service Vision? I found that Tray Passers are pretty important in educating patients on proper nutrition for the most rapid recovery. If this person’s expertise can have a big impact on a patient recovering fully and sooner rather than later, they play a major role in any hospital’s Service Vision. How about we rename Tray Passers “Chief Nutritionist Officers” or “Directors of Patient Diet”?

Upon arrival at a hospital, the person that you go to for information and directions is called the “Receptionist.” And most of the time they act like receptionists, by providing the least information they can, and only when asked. What if we changed their title to “Director of First Impressions”? Wouldn’t that title make them rethink the role they play in the experiences of all the visitors to the hospital?

Let’s talk about the toughest job in the world, nursing. Most hospitals today will tell you how nurses are underpaid, understaffed, overworked, and as a result, many are burned out. What if we called them “Daymakers”? Because that is what they actually are.

If they were constantly referred to as Daymakers and they had to introduce themselves as Daymakers, ­wouldn’t that make them reconsider their role and the sensitivity they must have with every patient and family member they come in contact with? Who do you think are happier with their jobs, nurses or Daymakers?

And finally the customers, who are the people who come to us for our services, whom we have always called “Patients.” Why? Probably because the first hospital that ever opened called them that and since then everyone else just did the same. Any employee of a hospital will tell you that after dealing with hundreds of patients per day, over time, the employees can become desensitized and numb. Especially when dealing with a new patient that has, what a nurse considers a minor, temporary condition, compared to the patient down the hall, who may only have a few days left to live. However, it is all relative to the patient and the “minor,” temporary condition may be the worst thing that has ever happened to that person and has him or her scared to death. Most nurses and doctors will also admit that instead of referring to patients as “Ms. Daniels in room 201,” they just refer to them as “201b” (meaning room 201, second bed). With that perspective, it can make it more difficult to provide a world-class patient experience.

Any good hospital will tell you that they have two external customers: (1) the patient and (2) the patient’s loved ones. Again, what if we thought outside the box and renamed patients, “family members,” and the loved ones “relatives”? In many situations, hospital customers are like hospital family members and hospital relatives, where the employees get to know them very well, even if it is just for a few days.

Like anything else, just giving new titles ­doesn’t change the culture, it is an aid in reminding that person of the role that comes with his or her position. But it is ultimately management’s daily responsibility to constantly demonstrate how each department supports and impacts the Service Vision of the organization, which drives the customer’s experience and level of satisfaction.

If you can’t change the people, change the people

Afraid your Service Vision will be met with some “rolling of the eyes”? You can’t let that stop you. One hospital that was committed to changing their culture was met with resistance by their 15 receptionists. So they asked all 15 to reapply for their existing jobs. Only three members of the original crew survived.

X Commandments for Providing a World-Class Customer Experience

30×20 Poster-FINAL.2

From years of studying and working with world-class customer service organizations, I have found that there are principles they all have in common that differentiate them from other organizations and elevate them to a different customer service level. These commandments of world-class service are irrefutable. There are not nine or eleven, there are ten. They do not change, or become obsolete. Just as important as the commandments themselves, is the order of the commandments, here, referred to as the Chain of Commandments. The commandments are arranged in the precise sequence necessary for an organization to provide a world-class customer experience. It is impossible for an organization to reach its optimum level of service attitude and customer satisfaction without proficiently executing each commandment.

I. Service Vision: A clear purpose of why the business exists.

First and foremost every organization that provides superior service has a strong Service Vision that creates a clear direction for everyone in that business—the true underlying purpose of what an organization brings to the community and why your customers buy from you that they ­couldn’t get elsewhere (Chapter 5).

You must start with a Service Vision before anything else can take shape in your organization. The Service Vision drives hiring, standards, training, leadership philosophies, and so on. Without the Service Vision, you are like a pilot without a flight plan. How will you know where you are headed?

II. Creating a World-Class Internal Culture: Attract, hire, and retain only the people who have the Service DNA.

Creating a world-class internal culture that only attracts, hires, and retains the people who are capable of upholding the Service Vision of the organization (Chapter 6).

Building your culture using your Service Vision to guide you will make or break the success of the following eight commandments.

III. Nonnegotiable Experiential Standards: Experience standards everyone must follow.

Have nonnegotiable experience standards for each stage of the organization’s customer experience cycle. These experiential standards allow employees to provide a consistent engaging experience that is unlike the majority of competitors. Employees must consistently execute each of these standards (Chapter 7).

Your Service Vision is clear and you are adding the people that truly share in that vision; now you have to create experiential standards that will allow that Service Vision to be of value to your customer.

IV. Secret Service Systems: Utilizing Customer intelligence to personalize their experience and engage and anticipate their needs.

Create Secret Service systems that easily enable front-line employees to personalize the customer’s experience by engaging them and anticipating and delivering on their needs (Chapter 8).

Having great standards is not enough, you now need to systemize those standards in order for them to be realistically delivered on a consistent basis.

V. Training to Provide a World-Class Customer Experience: Systems and processes that remove variation and provide a consistent customer experience.

Create an incredible training program for all new and existing employees consisting of soft-skill training that increases their service aptitude, giving them the knowledge and tools to provide a world-class customer experience (Chapter 9).

You have turned standards into systems, but who knows about them? It is critical to ensure every new employee gets trained on these standardized systems, otherwise the next generation of employees will dilute your Service Vision.

VI. Implementation and Execution: How to go from ideas on a paper to being consistently executed.

A solid process that allows the realistic implementation of the customer service initiatives and systems that are executed consistently by front-line employees (Chapter 10).

Without execution, systems in manuals are nothing more than ideas on paper. This is where most companies fail, the execution of these systems. The implementation and accountability for these standards and systems are every manager’s responsibility.

VII. Zero Risk: Anticipating your service defects and having protocols in place to make it right.

All employees must have full awareness of the potential common service defects that can arise at each stage of the customer experience cycle and be trained and empowered to provide great service recovery when defects arise, so your company is known to be zero risk to deal with (Chapter 11).

Everyone’s service aptitude appears strong when things are going smoothly, an employee’s or company’s true service aptitude is revealed when things don’t go as planned and service defects arise.

VIII. Creating an Above-and-Beyond Culture: Constant awareness and branding of how to be a hero.

Create an awareness of the most common opportunities where employees can really deliver heroic service for the customer that creates an above-and-beyond culture (Chapter 12).

Are your employees empowered and inspired to exceed customer expectations? Do you have mechanisms in place to collect and re-
distribute above-and-beyond stories to constantly remind your
employees of the Service Vision?

IX. Measuring Your Customer’s Experience: What gets measured gets managed.

Use a scientific method to measure your customer’s experience and satisfaction, providing benchmarks for performance in each location/
department (Chapter 13).

Your goals must be measurable, tied to a specific metric that lets you measure: how satisfied your customers are with you, who is clearly doing it, who is inconsistent, are you keeping your Service Brand Promise to your customers, how effective your service recovery is, and how do you stack up against your competition.

X. World-Class Leadership: Walking the talk.

Every world-class customer service organization is world-class to work for. It takes world-class leadership to provide the passion, inspiration, and discipline to all employees (Chapter 14).

While this is the final commandment, it is the most important, having the most impact and responsibility for the success of all 10.

Favorite Steve Jobs Quotes

Find something you love so much, you can’t wait for the sun to rise

Steve Jobs

Great leaders rally people to a better future

Steve Jobs

Don’t sell products, services, or jobs, sell dreams & a vision

Steve Jobs

Leaders are fascinated by the future, you are a leader if, and only if, you are restless for change, impatient for progress, and deeply dissatisfied with the status quo. As a leader you are never satisfied with the present, because in your head you can see a better future, and the friction between what is and what could be burns you, stirs you, propels you forward.

Steve Jobs

Make a dent in the universe

Steve Jobs

“I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You put so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments in time that I think most people give up. I don’t blame them. It’s really touch and it consumes your life. If you’ve got a family and you’re in the early days of a company, I can’t imagine how one could do it. I’m sure it’s been done, but it’s rough. It’s pretty much an eighteen hour day job seven days a week for awhile. Unless you’ve got a lot of passion for this, you’re not going to survive. You’re going to give it up. So you’ve got to have an idea, or a problem, or a wrong you want to right that you’re passionate about, otherwise you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that’s half the battle right there.”

Steve jobs

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying ‘we’ve done something wonderful’—that’s what matters to me.”

Steve jobs

“If you pursue ideas with the goal of getting rich, you may have a small chance of succeeding. More likely, you’ll give up when the inevitable hurdles arise.”

Steve jobs

‘Breakthrough innovation—the kind that moves society forward—will be much, much harder to achieve. Innovation occurs when someone is obsessively passionate about a particular subject, whether it’s building computers that delight consumers, creating technologies that reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels, developing life-saving medicines, cultivating an exceptionally engaging workplace, or any number of other ventures that improve the human condition. The people who obsess over these ideas cannot imagine doing anything else. Thinking about the subject consumes them, energizes them, and ultimately inspires them to create breakthrough companies, products and services.”

“Passion won’t protect you against setbacks, but it will insure that no failure is ever final.”

“Passion is the emotional fuel that drives your vision. It’s what you hold onto when your ideas are challenged and people turn you down, when you are rejected by ‘experts’ and the people closest to you. It’s the fuel that keeps you going when there is no outside validation for your dream.”

There is a terrible moment when failure is staring in the face. And actually, if you persevere a bit longer you’ll start to climb out of it.

“I’ve always thought that schoolchildren should be marked by the number of failures they’ve had. The child who tries strange things and experiences lots of failures to get there is probably more creative.”

Don’t let your obsession die. Embrace it, revel in it, and use it to stand apart. Follow your heart and not the crowd.

A bold vision inspires team members and turns them into evangelists for a project. And evangelists can, beyond a doubt, change the world.

“The only way to come up with something new—something world changing—is to think outside of the constraints everyone else has. You have to think outside of the artificial limits everyone else has already set.”

Passion is meaningless without vision.

A vision is how you will make the world a better place.

People surround themselves with interesting people who expand their domain of knowledge.

Spend fifteen minutes a day asking questions that challenge the status quo. Instead of asking “how?” use questions that begin with “why?” and “what if?”

It is hard to design by focus groups because most of the time people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.

Steve jobs

Get closer than ever to your customers. So close, in fact, that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves. “More than Apple listening to us, it’s us who listens to Apple.”

Listening to your customers is acceptable for driving incremental innovation, but it hardly generate breakthroughs. A better description for what Apple delivers is called a technological epiphany. A vision of what the customer  will want in the future. In this way, Apple changes the way you see the world.

Filling a gap customers didn’t know they had.

Transformational breakthroughs are rarely the result of focus groups. Customers didn’t ask for the itunes store, but today they can’t live without it. Customers didn’t ask for the iphone, but today millions of people can’t live without it.

‘To do a good job of those things we decided to do, we must eliminate all the unimportant opportunities, select from the remainder only those that we have the resources to do well, and concentrate our efforts on them.”

• What are you deeply passionate about?
• What are you genetically coded for—what activities do you feel you are made to do?
• What makes economic sense—what can you make a living at?

“To succeed in any business, you need an exceptionally clear vision.” “And to me, a vision is something you can say in one sentence.”

Steve jobs

As long as you have an idea that improves someone’s life or moves society forward, then you have a story to tell. It’s up to you to communicate your story in a way that inspires, energizes and excites your listeners.

First, you need to believe in yourself. Don’t waiver. There will be people—and I’m talking about the vast majority of people, practically everybody you’ll ever meet—who just think in black and white terms.

The key to successful innovation is matching your passion with an aptitude – core competency

He painted a picture of how it would change everything about the way we worked, educated our children, and entertained ourselves. You couldn’t help but to buy in.

A noble purpose inspires sacrifice, stimulates innovation and encourages perseverance. In doing so, it transforms great talent into exceptional accomplishment.

Compelling vision is far different from a mission statement. Traditional mission statements are long, convoluted paragraphs, typically drawn up by committee, and destined to be tucked into a drawer somewhere and largely forgotten. Not one business professional I’ve ever met, not one, has ever been able to recite his or her company’s mission word for word. If you cannot remember I, then why bother? Toss the mission statement. It’s a was of time. Make a vision instead; it’s far more inspiring.

A vision is a picture of a better world that your products or service makes possible. Captivating visions inspires investors, employees and customers, and best of all, they inspire those stakeholders to become evangelists for the organization. An inspiring vision meets three criteria. It’s specific, concise, and consistent.

Epiphanies rarely occur in familiar surroundings. The key to “thinking differently” is to perceive things differently, through the lenses of a trailblazer. And to see things through these lenses, you must force your brain to make connections it otherwise would have missed. It sounds difficult, but there are simple ways to get the creative juices flowing.

Scientists who have studied innovation, creativity, and brain behavior say the answer is to bombard the brain with new experiences.

Successful innovators engage in active experimentation, whether it’s intellectual exploration, physical tinkering, or seeking out new surroundings.

“Let’s go invent tomorrow instead of wondering about what happened yesterday.”

So why can’t most companies innovate the way apple does? Because they lack two things: Jobs’s commitment to excellence and Jobs’s commitment to the customer experience.

It is a simple idea that grew out of an understanding of his customers, not asking them, but knowing them.

Your customers don’t care about you. They don’t care about your product or service.  They care about themselves, their dreams, their goals. Now, they will care much more if you help them reach their goals, and to do that, you must understand their goals, as well as their needs and deepest desires.

 

“Love is like a puzzle, hard to piece together, but beautiful when all the right pieces are put together”

 

“You’ve gotta start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology”

 

“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected”
— Steve Jobs

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
— Steve Jobs

You’ve got to find what you love

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right

I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

How well are you training to provide a World-Class customer experience

Commandment V. Training To Provide a World-Class Customer Experience
Systems and processes that remove variation and provide a consistent customer experience

Answer the following true or false. This test will show you were you have opportunity for improvement in your non-negotiable standards & Secret Service Systems.

1. Employees are trained in the classroom on customer
service as well as on the job service training.
2. Our employees are fully trained on customer service
skills before they are permitted customer interaction.
3. Our employees are screened and tested on their
service aptitude.
4. Our customer experience standards, for each point of
customer contact, are documented and used to train
every new hire.
5. All employees are tested and certified on our
nonnegotiable customer service standards.
6. We provide soft-skill customer service training for all
NEW employees regardless of their position.
7. We provide soft-skill customer service training and
recertification for all EXISTING employees at
least annually.
8. Our customer experience cycle is well outlined and
our employees understand each stage.
9. How many hours of CUSTOMER SERVICE
TRAINING, soft skill, nontechnical training,
does your company provide to each NEW employee?
• 0 • 1–5 • 6–10 • 11–15 • 16 & up
10. How many hours of CUSTOMER SERVICE
TRAINING, soft skill, nontechnical training,
does your company provide to each EXISTING
employee per year?
• 0 • 1–3 • 4–7 • 8–11 • 12 & up

Based on the Company Service Aptitude Test by The DiJulius Group (www.thedijuliusgroup.com/SAT) from the best selling book What’s the Secret?

It is bad service when your customers need to read the fine print

An article that appeared in the Harvard Business Review (6/07), talked about how companies need to create less company-centric and more customer-centric policies. If customer satisfaction creates loyalty and loyalty produces profit, then why do so many companies infuriate their customers with contracts, hidden fees, fine print, and unnecessary penalties? The article’s authors, Gail McGovern and Youngme Moon suggest it is because companies have found that confused and ill-informed customers can be the most profitable.
Perfect examples of these companies are cell-phone carriers, banks, and credit card companies that profit from customers who fail to understand or follow the rules about minutes used, minimum balances, overdrafts, or payment deadlines. It has been estimated that 50 percent of U.S. cell-phone carriers’ income is derived from penalizing fees. These strategies may be profitable in the short term, but in today’s technology age, public sentiment spreads like wildfire, damaging a company’s reputation in blogs and company-specific hate sites.
What many of these companies have in common is that, even though they appear to take their customers for granted, their customers have little choice but to deal with it. Want to change your cell-phone company? Be ready to pay a hefty penalty to break your contract. Want to dump your internet provider? That may be difficult when one provider monopolizes your area.
Standard customer turnover in the cell-phone industry is 25 percent a year, which is shocking, especially considering most have customers sign contracts. This heavy turnover increases the amount of money that needs to be spent to replace these customers through aggressive marketing and advertising. In 2005, the U.S. cell-phone service industry spent more than $6 billion on ads.17 Which begs the question, how much better would their customer retention and satisfaction be if they took half that $6 billion and put it toward customer service training of their call centers, technical support agents, and retail associates?
Welcome Virgin Mobile USA onto the scene, which entered the industry in 2002 with an unusual customer-focused strategy: a pay-as-you-go pricing plan with no hidden fees, no time of day restrictions, no contracts, and straightforward reasonable rates. With an advertising budget one tenth that of the larger players in the industry, Virgin Mobile USA, in only a few years, already had exceeded 5 million subscribers and a retention rate considerably higher than the industry average, even though its customers can leave at anytime without any penalty. They have a 90 percent customer satisfaction rating, with more than two-thirds of their customers reporting they would recommend Virgin
Mobile to friends and family.
The banking industry is not much better. Profits from American banks have increased so dramatically from consumer fees and overdraft penalties that Congress had to reintroduce the Consumer Overdraft Protection Fair Practices Act. When the customer service bar is low, that means there is a great opportunity for someone to come in and steal the market. And that is exactly what the online bank ING Direct has done, offering savings accounts with no fees, no tiered interest rates, and no minimums. ING Direct is now the fourth-largest thrift bank in the United States, adding 100,000 new customers per month, with total assets of more than $60 million.
The Harvard Business Review article offers warning signs to recognize customer unfriendly practices in your company:
• Are your most profitable customers those who have the most reason to be dissatisfied with you?
• Do you have rules you want your customers to break because doing so generates profits?
• Do you make it hard for customers to understand or abide by your rules?
• Do you depend on contracts to prevent customers from defecting?
Deteriorating customer service is not only the customer’s issue. Eventually shareholders feel it the worst. For years video rental chains profited on late fee penalties. Which gave way to companies like Direct TV, On Demand, & Netflix to enter the market and run video rental stores out of business.

A title with a promise

Chief Xperience Officer
If you are really serious about customer service in your organization, then take the advice of my good friend Jim Gilmore, co-author of Experience Economy and Authenticity, who recommends having a Chief Xperience Officer.12 To eliminate confusion with the CEO, Gilmore recommends using the acronym CXO. It is a total paradigm shift in the way corporations think and view their level of customer service. Instead of it being an expense, they need to view it as a necessary investment.
This position and title would be oversee the company’s most important function: the satisfaction of their customers and the future direction of the organization’s customer service evolution.
The CXO should be responsible for:
• Ensuring that service is one of the company’s hiring standards.
• The development and marketing of the Service Vision.
• Ensuring the equal representation of the experiential component along with the other five: physical, atmosphere, functional, technical, and operational. (See Chapter 7.)
• The creation and evolution of all the company’s customer experience cycle and nonnegotiable standards.
• The service training of new and existing employees.
• The implementation and execution of these standards.
• Service recovery training and systems to ensure the organization is zero risk.
• Creating an above-and-beyond legacy.
• The measurement and accountability of customer experience.
Basically, these are all of the 10 commandments to providing a world-class customer experience that customers are willing to pay a premium for.

A Title with a Promise
Some companies give people titles that reinforce their purpose. Here are some additional examples of job titles that demonstrate a promise to the company’s Service Vision:
• Director of First Impressions
• Director of Customer Loyalty
• Director of Satisfaction
• Experience Guide
• Secret Service Agent
• Secret Service Specialist
• Head of Secret Service
• Director of Secret Service
• Secret Service Ambassador
• Chief Customer Officer
• Director of WOW
• Daymaker
• Indulgence Office
• Your Best Friend
• Head of Customer Intelligence
• Director of Employee Loyalty
• Chief Visionary Officer
• Director of Employee Morale
• Chief Brand Officer
• Head of Customer Intelligence
• Chief Visionary Officer
• Chief Brand Officer
• Your Escape Ambassador
• Rejuvenation Specialist
• Director of World Class
• Overachiever Specialist
• Director of World-Class Experiences

A Greeting with a Promise
I also love greetings that reinforce the company’s Service Vision. Here are some examples:
• Whatever whenever
• How can I make you a raving fan?
• At your service
• Anything is possible
• How may I start your world-class experience?
• How can I make you a customer for life?
• Yes is the answer
• World class starts here
If you are a guest at W Hotel, and you call the front desk from your room, the front desk answers, “Whatever, whenever.” If it happens to be 10:35 AM, and you want breakfast but breakfast ends at 10:30, how can they say, “Sorry you are five minutes too late,” after answering the phone “Whatever, whenever”?