Customer Service Mastery: Delight Every Customer | Chris Croft | Skillshare
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Customer Service Mastery: Delight Every Customer

teacher avatar Chris Croft, International Coach

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      What to Expect

      1:32

    • 2.

      What is Customer Service?

      0:28

    • 3.

      Stand out from competitors

      3:38

    • 4.

      Is it a Basic or a Delight?

      6:33

    • 5.

      The Ten things to NEVER fail on

      10:00

    • 6.

      Thirty Ways to Generate Ideas

      1:10

    • 7.

      Idea 1 - It's Easy to Give

      4:25

    • 8.

      Idea 2 - Unrequested Perks

      3:34

    • 9.

      Idea 3 - Creative Swiping

      4:07

    • 10.

      Idea 4 - The Worst Company Ever

      2:57

    • 11.

      Idea 5 - Watch and Learn

      4:39

    • 12.

      Idea 6 - Invite the Queen for Tea

      3:07

    • 13.

      Idea 7 - Life In Their Shoes

      5:33

    • 14.

      Idea 8 - Be A Rule Breaker

      4:10

    • 15.

      Idea 9 - Staying Alert for Opportunities

      2:48

    • 16.

      Idea 10 - It's a Personal Relationship

      3:37

    • 17.

      Idea 11 - Why to Welcome Returns/Refunds

      3:22

    • 18.

      Idea 12 - Ask Others

      2:45

    • 19.

      Idea 13 - Getting Tech Savvy

      5:10

    • 20.

      Idea 14 - Above Expectations

      4:40

    • 21.

      Idea 15 - Just Doing the Basics

      2:56

    • 22.

      Take a Moment

      1:06

    • 23.

      Idea 16 - MMFI

      2:53

    • 24.

      Idea 17 - Every Contact Point

      1:09

    • 25.

      Idea 18 - Which Communication Method

      2:28

    • 26.

      Idea 19 - Be Better than Competitors

      3:49

    • 27.

      Idea 20 - Is Marketing Customer Care?

      5:30

    • 28.

      Idea 21 - Avoid Perceived Indifference

      4:03

    • 29.

      Idea 22 - Be Flexible

      4:01

    • 30.

      Idea 23 - Life Should be Fun!

      3:39

    • 31.

      Idea 24 - Fast or Slow?

      4:37

    • 32.

      Idea 25 - Personalisation

      2:39

    • 33.

      Idea 26 - How Good is Your Memory?

      2:26

    • 34.

      Idea 27 - I Promise

      2:02

    • 35.

      Idea 28 - Keep in Touch

      2:05

    • 36.

      Idea 29 - Which Personality Type?

      2:47

    • 37.

      Idea 30 - Where to Invest

      4:16

    • 38.

      Congratulations

      1:43

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About This Class

Customer Service: Delight Your Customers with Customer Care

Master Customer Service - delight your customers using great customer care and benefit from lifelong loyalty and referrals

Do your customers LOVE you? Do they rave to their friends about what a great company you are? Would they ever consider switching to a competitor? Do they always leave your premises happy and well cared for? You might think this is a faraway dream, too expensive to achieve, or simply impossible for a product/business like yours….But guess what - it’s not! Customer Service can make all of those goals come true, and doesn’t need to cost you anything except creativity and passion. 

Amazingly there are almost no official theories, tools or frameworks out there talking about Customer Care. For me it’s one of the most powerful and underestimated marketing, sales and leadership areas. So, I have created a step by step course you can use to come up with original, cost effective and unique ways to delight every customer and have them coming back to you time after time. Imagine if all your customers became repeat clients, and referred you to others many times over? You could fire your whole sales and marketing team! In my experience most employees genuinely want to do a good job and make customers happy, but often don’t have the tools or empowerment to make it a reality. This course fixes that with simple, tried and tested ideas that have been working for decades. 

Over my 20 year management coaching career I've seen thousands of businesses... and I've pinpointed all the ways they could improve their customer service! The challenge with Customer Service is you need to be constantly ahead of your competitors and offering something unique and special to delight the customer. I've built this course around that for you. If you don't already have fresh Customer Service ideas popping up on a daily basis I’d highly recommend taking this course. It will allow you to build a loyal fanbase of customers who would never dream of spending their money elsewhere... and that could multiply your revenues many times over!

Chris Croft is an international speaker, and widely published author, who's been teaching Customer Service to companies for over 20 years. He's taught all over the world, as well as online, and has an entertaining and practical teaching style. This course is guaranteed to keep you engaged and amused, and teach you life changing skills for home and work.

The course overview includes:

  • Thirty unique ways to create Customer Care delights

  • Provide incredible service even with zero industry experience

  • Motivate your employees to go over and above

  • Highlight missed opportunities to delight customers

  • Turn every customer into a lifelong fan

  • Benefit from repeat sales, upselling and referrals

  • And as always it's 100% practical, and with no technical jargon. 

  • And lots lots more!

By becoming great at Customer Service, not only will you benefit from customers never switching to a competitor, you'll also have made your company thousands in referral and repeat sales!

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Chris Croft

International Coach

Teacher

Chris Croft is one of the UK's leading trainers and provides a wide variety of courses designed to involve, inspire and motivate people of all levels. To date Chris has trained some 87,000 people and enjoys a 94% rate of repeat business. Chris is also a successful author, with his first book 'Time Management' published in 1996 to wide acclaim and has since been followed by fourteen others. His tip of the month email goes out regularly to over 10,000 people. 

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Transcripts

1. What to Expect: customer service or customer care is incredibly important. It's the way that most people judge you because they can't really judge your behind the scenes quality. You think of a restaurant, you don't go in there and check. Is the chef cooking to the right recipes? You trust that you assume that. So you judge the restaurant on customer service, and yet customer service is a forgotten area. There are pretty much no theories about it on there's a few lists and processes that I've seen, but those have all been around the basics. Answer the phone within three rings. Smile. Give your name, that kind of thing. But what about the delight factor? The chocolate on the pillow, the person who remembers your name or helps you with your bags or gives you a free stamp for your postcard? It's brilliant when you experience it, but there's no system for thinking of those special things or is there? This course is designed to help you not just get the basics right, and we will look at them briefly, but to amaze your customers with how brilliant you are. It's not a list of methods for delighting. It's a list of methods for generating methods for delighting so you can use it for whatever type of business you have, large or small manufacturing or service, self employed or corporate, public or private sector, So let's get started. 2. What is Customer Service?: in this first section, we're gonna have a quick look at what customer service is. Why is it important? What does it consist off? Well, look at the fact that you've got basics and delight, and then we will look into the basics a little bit more. What are the basics that have to be right? And then in the second section later, we're going to look in a lot more detail at the delight side of things. So let's get started on Section one. 3. Stand out from competitors: customer service is a massive, knee neglected area. People spend lots of time thinking about making their product or their service unique, to give up prices and advertising and all that sort of thing. And then the bit they don't remember is to give great service and just to clarify. If you're making a product like, say, cars, then obviously customer service is an easy thing to understand. You know, when you go in with a problem, are you looked after? But customer service also applies to the service sector. So if I'm running training courses for people, I still have a customer service element. Don't I have joy out to the phone when they ring me up? You know what if they want to change their minds at the last minute, how flexible and my all that sort of thing. So customer service applies both to products and services, and it's vitally important. It's how you're judged. And the reason for this is that it's very hard for most customers to assess the rial quality of what you do. If I do a training course, do I actually know what I'm talking about? It's quite hard for my customers to know that. But they could easily see whether answer the phone quickly. And when I write to them, are there typos in my e mails, that sort of thing? So it's hard for them to assess the real quality. When you go to a doctor, Does that doctor know what they're talking about? Do they diagnose correctly? We don't know. But we do know whether they've got cold hands. Do they look smart? Is there a dead mouse underneath their desk? Things like that we can easily assess. So it's hard for us to assess the quality and also we tend to assume it. So with people like doctors, we assume that that doctor knows what they're talking about. And in fact, there was an amazing story a few years ago in England where there was an impostor doctor and somebody was pretending to be a GP, and all these people were going to him and he was diagnosing these problems, and actually, he wasn't qualified a tour. He just had a white coat and a stethoscope, and everybody assumed he was a doctor. We just assume that doctors know what they're talking about. Similarly, we assume that banks are safe and efficient and organized, and they, you know, they give us a good return on our money and all that sort of thing, and we just assume it and it's quite difficult to assess a bank. I mean, I'm not quite sure how you would do that, have a look through their accounts and see their systems. I don't know how you do it. So in the end we see him that doctors and banks and restaurants, chefs know what they're doing. So because we just assume they know what they're doing, we then judge them on the customer service. If I said to you, is your bank any good? You would probably say, Oh, yeah, they're great. They always answer the phone there Really nice. When I go in there, Well, you might say, I don't like my bank It all they send me these big long letters. I don't understand, or they never answer. When I ring up, you would judge the your bank on service rather than quality. Now I know that seemed crazy, but it's what we do. And the weird thing about customer services. It's relatively cheap to get it right. All you gotta do is be nice when people ring up and keep your promise. If you say I'll call them back to actually call them back. So those sorts of things are quite easy compared to being a brilliantly good technical bank . It should be relatively easy to get the service side right, and yet it gets forgotten. And that's just a crazy wasted opportunity. You know, most people just don't even think about customer service, and it's so easy to be better. So that's why this course is important, and that's what we're going to look at. 4. Is it a Basic or a Delight?: I've been researching customer service for myself for my own business because I want my customers to love me, recommend me, come back for more work. And when I looked into customer service, I found there are hardly any theories at all. In fact, I found one, and that's bizarre. If you look at leadership, there are hundreds of leadership theories. So many books written about what is it makes a good leader and something like quality. Their low two theories on quality, cost of quality and things. But customer services like this neglected area that nobody thinks about on The only theory I found is a good one, I'll admit, and that's what I want to show you now on. This theory says that there are two types of customer service. The basics and the delight. So if you think of it as a is a pyramid as a triangle, the main body of the pyramid is the core of what you do, so it might be cooking and serving food. In my case, it's doing training courses. In the case of a doctor, it's diagnosing illnesses or something like that. Around that middle section, you've got the top in the bottom customer service. So along the bottom, you've got the basics on the basics of things like seeing the person on time, replying to messages, getting people's names right, that sort of thing and the basics of what people expect. And if you get the basics right, people won't even notice. If you get somebody's name right, they'll just think fine. Whatever the fact, they won't think anything they won't even notice. If you go to the doctor and there is no dead mouse underneath your doctors chair, you don't think that's fantastic. There's no dead mouse. You just don't notice if you in a restaurant and the waiter's got clean fingernails. You don't think our lovely, clean things. You just don't notice the basics. But if you think about it, there are loads of ways you could fail, like dirty fingernails or hard to head to my house. And I saw a TV program about a hotel once, and they said that they had identified 130 ways to fail. Now, don't worry, I'm not going to list all 130 but it was things like the room being too hot or too cold too much noise queue for reception. You know, just loads of things wrong. No toilet paper. I don't know. They had a whole list of things that must never happen. And then what they did was they had a system to make sure they never failed on any of those . Because you can't afford to fail on a single one. Imagine if the room is the right temperature. There's no queue for reception. It's nice and quiet, but there's no toilet paper. You're just gonna think, Well, this hotel's rubbish. So all you do, you just make a list of everything. You have a procedure and you make sure you don't fail on a single one. And if you fail on doing the basics, if then, if a single basic is not done, then that's how customers are lost. They're gonna think I'm not going back there again because the room was too cold or something like that. So you're going to lose customers if you don't do the basics. And it's really expensive to get new customers to replace an existing regular customer, so you would be mad to fail on a basic. All you need to have is a system to make sure that you always check the toilet paper. There's always a spare roll or whatever, and it's done, so it should be really easy to make sure you do all the basics. Just give it a bit of management attention. It should be fine. In fact, a good way to get a list of your basics is just to do the same as what everyone else is doing, or at least what they should be doing. So you could go and have a look at a good hotel and just make a list of everything that they do. Or if you go to the doctor or goes really well, just make a list of everything that you see. You know it's clean. The receptionist expect you. They get your name right. You know the doctor Sesay. One time, just make a list, and then you just have that as your system and you just make sure that all those things happen. So that's the bottom of the pyramid. And really, there's no excuse for failing on any of those things. The top of the pyramid is the delight factor. This is where people think, Wow, they did that. It was fantastic. You know, the doctor remembered my name. The doctor had a kitten to stroke while I was having my injection or whatever. Crazy thing it is, where you think Well, that's really good. I'm going to go back to that doctor, and I'm gonna tell my friends about that doctor because it was so good. And the difficulty with the delight is that it needs creativity. Somebody's got to think, Why don't we have a kitten to stroke? Or why don't we have a heater the doctor could put their hands on so that they've got warm hands when they touch? You know, somebody's got to think of all those really strange ideas, and that's difficult. So delight requires creativity, and it also requires you to be different from everyone else. So, yes, by all means copy other people's delight factors. So if you run a pub and you've noticed the pub down the road has, you know, say, a free duke box on Tuesday, you have any music you like, You might think, Yeah, we should have a free jukebox so you can copy, but really, you want to be ahead of the other people. So you've got to think of things that the other people haven't even thought off yet. You know they may be, but it would have their own playlist on the jukebox or something like that. So it's really difficult to think of those delight things because you got to be the first person to think of it. So, yes, copy them, take the best bits of everyone else and then embroider on it and come out with even better ones. If you can remember, you can take stuff even from different sectors. So if you're running a pub, if you notice that hotels do something, you can steal that. Or if you notice that when you go to the airport they've got some clever system, you can copy that. In fact, I personally think that airports probably ought to copy hotels. Maybe they should give you a little piece of chocolate when you join the queue. I don't know, but the idea of stealing bits from other sectors is something I'm going to come back to later. So the delight is more difficult. But it's really important because the delight is where recommendations come from. You're never going to recommend somewhere if it's just OK. But if it's special, then you are. Whether it's restaurants or or hotels, you stay out or anything shops. If there's a delight factor, you're going to say you've got to go there. So delight is the big challenge, and I think it's the more interesting challenge. So that's what I'm going to spend most of this course on. But before we get to that, let's just have a quick look at the basics in the next video. 5. The Ten things to NEVER fail on: it's really important to get the basics right. If you fail on any of the basics, you could lose a customer, and it's important to have a system and to make sure that everyone always follows the rules and just to get you started, I've picked what I would have is my top 10 basics that I think any customer service system should have. A number one is. Make the customer feel important, so that means, you know, allow plenty of time. Don't keep them waiting, really focus on them. Listen to them, make sure they feel important. And I think the essence of customer service actually is whether you make the person feel important or not. So if you have ever had a time when you've gone into a shop on the two assistance or chatting and you have to wait for them to finish chatting, it's really annoying, isn't it? And the reason why it's annoying is they're basically saying you're not important. Our chat is more important than serving you the customer, and even if you go in somewhere and there's a big long queue, or even if you ring up a help line is a long queue. There's an implication there that you're not important. They can't be bothered to put more people on the desk. So you have to wait. So the first thing is, do we make our customers feel important? My second basic is eye contact and smile. So if somebody says yes. So can I help you? Yes. So what is it that you want? If they don't look atyou, they're basically saying I'm not important. And also, if they don't smile, if they just say hello kind of help here, then you just think I don't want to come back here. It just feels like a cold, unwelcoming kind of a place. So I contact and smile even on the phone. You should smile because they can tell whether you're smiling by the tone of your voice. So smiling is really important. And that might be hard to do when you've been dealing with hundreds of people already today . And they're all annoying idiots on the next person rings and you gotta go. Hello. How can I help you? I think it takes a particular type of person to be good a customer service when you're dealing with the public and dealing with a lot of calls. That's a valuable person. If you find them, you should hang on to them. So that's rule number two. Eye contact and smile. Rule number three is to get people's names right. A person's name is one of the most important words in the world to then, and you must get their name right, especially unusual names. If they got a big loan complicated or a foreign sounding name, then it's really important to say, Can I just check up? Spell that correctly, or How do you pronounce that? Just make sure you get it right. But even relatively simple name. Suppose somebody's called Stuart Thompson or something like that. What would you check for an immediate something? Stuart is a VW or is it you? A in the middle? Thompson doesn't have an age, doesn't have a P, so always be on the lookout for potential mistakes. And just don't get somebody's name wrong because they're thinking A I'm not important and be this place is really inefficient. Imagine if you went to the hospital for an operation and they keep getting your name wrong . I'd be really worrying if they're gonna cut the wrong leg off or they're gonna give me an operation I don't need from want. So it's a sign, isn't it? If if you get somebody's name wrong, everything else is probably going to be wrong as well, So that's absolutely key. Get their name right. Number four of my customer care. Top 10 rules for the basics would be Be easy to get. Hold off. Always make sure that you won't see your mobile phone. Make sure that it's easy for them to get through to you. Perhaps give out your direct line number on when somebody rings. Answer the call within three rings again. If it rings for ages, you're saying to them they're not important. If the Queen of England rang me up, I would answer within three rings. So make sure you answer reasonably quickly. And if they can't get through to you, have a good voice mail message. You don't want one that just says you have reached over 79 Double six. Please leave a message because they're thinking Well, is that Chris? Have I got the right person? So say who you are on your voicemail message. Say that you're sorry a car. That's the phone. Please leave a message and I'll get back to you straightaway so you don't have a good voice mail message and similarly on your emails. Have a nice, smart email footer so that if they need to phone you have your number in the email footer. If they printed out, make sure that you've got your email address in your footer moving on to number five. Call back when you said you would. Now this is actually verging on delight. If somebody says to me, I'm a bit busy, I'll call you back this afternoon. Or if I get an answer, phone message, a voicemail and it says you know will phone you back later today. I always think her, you know, we'll see. And if they do, actually call me back when they said they would. I'm amazed. So I think that's almost a delight. But really, I think it's a basic keeping your promises. If you say I'll call them back tomorrow, you must. And of course, in order to do that, all you have to do is write it down. Don't rely on remembering it right in your diary, said that you definitely called them back. When I say write it down, Of course, it could be that you're gonna type it into your phone. But, however, record it, so you do it. Number six of my top 10 would be to keep your promises generally, so not just calling people back. But if you say that you'll send them a proposal by the end of the week, make sure you do. If you say you'll be there in a certain time to meet them, make sure you're there and keeping your promises. I think if you always keep your promises, that will probably put you in the top 10% possibly the top 1% of people that they deal with and thinking about my suppliers and my customers. Really, a lot of them don't keep their promises. Not every time that, you know, quite reliable, but you can't absolutely count on them. You know who could you think off that you absolutely trust, You know, if they say they'll do it, they will always do it, and there aren't many people like that, and you must make sure that you are one of those people. Number seven out of my 10 is to train all of your staff. If you're employing people, make sure they're all trained. Make sure they know how to answer the phone correctly. Make sure the letters that get sent out a smart the number of times I've run up. I remember. I don't know if British gas exists anymore now, but anyway, the gas board used to be nationalised. I remember phoning up British gas and his voice just went Hello. But I said, Is that British Gas? And the voice went, Yeah, yes, I just felt like I'd phone somebody in their house, so they obviously hadn't been trained to say Good morning. You know, this is Louise from British Gas. Can I help you? That was all I wanted. Just to know who was I talking to you and have I got through to the right company. So even basics like that people have to be told because they won't know. So all staff should be trained in at least thes top 10 things I'm covering now, and preferably in the delight as well. Number eight out of 10 is for everything to be clean, and that includes the people they need to be smart, so clean and smart people and buildings. Ideally, they would wear some sort of uniforms, some sort of smart clothes. Or you'd at least have a dress code. People reception need to look really smart. The whole area around reception needs to look smart. So if you've got a lovely, smart receptionist on a dead rubber plant, people are going to come in and they're gonna think, All right, is this how they run the company? They've left their rubber plant to die. What's gonna happen when I've got a problem and they're going to give me any attention? Or I'm going to be effectively left to die as well on even the car park, because first impressions when they first arrived, they're going to see the car park. If you've got a few old pallets in the corner and some empty drinks, cans and cigarette butts, I know you could say it's not my fault. You know, people leave that stuff at night when they come out of the nightclub next door. That doesn't matter. Customers are seeing your car park, and they're judging you by that, so everything must be clean and smart. The people and the buildings. Number nine on my list of 10 is keep customers informed. Tell them what they're doing, even if it's not good news, tell them how the jobs getting on. Tell him it's going to be a week later or whatever. Tell them that everything's fine. They're going to get it next week. But if you just make that little bit of effort to keep them informed, that's actually almost a delight, isn't it? But I think it's a basic to be told what's going on. I actually really like the way my dentist tells me what he's doing is he drools away at my teeth. He says to me, Right, It's just gonna be two more minutes of drilling, Chris, and then we get on to the next bit or this bit's gonna hurt a little bit. But then after that, it will be okay and the fact that it keeps me informed, it just makes me feel a bit more important, a bit more valued and that's great. And finally, number 10 of my top 10 customer rules for getting the basics right, I would say, is adapt to the customer a little bit. So how do they like to be contacted. Do they prefer email, or do they prefer a phone call? What time of day do they like you to call them? And then morning person one evening person and they busy at work with a rather be found at 6 p.m. On what we like is a person. Did they like to have loads a detail? Do they want you just to cut to the point? Do they all have a bit of a laugh, or do they want you to be their friend on Get to know them? And, you know, perhaps you've got to remember the name of their cat. And how is Fluffy, you know? Is he feeling better now? So adapting to the style of the customer wants because customers very some people don't want you to talk about their cat. Other people, you have to talk about their cat. So I think adapting to the customer again. That's almost a delight factor. But I think it's a basic really talk to them in the way they want to be talked to. That's my 10th 1 So there we are. That's quite a long list. We'll give you a printable page that's got all those on, so you can use that. And obviously you want to make sure that in your organization you're not failing on any of those 10 things. They are the basics. But now we want to move on to how to be special, how to be even better, and that's what we're going to look at next. 6. Thirty Ways to Generate Ideas: So we've already looked at the basics, and there's a list of things there that you have to do. But now we're gonna look at delight and delight is more difficult because delight ideas a creative they seem to come from nowhere. We're trying to think of ideas that are competitors haven't thought about yet. So we need some methods or processes to help get more delight ideas. And I've got 34 you here, so these are not delight methods. You can use these air methods to help you to come up with methods for delighting your customers if you see what I mean. And there obviously will be all sorts of examples I'm going to give which you can pinch, and you absolutely can pinch as many as you like from this but as well as my examples, What I'm really hoping is that the process is I talk about will help you to generate even more ways to delight your customers, and I'd recommend that you brainstorm. There is a group with your colleagues or with some friends, so just sit down and think water is many ways, as we can think off to delight our customers. So we've got 30 methods. Let's get started on those 7. Idea 1 - It's Easy to Give: so the first way to think about how could you delight your customers is to think what's easy to giveth. Um, what do we already have that's easy for us to give but would be valuable to then So an example. This would be advice, you know, if you know good places to eat or good places to go on holiday, or if you know that the person to contact if you've got names of people or if you've got I T expertise. If you know that this is the best software for this particular job, that is something you can give a customer easily, and it will be a delight factor for them. So what knowledge do you have that you can give your customers? And it might be advice, or it might be information. So, for example, the I T person who comes to fix your computer or the washing machine repair er, who sees lots of other customers? They may know, and they may say, Well, what I've noticed when you're using this particular type of washing machine, you always want to make sure the flood doesn't build up too much because otherwise it's going to lead to this problem later, and that will prolong the life of your machine. And that's a little bit of information that's really useful, that which would delight your customer. You're just going a step further than you need to. Rather, just I've repaired your washing machine, going to give him that bit of extra information or advice. The next delight factor is progress updates. So if you can tell your customer what's happening with their job, then they're going to love that again. That's easy for you to give because you know what the progress is. But for the customer, that's quite valuable. And similarly, when they first come to you for a job, you could explain why there's a long queue or why the job is running late rather than just You're not going to get yours till next month. If you can say Well, this is why it's easy for you to give that information on. That might make them a bit happier about what you're telling them. Another example of something that's easy for you to give, but valuable to them would be an immediate reply or at least same day reply. So on my voice mail message on my phone. It says Hi, this is Chris Craft. Sorry. Carts the phone at the moment, Please leave a message and I'll get back to you the same day. And that's valuable to them because they want to hear back straightaway. They've still got it in their mind, and it's easy for me to do so. That's an example. My final example is my Audi light bulb. So I had a Audi that was pretty hold, I think, at about 150,000 miles on it on it was great cars really reliable. That just wouldn't die really. On one day, Game came back from a long journey, and the indicator light had sort of fallen out of the side of the front of the car was dangling on a wire on when I pushed it back in. It just wouldn't click back in, and I realized that the the little clip had broken the little plastic clips. I rang up Audi and they said, Yes, we can order you one of those. It's 27 p, my first thought. Actually, it's quite petty because I thought we could have just given me that because I take the car to be serviced all the time and cost me hundreds of pounds. And I thought we could just give me the clip. But they said 27 p will order it for you. Would you like to pay by credit card right now? And I said, Well, can I just give you the cash when I pick it up? And they said, No, no, no, because it's a special part. We have to order it now and we have to be paid in advance because we don't wanna be left with it in stock. And I was saying, Well, you're not really left within Stop cause I need it. I'm going to pick it up And they said, But how do we know? You know what? If you don't come and pick it up, we're left with it. I'm thinking, Well, it's not exactly much of a risk. It's any 27 p anyway. So in the end, I had to pay by credit card over the phone on. Then, later on, I had to go and pick it up. When it arrived a week later on, I remember just thinking it would have been so easy for them just to give me the clip or I could pay at the time. Or they could have added it to my next service bail and said, Look, I know it seems petty, but we have got to charge you 27 pence. We'll just add it. Your next service Bill, I would have thought. Okay, fine. So that's an example of something that you could give that will be easy to give and make a big difference. The other person allowed e didn't. So that's my first category on the question, really is. What could you easily give your customers that would have value to them? 8. Idea 2 - Unrequested Perks: My second category of delight is things that are unexpected and things that you didn't ask for Unrequested. So, for example, if you take your car in to be serviced and they clean it, you just think, Wow, they've cleaned my car as well. That's fantastic. Now, the problem with these things is that they become expected. So the second time you go in, you're going to expect it to be cleaned, and they've then got to clean it every time forever. And you may think, Well, in that case, don't go there. But what I'm saying is, yes, you do have to go there and you have to clean their car forever. But it does mean if they go anywhere else on the car isn't clean. They're gonna think Sure, I don't like I'm gonna go back to that first place again. So you know, there's no problem with doing that, and it doesn't really cost you very much to clean the car and you've got that person locked in then Now, if everybody starts to clean cars, then you've got to go another level up and you got to think of something else. So you got to clean the car on, put some flowers in there or whatever it is. But nevertheless, if everyone else is doing it, you've got to do it. So I know that it's gonna become relentless. But that is the game we're in. We're in an arms race with our competitors, and we have to keep escalating to keep ahead of our competitors. So, like it or not, that's what you've got to do. So surprised them by cleaning the car the first time and then do it every time forever and make it become part of your process that that's what you always do. I've got a couple of other examples. One was I stayed in a bed and breakfast. Andi. I had a couple of apples with me and I just left them on the window. Sill went out. Did my training course all day came back to my being be on on the window sill were my two apples, a peach on a banana on. The ladies obviously come in to make the bed on. She'd seen the two apples and she'd thought, Oh, I put out a bit more fruit for Chris and I just thought that was brilliant unrequested unexpected on I just thought That is great. You know, I've always stayed in that B and B ever since. When I'm in that area, that's the one I choose just for the cost of a banana on a peach. Sometimes you go into shops on they have biscuits for your dog and see what you would. You don't like a biscuit, and they give you doggy biscuit on. That's brilliant because it doesn't cost them much. Onda people are quite funny about their dogs on. Some people even call their dogs for babies, which worries may. But but everybody who's got a dog is regards it almost as a member of the family. So if they ignore your dog, they're basically saying You've got an ugly dog or they don't like your dog. So to say, that's a nice dog that's already good. But if you actually say, would your dog like a biscuit? That's really good. I got one more example of the unexpected on This is a little Italian restaurant just down the road from where I live on. The waiter puts opera on the sound system, and he loves it. He's Italian, and he loves opera, and he actually sings along with the opera during the meal. He's quite amateur and hear any things along with little bits of it. But it sort of adds to the theater of the place, and it's a bit human and a bit crazy on. That's an unexpected thing that you get that makes it better. And it makes you talk about that to your friends and, you know, probably would make you go back. And if you go to any other restaurant after that, it just feels if they don't really care, there is your food, you know, you think where he's not singing along toe opera. So what can you do that your customers would not have asked for and would be unexpected and would give them a bit of a laugh or make them feel a little bit more cared for the needed before 9. Idea 3 - Creative Swiping: My third suggestion for getting some delight ideas is what's known as creative swiping. So this is where you steal the ideas from other people and not just your competitors, but from different sectors. So I was thinking, for example, from cinema to restaurants. So if you were a restaurant, you might think Well, when I last went to see a film, I could actually book my seats online. There was a map of the cinema and I could move my little man onto. And in fact you do that when you book seats on an airline to don't you? So I could have that in my restaurant. I could have a map of the restaurant, and I could book whichever table I want online. So how about after a great idea? Now? I just made that up because I was thinking, you know, what? Could a restaurant learn from a cinema now? What about airline toe hotel? What could a hotel learned from an airline? And I think a big one is checking in in advance because with the airline there, we said you want to check in in advance, and I've noticed, actually recently. Some hotels now have started to say, Would you like to check in in advance? And then when you arrive, it's all just done and they just give you an envelope. Everything's in there. Your key. Everything's just sorted because when you arrive after driving for several hours, it's late at night. You're tired. The hotel really needs to just be on to give you it straight away. So that's something that hotels could learn from airlines. Now. What about from Hotel Toe Hospital? What could a hospital learn from a hotel? I don't think hospitals could give you a piece of chocolate on the pillow, because that's probably not very healthy. But they could, for example, remember things about you from a previous visit, because quite often when you go to hospital, you've bean before and imagine that was a file that said that you like to read a certain newspaper and they could say, Would you like us to get you the same newspaper? Four. Another thing I noticed there's a hotel I stand, which gives you a choice of pillows. So do you want a soft or a hard pillow and you want feathers or do you want foam? And I thought that was pretty clever, the hotel giving me that choice. And of course, it doesn't cost them much because they only have to have a few extra pillows for people to choose between. And you know, most people just go for the standard pillow, but also, if you got more pillows that people are using their going to last for longer in the end, so probably doesn't really cost anything more on. I was thinking the hospital could also give you a choice of pillows. So there are things the hospitals could learn from hotels, I think a couple of other examples. What about from restaurant to GP surgery? So could a doctor surgery learned anything from a restaurant? Andi. I've stayed at restaurants where there's a queue for the tables on what they do is they give you a little pager that buzzes, and then you can go and sit out in the sunshine outside. Or you can go to the bar and they buzz you and your table's ready. And I was thinking, Would it be good? If a GP surgery could do that? You could go and do something else, and it would buzz you when the doctor's ready for you or five minutes before the doctor's ready. I don't know. It's a thought on. These are just ideas. I've had to illustrate this idea of creative swiping. Now, the final idea I final example I've got is from airline to bank. Could a bank learn anything from an airline and some airlines I've traveled on? You could pay extra to fast track and get on the plane sooner. So if you worked in a bank or you're running a bank when you travel on holiday, you think, Could I pinch that idea? And that's the thing to always be thinking a bit like when I was in the restaurant, I was thinking the bus is a good idea. Could I pinch that idea? So maybe the bank could pinch the idea and have a fast track. You know, maybe you could be a premium customer, and you could get serve straight away at some special counter or something I don't know to help jump the queue in some way. So that's an idea that perhaps banks could learn from airlines. So whatever your sector is, all of the rest of the time when you're living your life and you're going to restaurants and you're traveling and airlines, you're going to the back, going to the hotel, Always be thinking, Could I pinch these ideas for my business? 10. Idea 4 - The Worst Company Ever: my fourth idea for helping you to generate ideas about how can you really delight your customers is to imagine really bad service and then reverse it. So, for example, a builder, what will be the worst builder? And it probably be somebody who turns up with a filthy, disorganized van comes into your house and makes loads of mess. And I think that's one of things that people dread with builders is the mess. So therefore, what would the ultimate fantastic builder be like on they'd have a spotless van, They'd be really smart looking. And when they come into your house, they would rather leaving Mess. They would actually Hoover up after themselves on what we had. A builder like that. He would bring his own Hoover and he would say, All You don't want brick dust in your Hoover. I brought my own older it, and our house used to be cleaner after he'd bean than before he came on. That's fantastic, isn't it? I mean, that's the ideal builder, so I don't know how he thought of that idea, but he could have got that idea from thinking. What don't people like? What's the barrier that people have about getting builders it and it's a mess. Another example would be suppose you were cutting people's hair. What would have really bad haircut be like? And it would probably be that you didn't know what they wanted, and you just gave them all totally the wrong thing on DSO. Therefore, the way to avoid that would be perhaps to take a photo of the previous time when they get their perfect haircut, take a picture and store that so that when they come next time you can say, Is this what you would like again, or would you like it slightly longer, slightly shorter. And then my third example was Suppose you're going toe organize a barbecue, you could think. Well, what would the worst barbecue be like? Can you answer is it would probably rain. The food would run out. Some people get food poisoning or whatever. So then you think, OK, so the best ever barbecue we have a marquee. The food is not gonna run out, so we're gonna have people can preorder particular food on and food boys, he said. We'll make sure we've got a proper chef, but those are really just basics. You could then go a step further and say, Let's have an amazing marquee with flowers and colored lights and balloons and things and then the opposite of the food running out and making sure we've got food is we could have choices of food. You know, if you're gonna pre order, you can have all kinds of different food available. And then, instead of just having a proper chef, so there's no food poisoning. Why don't we have a fantastic chef who does special dishes? Andi juggles. Andi sings opera at the same time so you could see how you can go from really bad to sort of okay to what would be great. So that's the idea of reversing the worst case in order to get an example of the brilliant case. So applying this to you, what would be a really bad example of what you do? And then how can you reverse that and get something that's completely brilliant? 11. Idea 5 - Watch and Learn: My next method follows on from the last one. Really? Because this is to actually find out what people don't like. So to actually watch what people do on even ask them. What don't you like about the process and then fix it? One of my pet hates actually, when I when I park it, uh, shopping malls. And then I have to sort of struggle through scrubby little bushes to actually get to the shops because the car parks got these bushes around the parking bays on. I have to wait through the bushes and the mud to get to the shadiest thing. What if anybody actually watched the customers? They would see that that's a problem. So anyway, let's look at some examples of things that you might watch in spot, and then you could fix. So if you, for example, watch people taking their Children to have their hair cut on, the kids will wriggling around on their board and they're crying because they don't want to be there. How could you solve that? And the arts will be, perhaps to have a little DVD player next to the mirror. So while you're cutting their hair, they're just happily watching some Children's program. I've seen that done once, but I thought was a brilliant idea because that fixes the problem. Another of my pet hates with hotels is a slow check in, so find a quicker way to solve that. You know, find some way that they can just swipe a card or checking in advance or whatever. And then another thing that's difficult is when you need a replacement part for your car. Let's say a windscreen wiper or something like that. It's a total pain to find the exact make and model, you know. Is it a mark three Fiester and and is it them? You know which year I don't know. But recently I've seen a thing where you just put your your registration plate number in and immediately, just as our you're driving a gray Fiester from 2017. Therefore, this is the windscreen wiper that you need. So if you could have a computer system that took away the pain, that would be great. It's always trying to work up. What's the pain? And the pain can be when the system makes people feel stupid, so sometimes they'll say, Well, didn't you see the sign and the answer is no. I didn't notice the sign. So what I had recently was I went into KFC, and I don't know whether that's a bad thing, but anyway, wanted to Kentucky Fried Chicken, and I quite like just to have the three pieces of chicken. So I don't want the latest fancy dipping thing with jalopy. No source. I just want my three pieces of chicken on. Guy was looking up at the menu and I just couldn't see the three pieces I had everything else except for what I wanted. And in the end, I had to ask you, Can you do me the But anyway, yeah, yeah, three pieces. But when they did it, But I'm just thinking, Why didn't they have that clearly on the menu? Because for me, the pain is to stand there looking stupid, and everybody else is waiting, and I'm trying to find what I want on the menu. So take the pain away and make it easy and notice what it is that give people pain at one more example of this. And I think this is a great example because it shows that you don't always know what's happening to customers unless you observe them really carefully. We were driving home from somewhere and we've been driving for a couple of hours and we came into pool where I live. And about one minute from my house is the Audi garage. And I knew that the new A five was out and I wanted to have a look. And I said to my wife, Can we just stop in at the Audi carriage and have a look at the A five? And she went note, note. We got to go home, Onda. We did. So I didn't get a chance to go to Audi. And when we got home, I said to her, What? Why couldn't we stop offered Audi? And she said, Well, I needed the toilet on I hadn't really thought about that. And then I said to her, Well, so why couldn't you just going to the toilet a dowdy and you could have gone to the loo while I looked at the new A five and she said, Well, last time I went there, the bulb was gone in the ladies toilets, so when you shut the door, it was completely in the dark, and she said, I didn't want to go in there again because of that. So because they hadn't replaced the light bulb in the toilets, I didn't get to look at the new a five. And perhaps that meant that I didn't buy the A five in. That might have cost them 30 £40,000 because they hadn't changed a light bulb. And sometimes you don't even know. But the game is to try to work out. What is the pain? Why do people not want to go into the Audi carriage now? Why do people not go into KFC because of the humiliation of not be able to find what's on the notice board? And if you can find out what that is, you can then fix that. So for you, what do you think the pain points are on? What could you do to take away those things 12. Idea 6 - Invite the Queen for Tea: method number six is when I use quite a lot, actually. Which is what if the customer was the queen? Or perhaps you know, the president. If you're watching this in another country, although that assumes you like your president, What if they were really, really important? You know what? If they were Kate Bush or Kylie Minogue or some person who you worship, what would you do? So some examples of this If the queen stayed at your hotel, you probably send a thank you letter later. When you thank you for visiting our hotel. I hope everything was fine. So why not do that? Anyway, if you run a hotel, why not send them a thank you letter afterwards? Or if you run a training course for some people as well? It's just sending them the bill afterwards. Why not send a little thank you letters saying I really enjoyed meeting your team. It was really great. Thank you for having me. So that idea came from What if it was the queen? What if the Queen visited you? Would you reserve a parking space for her? Where would you just think she'll have to find somewhere down the road and walk the last bit. And of course, you'd reserve a parking space. So every now and then when I go to visit a company, they've reserved a space and it says reserved for Chris Craft. And that makes me feel so important. I love it. So why not do that? If you've got a customer coming, reserve a space and actually put their name on there? And even if it's a supplier who, you know, maybe you don't have to really Kau Tau two in the same way. But why not treat the supplier well, a reserve, a space? They're going to give you better service than, aren't they? One time when I arrived to do a course in reception, they got a big screen in reception and it said, Welcome today to Chris Craft, the famous sax player. And I just thought, that's amazing because they'd obviously googled me and found that as well as doing training courses, I play the saxophone in a band not very well, but nevertheless they found out that fact, and they put it up in reception on That was grand, maybe feel really important. Ah, a couple more examples of this when they clean your hotel room is one place that I know that the cleaner hotel room and they don't just make the bed and Hoover the floor, but they polish your reading glasses as well. So if you leave your glasses by the bed when you come back, they will have polished your reading glasses. And that's fantastic, isn't it? You know, I mean, if the queen was staying, you might do that for her. But to do it for everyone. I thought that was really neat. The final example was that my wife went to have her hair done at the local place and they wash her hair before they cut it, and it took her over to the basin on before they put the plug in the base and they went all hang on a minute and they pulled all these hairs out of the plug hole and got rid of all the hairs. And then they put the plug in, filled up with water and wash my wife's hair, and I'm just thinking, if the queen was coming to have her hair done at your cell long, you probably would clean the basin before she arrived. So you know, you don't want to do that in front of anyone, do you? So just imagine if it was the queen that was coming to see you, what would you do differently on should you do those things anyway? 13. Idea 7 - Life In Their Shoes: Method number seven to generate ideas for great customer service is what if I was in their shoes? How would I feel if I was then, on a few examples of this? The 1st 1 is, What if you were staying in a hotel and you forgot your toothpaste? Let's say be really annoying and I don't know where the local shops are to buy toothpaste. They're probably shut anyway. It's 11 PM, and I'm rummaging in my bag, and I think I forgot my toothpaste and probably happen to all of us. Wouldn't it be great if they said there was little sign saying at reception, If you forgot your toothpaste, just let us know and we can provide it. Either we can sell it to you, or even better, we can give it to you for free Now. I was telling my wife about this and she went. Everyone does that, don't they? Actually, there are some hotels that do that, but there's a lot that don't on. It would just be so great if you could do that. Now. Some hotels give you some toothpaste in the room, but if you do that, it's quite expensive to put it in every room, and I think it will be cheaper if people had to ask. And it will be kind of better as well to say If you ask, we will give it to you for nothing. It feels like you've really done them a favor then. So free toothpaste, if you ask for it. The 2nd 1 was some hotels. I've noticed that they pushed the bill under the door early in the morning. So when you wake up the bills already there just in underneath your door to save you, having to queue to check out Andi, I think that's a really nice sistemas. Well, so that's another example off, you know, in their shoes. What would they really want to the arteries? They wouldn't want to queue up to check out because you've got up. You've had breakfast. You just want to get away quickly, don't you? So I thought that was neat, and another example was that I was staying in a hotel. Once on, I came out to my car to get some stuff out of the boot on the car next to mine had a whole load of bird poo. Kitty Park just under the edge of a tree. There was obviously a bird's nest or something up there. There's all this stuff all over his windscreen on, but it was quite a posh Mercedes. I remember thinking, Ha! Look at that. The birds of food on his Mercedes And that's not very nice off me. But I must admit, that's what I thought. And then, later on, I came out again. Get something else from my car, and the manager of the hotel was there with a bucket and a sponge cleaning off this guy's windscreen. Now, I said to the manager, Oh, dear, you know, did the bloke complain and he said, No, he hasn't even seen. He said we saw it. We thought we'd better get rid of it before we came out. And I thought that was really amazing. That was really impressive on that guy. Will probably never know that they did that, but I know. And of course, if they hadn't done that, the bloke would have come out. And this is where I'm I'm thinking in your shoes, because imagine being in the person shoots, imagine coming out. You finished your meeting. It's five o'clock you gotta drive now for two hours to your next place on your windscreens , all covered in bird poo. That would be a real problem because I don't about you. But I don't travel with a bucket and a sponge for cleaning my windscreen, and it would have been a nightmare. So the hotel had obviously thought If that was me, I'd be really unhappy about that. And it would probably ruin my stay at the hotel, so we're going to clean it up for him. Two more examples. Have you ever been in a restaurant? I don't know how old you are watching this video, but if you're of a certain age you need reading glasses and particularly curry restaurants . I find the lighting's quite know, and often the restaurants are kind of. The menus often have brown paper with orange writing or something kind of curry colored, and it's really hard for me to see. So I need my reading glasses to go to read the menu, and every now and then you turn up and you haven't got your reading glasses and you're squinting at it like this. It may be using the torch from your phone to make it brighter. On one restaurant I went to, I forgot my reading glasses and they said, Oh, would you like to borrow some reading glasses? Sir? And they had a little selection of glasses purely available just to lend to people who'd forgotten. There's and I thought that was really great. They'd really thought about What is it like for a person who turns up and realizes they've forgotten their glasses? Now my final examples a little bit horrible, but I think it's good. Which was that I went on holiday to India. I actually love India. I've been there several times. I keep going back something fascinating about India. But the first time I went, I stupidly at some things I shouldn't have eaten on. I got a bit ill and we were staying in this really fantastic luxurious hotel. Um, I think it was called that you made Bhawan Palace is quite famous. Hotel Andi. I just spent all day on the toilet, but the star for fantastic cause they knew I was ill. I'm not sure how, but anyway, they knew I was ill and they brought me in a big plate of grapes and I can still remember this plate of grapes and they cut them all in half for me. And they were mixture of green and purple on day would it was just and it was absolutely what I needed. It just Oh, it was heaven to eat those grapes And I thought they could have just thought the bloke in number nine is not very well, but they didn't. They thought if I was in his shoes, how would I feel trapped in this room just feeling awful on the fact that they said, Would you like us to get you some grapes? Was just brilliant. So in all of these situations, the game is to think, What's it like for the customer in this situation on what would really make them happy? And if you could do that for yours, that's another way that you can delight your customers. 14. Idea 8 - Be A Rule Breaker: My next idea for how to generate ideas to really delight your customers is how can we break the rules now? This is tricky because you've gotta have rules on part of the basics is toe have rules that all the staff follow, so they always get it right every time. But I've got four examples here to show you that sometimes thinking about how you can break the rules would allow you to delight your customers. So my first example is visiting time at a hospital. So imagine that visiting time is, say, one till two on. Imagine that a relative comes running in the hospital two minutes past two to visit their relatives, who might be perhaps really ill. And imagine if the nurse says, Sorry, if you missed visiting time, you have to come back tomorrow. That would be awful, because that person's probably traveled quite a long time that had a really stressful journey to get there. They just missed the window and to say, Sorry, mate, Miss visiting time would be horrible. So great customer service will be to say, look, visiting times finished and, you know, really supposed to go in there and disturb the other patients. But if you just go in there quietly for 10 minutes, I'm sure it would be fine. And that would be a delight factor. So it's my first example. The second example is selling my wife's birthday. So what I do is I try Teoh, not run a training course on my wife's birthday. I think that's probably a good thing to do. But every now and then I've got a customer who desperately wants a training course on the 14th of September. And so what I do is I let them have that day. But I tell them. So I say, Well, it's my wife's birthday and I shouldn't really be doing it, But okay, let's do the training course and I try to make it up to my wife in some of the way, of course. But the main thing is, I make sure the customer knows that I'm going a little bit further than normal for then because I care. I'm actually selling them my wife's birthday. Andi, for a fee, I rule too fat. So that's an example. Again, I think of breaking the rules and I don't know, I have a bit of a rule that I won't work on my wife's birthday. I spend it with her, but for you I will break that rule. My 3rd 1 was just a thought I had, which was letting somebody go over their baggage announce if they've got a good reason. So if you are a complete jobs worth Ugo No, it's sorry. The baggage allowances. 20 kilograms. But imagine if, for example, somebody was pregnant. You might save number. Look, you know, obviously you need to carry a bit of extra staff. Or perhaps because they had a little baby, you might say, Well, it because of that, you know, we can let you go a little bit above the 20 kilos. So that might be an example of a rule that you could break. And then my final one is that I stayed in a little hotel in the Greek island of Rhodes. Andi, the the cost of staying there was the room and breakfast included breakfast. So each morning we would sit and have breakfast. On day one time we had a couple of visitors, and friends of ours were also on roads. Andi, they came to meet us. We're going to go out for the day and they arrived while we were still eating breakfast on this. The lovely lady who looked after us in this little hotel, this little Ben M breakfast type place said, Would your friends like coffee as well? And she went in and brought them coffee and we'll Saturn. We just had a cup of coffee before we went out for the day. And I thought that was really nice because she could easily have said it. Well, you know, they're not included. Your breakfast doesn't include coffee for other people as well, but she broke the rules just for us because she can't because she liked us. That's how it felt anyway. She was probably just good at marketing, but either way it was great, and I would absolutely recommend that hotel to anybody else. If you want to know where it is, email may are recommended to you. So those are some examples off of just going that little extra mile by just thinking. How can I break the existing rules? We don't want to make a habit of breaking all of the rules, but just the occasional situation. What a rules that we have that we could break to make the customer feel special. 15. Idea 9 - Staying Alert for Opportunities: suggestion Number nine for generating ideas to really delight your customers is to be alert for service opportunities. Just always be looking for What can I do to really make them love me? So, for example, if somebody's bought something heavy at a garden centre, say on the staff could see, Would you like me to help you carry that to your car? And if you see somebody struggling across the car park just run across, they can help you with that. Another example might be, this is a real one I saw. Actually, somebody had left their window open at the airport car park, so they had the window down. I think was probably a hot day when they had arrived and they parked the car and they got a whole day for two weeks because while they're away, the weather changed. It was tipping down with rain on the guy who drives the bus to and from the car. Park had seen this car window open, and he put a bag over it. He just got an old supermarket carrier bag or whatever, and he just put that over the person's window because he couldn't raise the window up. You need the keys for that. But he put this bag over the empty window to stop the rain water getting in. And I just thought, That's brilliant. You know, he spotted that he's being observant to show this opportunity to show that he cares. And the third example was that we went on a holiday with Grandma on. Do you know she was with us and she had her bags and there was one moment where and I had my bag and my wife it has, and Grandma was just about to pick up her bag. And this member of staff from the airline said, Can I help you with that bag? Madam on? I just thought, you know, that was really good. This person obviously noticed and thought, you know, does she need help? So just spotting those opportunities when you can help somebody who's struggling, I saw actually an amazing bit of research which showed they didn't experiment. Andi, this person pretended to drop a whole load of stuff on the pavement on the sidewalk, so their bags sort of burst open and lots of things fell out. And then they they were scrabbling around on the on the cycle, picking up all their stuff. And as they did that, lots of people were just stepping over them, going, uh, blocking the pavement on. It was very rare that anybody actually stopped and said, Can I help you with that? And I think, you know, maybe human nature is that if there's lots of people around, we tend to think while somebody else will probably help them. So what this is really about is noticing that little opportunity thinking I could help that person, you know, I could block the window up. I could help that person carry that heavy thing to the car with that little old lady. I could help her with her bags. So in your work, what opportunities are there where you could take that chance to show that you really care ? 16. Idea 10 - It's a Personal Relationship: method number 10 out of 30 for generating ideas for delighting your customers is to make it into a relationship to make it feel like a relationship. So when I ring up my Chinese take away for a meal, they always go. Hello, Mr Croft. Would you like your usual on it? Makes me think maybe I too much Chinese food. But of course, all they've got is an automated system that says it's Mr Craft, and he always has so and so. But it makes me feel as if they know me. It makes me feel as if they care. And that's great. Now, when I used to take my BMW in for servicing, they did a similar thing. They used to know my name. So I would arrive park outside, I'd go in and they'd go. Good morning, Mr Kraft. You've brought your 3 20 in for servicing. I see. And I remember thinking, Wow, they know my name. They actually know me. And then I started thinking maybe they look at my number plate when I arrive, and then they check on the computer. Oh, yes, Mr Croft. And then they greet me personally. Now, is that cheating, and it is in a way, but it's still great cause it still have made the effort to greet me by name. So once I tried parking round the back, and then when I went in, they still said, Good morning, Mr Croft. So I think maybe they actually did know me. But however they were doing it, I thought that was brilliant, cause it made it feel like a relationship. I've stayed in hotels where I've seen that the staff know when people's birthdays, I guess maybe you have to put your date of birth in for some reason. Or maybe when you given your passport, they have a look at your date of birth. And if it's your birthday, they know. So when you're eating your dinner, they come out with a birthday cake, and that might not be everybody's ideal of fun. But it could at least say, um, you know and it is your birthday today. Happy birthday. So that's pretty cool as well, I think Onda A couple more examples. If you can't help somebody, you could still make it feel like a relationship by suggesting alternatives. So I'm just saying Sorry, May I can't do that, you could say, But there is a place down the road that it good. And if you like, I can look their number up for you. And you could even give them a phone number. So because that's what you do with a friend didn't. If a friend asks for help, you wouldn't just say, Well, I don't know the answer. You'd probably suggest some other way. And the final one is my plumber. And I suppose my house is quite old verging on accident prone. So we do have to get a plumber in quite a lot. But the great thing is that the plumber really knows our house. And we had a spell of really cold weather last winter, and our boiler stopped working and I rang him up and he said, Oh, yeah, that will be the plastic pipe because your plastic pipe I seem to remember goes around the side and you'll probably find that the water is freezing. Andi, He said on it around and fix it now. And he came round within about two minutes. He'd fixed it. He did it really fast, and he did it for nothing. And that was because he knew my house and he knew me on. I felt like his friend. Now he could have said who are sorry. May call Outs, 40. Quit. But he didn't. He did it for nothing, and I am now totally loyal to that plumber. I'll recommend him toe anybody else. He's brilliant. Everybody lives in pool and you want a good plumber. Let me now. I'll give you his number. And that's because I feel I have a relationship with that plumber because he does things like that. So how could you make your customers feel as if it's a relationship? Can you send them a birthday card on their birthday, for example, how can you make them feel that you really do have a relationship with them? 17. Idea 11 - Why to Welcome Returns/Refunds: My next method for generating ideas to delight your customers is toe. Ask other people, Ask your staff for ideas and ask your customers What would they like? So find out from the customers what they like and what they don't like about you. And also what do they like and not like about your competitors? How do we compare with our competitors? So for Start, you could just have a little card that goes in with every letter you send out saying, you know, Please help us to be great till help us to be brilliant what you like about us? What? How could we be even better? Is there anything about our competitors that you really like that we should do or something like that? Just keep harvesting those ideas. You don't have to think of all of this yourself. So certainly a really good idea would be to get a mystery shopper to come in and test you and your competitors. So the idea is that you pay somebody toe ring up or come in personally and pretend to be a customer, perhaps a normal customer or perhaps a difficult customer on they make notes on you and your competitors. And then they give you a report on the person who comes in, doesn't actually know who's hired them. So when they come to you, they don't know that it's you that's hired them. So you get a completely impartial report. So this is normally done by somebody you pay, but it could be done by you. You could do your own. Obviously, you're going to be You're not gonna be impartial if you do it. But I'd really recommend when you're holiday, just ring in on ask for yourself. You might have to put on a funny voice, but it's ring up. Go Hello Charlotte Crosby to Chris Craft play he's and just see what happens. Does the phone just ring and ring? Or does somebody go out of their where he is? Or did he go? Yeah, he's on holiday. He's always on holiday, that guy. So it'll be really interesting just to do some mystery shopping and ring in and see what happens on. Then just listen really carefully and fix anything that you discover. And if you discover, for example, that there's something that irritates customers I mentioned earlier on walking through the bushes to get to the shops in the shopping mall. If somebody asked me what you think of our shopping mall, I'd say I hate having to walk through the bushes and then they could fix that. You could make a little path, so find out from the customers and then fix it on. Also harvest any ideas for delight. Say to them what would really delight you or what does delight you in one area that we can copy in the other areas. So you might find, for example, that you've got, you know, 20 showrooms throughout the country, and you might find that in the one somewhere up north there's a guy who does something unusual. I don't know what it is, you know. Maybe he has a really great selection of magazines to read in the waiting room, or maybe makes them the coffee person, the or he remembers how many sugars they take. But whatever it is, if somebody says that guy's great, copy it and make it into a system for all of your show rooms. So this idea of surveying customers on also surveying staff for ideas it's really part of management on every manager should be doing this, but it's often not done because mostly management focus on things like, you know, amount of production you can get and saving money and things. They don't often think about customer service as a subject on its own, but they should do. 18. Idea 12 - Ask Others: method number 11 for generating delight ideas is how can you make it easier for that customer to come back to it a second time? How could you make them become a regular customer? So, for example, I mentioned earlier, If you have a photo of the previous haircut, then it makes it really easy for them to come back and have the same haircut again. And if I had a regular thing where I went and I always got exactly the right haircut, I'd be locked in then and the thought of going somewhere new where they don't know what I want. I'd be thinking, I'm not going to risk that. I just go back to the one that has a photo off me from last time, so I think that would be really nice idea. And yet it's pretty rare, you know. Do they take a photo of your hair cut when you go? What they probably don't. So that's a good idea. On there are hotels where they have your details on file. I quite often stay at premier ends not because they're very exciting, but because their website has already got all my details stored. So I just go premiere in. But but But it's just dead easy because people are naturally lazy, including me. It's just easier if they got my details already on that. So the premiere in website is brilliant and in fact, what I really like about the premier in website just while I'm on, that is they have a map which shows all of the nearest one. So suppose I wanted to stay in Coventry, but I'm going to be arriving from a Southern direction. The map shows me and I might want to stay further out from the center, but it's on the way, so that's just a really great way. I just love that website, and that makes me go back there in book again just because it's got the map function. Another example of making it easy for people to come back to the point where they locked in is Accardo. This is where you could buy your food online, so the first time you go to a cargo, it's a bit of a hassle, because you have to go through and find all your favorite things. The big pots of Marmite. You know where the Coco Pops there The two main things I live off, by the way, Marmite and cocoa. But if it's brown, it's gonna be good. But the point is, you have to go through and you find all these things. But the second time you order from Accardo, it's dead easy because it says, here is everything you ordered last time. Do you want the same again? And you usually do. We're all creatures of habit. So once you've got your food in there, you're locked in. And if I was thinking of going to a different supplier of online food, I would just think comparable to put it all in again. I go to other stick with Accardo. So I'm locked in. I suppose the ultimate is probably Amazon. I mean, it would just be too hard to start again if if a competitor of Amazon came along, I'd be thinking, I just can't be bothered. I love the way it knows what I like, and it recommends things. So for your business, how could you make it really easy for people to come back and order more of the same? How can you get them locked in 19. Idea 13 - Getting Tech Savvy: Method number 13 for delighting your customers is to use technology, and you can use technology to either personalize the dealings you have with them or to speed up the process. So, for example, I I bank with first direct. I love first direct and not many people would say they love their bank, would they? But I really do love first Direct part of HSBC Andi technology gives me an automatic balance update. So every Monday I get a little text to say that I've hardly got any money in my account. But it's great that I know what's there. And also, if you take out on amount larger than a particular figure, and I think you can set that figure, say, £1000. If you take out more than £1000 it will send you a little message to say just to confirm this amount has gone out so that you know that nobody else is taking money out. They don't want to. You can also set it so that if your balance goes below a certain amount, it will tell you on. I just love the way that you can personalize that you get a text. I guess it doesn't cost them much to do, but it's a great system. Another example would be that JAG you acars Now I don't own a jag, but apparently Jaguar cars have an app on It's really cool. So, for example, you can start your engine and you could stop your engine just from your phone. Now, why would you want to do that? Well, the answer is you might want to start your engine while you're still in door so that the car can warm up and you can even set the inside temperature of your car on the app so you couldn't get it nice and warm for when I go out there, So that's pretty cool. Also, it remembers what it knows from GPS where you've parked the car, so on your phone you can have a map and you can see where your car is, which is really great. You can also see all your previous journeys on a map on your phone because it's tracking itself as it drives around on. You can export that automatically for your annual mileage claim. It'll just say these are all the journeys you've done from here to here from here to here, it list them all with how long each journey is straight into a spreadsheet. I mean, how good is that? So Jag, you have obviously thought as well as the cars being good. What can we do that will really delight our customers? Let's have a nap, and then they just brainstorm what the ideal app would be like. And I think that's really nice. My next example would be to recognize incoming calls, and I mentioned earlier on that my Chinese take away know that it's me, but all companies who your phone really ought to know it's you. If you phoned them before, why would, you know, have a customer's recognition system so that it would recognize you? I would say that somebody's phoning. So have a system where you can recognize incoming calls. Another example of technology is my tip of the month that I send out, and by the way, please do sign up for my tip of the month. I'll put a link, but you basically just go to free management tips dot co dot UK with hyphens free hyphen management, hyphen tips dot co dot UK and I will send you free monthly email tips forever, and they'll never repeat that. I've been doing this for years on what it does is it's only it's only an email. So, you know, I send it out to 20,000 people, but it feels personalized for each person. So I'm using technology to have a relationship with all of those people. You should do it there they are fun and they never repeat. So my tip of the month is an example. Another one is tracking your parcel on. You get little things saying your parcel will be delivered today. But what's really good is it says that Jamie will deliver your partial today. And if I got one recently says, Jamie is driving around your area at the moment. Your number 17 on the list and he's on number 14. So he'll be with you in about half an hour and you can see where he is on the map. And you could actually go to their website or the app on your phone, and you can see Jamie on his way a bit like a new uber driver. And how cool is that? And again, technology just gives that delight factor. In fact, just thinking of uber, Um, you've probably taken a new but taxi, but isn't it fantastic? You can actually see your uber taxi gradually arriving on a map. Now, in a few years time, we'll take that for granted. But the moment I think that's a delight factor. I think it's amazing that I can just see them coming around the corner. And just as it comes around the corner on the map there, they actually are. So that's another example of technology. My final example is website cookies to personalize what you see. So if you use cookies, which you know that they're okay, as long as you say that you're using them, you can personalize the Web site, and you can either make sure the wherever they went last time you could make it easier for them to track back and go to the same place again. Or you can make them see something different. So each time they come to your website, they'll see something different. So that's another way that you can use technology to personalize things for the customer. So for your business, how can you use technology to really delight and amaze your customers? 20. Idea 14 - Above Expectations: My next idea for how to delight your customers is Can you give the Mawr than they expect? So whatever you're doing, can you push it a bit for I've got a few examples to illustrate this. The 1st 1 was that when we visited Greece, we stayed in Athens for a few days. What a great city. Athens Waas, Andi The hotel. We stayed a little boutique hotel on the edge of Athens. It wasn't very expensive, and it wasn't in a particularly posh part of town. But it is a really nice little hotel. Email me and I'll give you the details because I'd really recommend the hotel. Why would I recommend the hotel? Well, one of things they did was that when we arrived, there was a chocolate on the pillow. It was one of those little gold sort of triangular prism shaped chocolates. It wasn't a table around. It was sort of more milky than that. But anyway, it's really nice. Little gold, triangular prism of chocolate. So I immediately at that and we went out for dinner, whatever. On when we came back to my surprise, there was another one on the pillow because I thought they'd be one when you arrived at the hotel, and that will be it. But no, they put another one out there. So anyway, the next day went out. When we came out. When we came back again, there was another chocolate. And then what happened? Waas? That we were leaving the hotel and I realized I'd for gotten something. So I went back to my room, and already on my pillow was another chocolate, and I couldn't work out how they were doing it. I wondered if there was a little man in the cupboard. And every time I leave the room, he pops out the covered and doesn't shopping and goes back in the cupboard because how are they doing that? I think what they must have done was when you left the hotel and you gave in your key. They must have immediately gone upstairs and put a chocolate on your pillow, which I mean, that's really dedication, isn't it? I started going out and coming back in again just to get another chocolate. We must divide loads, but I thought that's an amazing system. There was some other good things about that hotel, and I'm gonna come back to that on some later videos, but just a couple of other examples off giving you mawr than you expect On my tip of the month, I quite often put a P s on. I've started a little tradition of putting quite a few PSC's I have PPS and PP PP s and p pp PPS. And I keep thinking little extra things. Dimension films. I've seen that we're good or music to recommend or questions for people, and it's just going a bit further than you would expect. Having some P s is, and some people say they like my PS is I don't know. I've already mentioned cleaning your car when you when it's serviced, that's going beyond the expected. When I do a training course for people, I quite often give them a free book, just a little mini book that I've made. So if it was something like, if we're doing a customer care course, I've got a little customer care mini book and I give a proper to each person and the only cost they probably cost a pound each to print. So, you know that's probably £15. It's cost me But the delight factor I think is worth it. Because you're not gonna throw that book away. You're going to keep it somewhere. And then in years to come when you think, who should we get in to do the training? Your Oh, yeah, that guy who gave us the book, we liked him and they'll get the book out and there will be my details on the back of the book. So a free book is an example of just going a bit further than people expect. And the final example I've got was that we had some builders who did our kitchen revamp, and we extended the kitchen, and that was all great. And the builders said, Are you gonna have a TV on the end wall? And we said, No, we don't think we need a TV in the kitchen. And they said, Oh, yeah, you gotta have a TV. They said, Well, we'll just put the wires in any way, shall we? Just in case And I went all right then. So when they'd finished the kitchen, there was just this wire sticking out of the wall on Guy said to them, Okay, we're gonna have to get a TV now aren't way on. The guy was going well. Yeah, but I know really good place where you can get a lovely big TV Really cheap. I know the guy. It's brilliant. Shall I get it for you? So he know any recommended where to buy the telly. But he actually bought it for me. He said I'll get it. So he went and bought it, brought it back. He did, Only installing the brackets, put it all in, plumbed it all in and made it work for me. And I had to pay him for the telly. But, you know, I was fine with that. So his majors happy cause he got to sell a telly. I was delighted. I got a great big telly in my kitchen Now, which is great. But the main thing Waas I'm really pleased with the builder cause he looked after me. He was like a friend. He did everything for me on dso that idea of just doing a bit more than expected. So for you, when you do whatever it is you do for your customers, what would the next step be if you're going to do a bit more than they were expecting 21. Idea 15 - Just Doing the Basics: idea number 15 about how to delight your customers is that maybe just doing the basics could be a delight. So, for example, if you call people back when you said you'd call them, that could be a delight factor. I never expect people to call back and when they dio, I actually think that's really good. Or getting people's names right is obviously a basic. But if somebody's got a really unusual name and you get it right, I'll give you an example of this. There's an Indian lady I know called Ratha Onda. I first encountered her when she was emailing me. She was a customer on She spells her name R a t n a Andi. So I always assumed she was called Ratner. And then when I met her somebody, That's right. When I met her and I introduced myself, I said, Hi, I'm Chris great to me and she's high, You know? I'm reference Andi. I said her. Oh, I thought it was pronounced rap. Now have I've bean spelling it wrong all this time and she said, No, no, no. There is no h when you spell it, but it's pronounced Rathmann and I went OK, right? So I always called her wrath. Now on what I noticed was whenever she talked to somebody else. Everybody else called her Ratner, and it's not a big difference, but I was the only person who pronounced it correctly. Just because I'm a bit obsessive about these things on, I'm sure that made a difference to her. What I hope, anyway that she was pleased that I made a bit of an effort to get her name right, and it's not. It's not a big thing to everyone else, but to her, it's important. So make sure you get unusual names, right? Another basic that you would expect will be that the doctor would see you on time for your appointment. But if they actually do see you on time, then that's almost a delight factor, isn't it? So you could delight your customers by making sure that everything always happens on time. Or imagine if there was no que at the supermarket and you just turn up on the till and you just get served Now you might think that serving people without a queue is a basic, but actually these days it's more or less a delight factor. So if they could keep the queues down at the supermarket on there are supermarkets that have systems for doing that, then that would be a delight. And the final example of this is that you would expect a basic will be the way to would give the right food to the right people. But you don't often get that. Normally they say, Who's having this? Who's having that? And imagine the waiter who just puts the food down in front of each person correctly without asking. Is it a basic or is it a delight? And I actually think that's pretty much a delight factor, mainly because they don't interrupt your conversation. So you're chatting away and the food just appears, and that's just seamless. That's really good. So making sure that you're really hot on the basics can be a delight factor. So what could you do for that? What are the basics that you do on? How could you do them really, really well, 22. Take a Moment: Okay, so that's the first half of my suggestions. We've done 15. It's already quite epic, isn't it? And I'm thinking rather just keep plowing onto number 16 17 18. Now, why not pause for a moment and just go back through and look at my 15 see if there's anything there that you could actually use on the way I'm imagining. You would use this course anyway, isn't that you wouldn't just sit down and view all 30 methods? I think that would just fry your brain. But just pick one at random or perhaps do one a week on, then talk about it with some friends and say, Look, here's the video for this week. How could we apply this on? Maybe if it doesn't work over the next video, pick two or three a week, perhaps on on work with some people and come out with some really ideas. So take your time over this. You know, you've got this course forever, so you don't have to just sit and watch all 30 but really think about each one and think about how can I apply it on, then, when you've really worked through the 1st 15 then watch the 2nd 15 Here we go 23. Idea 16 - MMFI: Method number 16 for really impressing your customers is make them feel important. I mentioned earlier on that. Actually, the essence of customer service is make people feel important. Make everybody feel like the King or the Queen or the president. That's the game. So when I went into BMW, they knew my name, and that made me feel really important. I don't know whether I really waas important that I felt important. That's the essence. So a really easy way to make people feel important is just to ask them questions and listen to what they say. Just ask them. Have they traveled far or how's business? Anything like that? And really listen, show that you've listened by repeating back a little bit, really have come away from Birmingham. That's quite a journey that makes people feel important, so that's an easy way to do it. But there are other methods you could have. For example, one company I worked for, we were making printing presses and we were selling them to people all over the world and we had a lot of foreign visitors and we had a flag for each country. So if we had people visiting from, say, Let's say, Japan, we would put up a Japanese flag for them when they arrived, and they loved that. They loved seeing their own flag there on the flagpole. So putting up a foreign flag for visitors makes them feel important. And then you can have a welcome board in reception. It could be a big screen, or it could be a blackboard. I mentioned earlier on how they said, Welcome, Chris Craft, famous saxophone player that made me feel really important. So I think you should absolutely have a welcome board in reception to say Who's coming that day. A couple of other examples. There's an Indian restaurant in Bristol where I've bean once or twice where if there's a a couple eating there, they give the lady a rose as they leave the restaurant. And that's that's quite expensive. Is it to give you a rose when you leave the restaurant? But that's what they do. I remember once I was eating there on my own, and as I was leaving, I went, Do I get a rose and they went no, which I thought was quite funny. But that's fair enough. But to give the lady Sweet There arose when they dio. I thought I was really smart, really nice. That would cost a little bit of money, though, and the main thing is to think of ideas that are not expensive. There's one other Indian restaurant on all these stories about Indian restaurants. I think I might eat too much curry, but there's one where the waiter learns the names of the people, particularly the Children on. He uses those during the meal. So he says. How you doing, Louise? Is it nice miles? Would you like a bit more Coca Cola or whatever? And he learns the names of the Children. Of course, that really impresses the kids and the parents. So you know, that's a great trick to do, and it's not that difficult. So that's another way to make people feel important. So the question is for your business. How can you make your customers feel important? What could you do to show them that they really do matter to you? 24. Idea 17 - Every Contact Point: idea. Number 17 for coming up with ways to really delight your customers is to make a list of every contact point every moment of truth, or some people call it on, then make each one brilliant. So maybe people casually walk into your shop. Maybe people phone up. Maybe people come and collect their car after servicing. How could you make all these brilliant? Maybe there's a point when people get sent. The bill can being given the bill be made to be brilliant. Your notice. In restaurants, they often give you a piece of chocolate when they give you the bill so they make that whole experience a bit nicer. Maybe when people come to your website when you e mail them. Perhaps when relatives visit patients in hospital, how can you make that brilliant? Maybe there's an Internet returns process when you have to send stuff back. Can you make that brilliant? Maybe there's a help line people ring up when they've got problems. Can you make that brilliant rather than agony? So all of the contact points between a customer and you make a list of all of them and think about each one. How could we make it brilliant? 25. Idea 18 - Which Communication Method: My next method is to think about the communication process that the customer would prefer. Can you give them a choice of communication processes? So, for example, would they rather it by email? Would they rather use the phone on? That's why I chose First Direct, for example, cause I can ring them up. Would they rather do it by text? I think text is actually my favorite because I don't Generally, I don't like phoning people up, but I love it if I can send a text or receive a text. I mentioned earlier how I really like the fact that first direct text me with information about what's in my bank account. They don't write to me. They don't phone me, they send me a text. There might be some people who would like to have an actual paper letter, so maybe you should give them that option, or maybe face to face. You know, perhaps Banks. There might be some people who would actually like to go in and see a real person. Personally, I wouldn't, but some people might prefer that. So can you give people the option of how they interact, give you an example of this, I suppose that you won't have a repeat prescription from your doctor. You just want to get one more. A lot of pills or some ointment or something like that. Rather have to go in now and sea them. Wouldn't it be great if you could do it by either email or even go to a Web page and just click on? Repeat? And you could easily have an automatic thing that says you can't have more than three repeats, or it could perhaps ask you a couple of questions before it lets you have a repeat. But wouldn't it be great if there was an automated process? And that would save time with the doctor as well as delighting the customer? So the idea is really whatever system the customer wants, they should be allowed toe have. And if you can find out which one they like, you should use that. If you know they prefer to be emailed, email them on. One way to tell is what they do with you. So if you say, let me know if they bring you up, then you know they prefer the phone. If they email you, then you know they prefer email, and I've certainly found with my customers. Some of them like to chat on the phone. Some of them prefer just to send me an email. Some of them text me. I've even got people use what's happened. Facebook and things like that is ways to contact me. But whatever the customer prefers, that's the method I use because I want to make it as easy for them as possible. So for your customers, do you know what they're prepared? Preferred communication method is, and do you then use that? 26. Idea 19 - Be Better than Competitors: method number 19. To be really great with your customers is simply to be better than your competitors. So find out what your competitors do and think. How can I be better than that? So I give out books with my training course. I know that most other trainers don't give out books. Some of them sell their book at the end. But I'm thinking, no, I'm gonna charge a little bit more, and then I'm gonna give my book away, and it can just be really small stuff. So, for example, the supermarket Waitrose controversially recently started giving out free coffee to their customers, and some people have abused it, and they've had people sitting in their drinking coffee all day, but that's just minimal. The main point is, if you're a customer of Waitrose, you're gonna love that. And so, for a tiny amount of cost, you're gonna love Waitrose. Another example is free parking on. This could be anything from a supermarket to a hospital or wherever. It's really irritating if you have to pay. So born with airport just down the road from where I live, you have to pay. I think it's two or £3 just to pick somebody up, because you have to drive in, which means paying. You pick the person up and you leave again. Now, most car parks, most airports, car parks are free for the first half hour, which gives you long enough to go in and pick somebody up. But, oh, no, not born with you have to pay. And obviously somebody's thought we could make a few more quid doing this, and it probably adds up to quite a lot. But it really annoys to customers to the point where you might actually pick a different airport if you had the choice. So delight your customers by giving them free parking. Maybe I had a little debate about this next one. I was talking to some lawyers, and I suggested that they should answer the phone at lunch time. I was actually quite surprised to discover they don't answer their phones at lunchtime, and they were saying What? We cannot see the phone at lunch time. We're eating our lunch, and I'm thinking, Well, it didn't about you, but, you know, I just quickly to roll. And if somebody rings have to put the roll down or do the phone call and I finish finish my role. But maybe the lawyers will sit down with sort of, you know, silver knives and forks and have lobster, right? But I thought was bizarre that they don't answer phone at lunch time. And I said to them, Well, you can't you stagger your lunch hours so that everything it's always covered at some point is always somebody answering the phone. They went, Oh, that would take far too much work. But the real killer thing was they then said to me, But none of the other law firms answer the phone during their lunch, either. So we don't have to, and you can imagine my answer. That was, well, you could be the first you could be. The only people who could almost advertise were the only lawyers who answered the phone at lunchtime, and sooner or later the others are going to be doing it. So do you want to follow them reluctantly, or do you wanna be in their first and be the best? So if you discover that other people don't answer the phone at lunch time, that's brilliant. That's an opportunity to be better than your competitors is not an excuse to. They are brilliant. We don't have to do it either. How can you be better than your competitors and answering the phone at lunch time? He's one of them. My final example is that my answerphone message doesn't just say, Please leave a message. It actually says, Please leave a message on. I will phone you back the same day. And so there's a promise in there that I will be better than my competitors. Andi, I really do. You know, I always do call back the same day and I have had people saying we shouldn't make promises you can't keep, but I can keep that promise on. I've had people saying What if I phone you up at five to midnight? How you going to do it then? But you know, I'll probably phone you back at one minute to midnight then. But the principle is how can I be better than my competitors and then always keep your promises 27. Idea 20 - Is Marketing Customer Care?: Method number 20. To come up with ways to delight your customers is marketing. How could we make it easy for them to buy or reorder or try other products on? This is really, really a win win because it means that we sell more, and yet they also find us easier to deal with. So we all win. So, for example, I recently had lunch in a really nice part about in the countryside. On, Built onto the side of the pub was this really classy shop adds a lot of kitchen things and funky doormats and things You can hang up on things, and it actually said everything in the puppies for sale. So all the decorations in the apartment, the candles that they had and the vases and all the things there were all for sale in the shop. And I thought that was a really nice idea and everybody wins, because if I like the candles, I can buy one and they make more money. Another example that we all know, of course, is Amazon, and it says people also bought this on. You could just say, Well, it's just a cynical attempt to sell more But it's also quite nice to know what else is available that similar on go What did similar people to you by. So I think that's really, really clever people also bought another example was that there was a charity run recently on. They were collecting money in buckets, but not only did they have the bucket for you to throw your change in, but they also had contact less payment cards. So if you wanted to give money to the charity, you could just go with your card and you could put in a pound or £5 or 10 or whatever you wanted to give. So I thought that's really a great example of making it easier for people to spend money. Another example is, if you take your car in to be serviced, let's suppose that you've got a three Siri's BMW, right? You take it in to be serviced. What they could do is just give you a smart car for the day or some little tiny cart so that they can save money. But what they ought to do is lend you a five Siri's or even a seven Siri's, because then you're going to think, Oh, this is a lovely car. I'm gonna upgrade next time. So lending you a better car is a win win because it encourages you to spend more. You have a better time. Everybody wins my tip of the month I already mentioned, you know, that's that's a win win. Really? Because on my tip of the month, occasion mentioned other courses that I'm running. So people like that. But mainly it just feels like a bit of extra added value. So is it selling or is extra added value? It's both, um, another example would be estate agents keeping in touch by sending you flowers on your birthday. Now they know it's easy for them to know when your birthday is, and they could just have a system that sends it. But I think that's a really great idea, because when you move house 20 years later, can you remember which is stated? Is it waas that soldier? The house and you probably can't, so they need to stay in your mind. On the best way to do that is to keep in touch about once a year, so flowers on your birthday or even just a card on your birthday would be a great way to do that. Just a couple of other ideas. I had to curry somewhere yet another Indian meal on. They gave me a A 10% off your next curry little card, 10% off. And I thought that was really clever, because I'm not gonna throw that card away and 10% off the Curries any about £2. It's nothing for them. But I'm going to go back because I don't want to waste that card and that Currys got there that cards got their phone number on. So if I want to take away, I might just use that card. So I thought was really nice bit of marketing, you know? Is it is it marketing or is it customer service? And it's kind of both because they're saying, we value U. We want you to come back again. Two more examples. One of them is a thing called for NOx, which is stuff you put in your radiators to stop them filling up with sludge. I don't know if it works. I guess it probably does. But what you're supposed to do is you're supposed to put a bit Maurin every 10 years. You're meant to, you know, top it up, Andi. You're not going to remember that. But they have a reminder service. So when you buy for knocks, it says, Send this card back to us free post with your address on on, we will remind you in 10 years when it's time to top your system up. And part of me is thinking that's really nice of thumb. And part of me is thinking, Yeah, they just want to sell me more for Knox. But it's clever, isn't it? Because that's both customer service and marketing on my final example is that I was queuing up for food in a canteen. I think it was in a hospital somewhere like that was visiting on day. One of the options was chilly, and I said to him how how hot is the chili? Because I like it reasonably hot, but not crazily hot. And I said, How hot is the chili? And they said, Would you like to try it? And they gave me a spoon that I could dip in and try spoonful of the chili. Actually, it was perfect, so I bought it. But I thought that was really nice, that they took that extra time. They had that flexibility to help me try the chili. So these are all examples, really of, of selling or marketing, but they feel like customer service as well. So what can you do for your customers that will allow them to more easily try other products of yours or reorder the same existing product a second time? 28. Idea 21 - Avoid Perceived Indifference: I saw some research on why customers goto a different supplier. You know what would make you change To say a different hotel from the one you normally stay out. And apparently it's perceived indifference. Okay, It's not Price. You know what would make me change from BMW Audi? It's not gonna be price because they cost roughly the same. That's the price bracket I'm in. So it's not gonna be price. It's gonna be perceived indifference. If I think they don't care about me, I'm gonna take offense to that. I'm certainly not gonna feel any loyalty to them. I'm gonna think, Well, I might as well shop around. So how can we avoid perceived indifference? How could we make them feel that we care on? I've just got four examples of how you might do this just to illustrate the point. And the 1st 1 is just a thought of mine. I mean, I don't know whether they'll ever do it, but when you're traveling and you you got off the airplane and you go to collect your baggage and it comes around on that carousel thing, it comes out through some sort of hanging flaps. Doesn't your baggage comes out on the conveyor belt, and quite often your baggage is upside down and it just looks like somebody's thrown it on their that they probably have. It looks like it's being kicked around and chucked, and if they just put all the suitcases the right way up, when they came out, you could even just do it for first class. Maybe, but if the suitcases with the right way up is they came out, you would feel that they cared. Where's as it is. I feel perceived indifference about my baggage. I think they don't care about my baggage. At least that's the message I get because the suitcases air upside down or higgledy piggledy as they come out. My 2nd 1 is a little pet hate of mine. I don't drink coffee, so when we've had a meal out, often all the others have coffee and I don't and that's fine. You know, I don't mind. I'm just sitting there chatting, But quite often everyone who has coffee gets a mint as well, and occasionally I get a mint as well. So sometimes when they bring out the mints, they give me one as well and I always think, Well, that's great because I deserve a mint, don't I? I know I haven't paid for coffee, but I paid for the rest of the meal. And quite often it's meat. It's organized the whole event. I don't even get a mint. And sometimes when all the coffee people get a mint and I don't I say, Do I get a mint as well? And then about half the time I get 1/2 the time. I don't on def. I don't get a mint to me. That says perceived indifference. You know the people running that restaurant, That waiter doesn't really care about me. Sorry, mate. You didn't have coffee. You don't get a mint. That's perceived indifference. My third example is just to ask people, How could we be even better? You know, How is your meal this evening? Is there anything we could have done to make it even better? That's brilliant, because if they just say thank you very much Goodbye, then That's perceived. Indifference isn't they don't really care on. My fourth example of perceived indifference is Bruce Springsteen, because a lot of people, when they do a gig, they just turned up, play the songs and they go again and you think, Do they really care about me? But if you go and see Bruce Springsteen, he really cares. You know, he'll sit on the edge of the stage and he'll chat to the audience and he'll tell you some stories. He always plays for longer than you expect. He plays for longer than he's allowed to. You know quite often there's a cut off 11. He'll play till half past 11 just because he loves it. He doesn't have to. He doesn't need the money. He's not contracted to do it, but he just loves it. And you know, he's no indifferent to the orders. He even sweats. You could see he drenched in sweat. I saw one gig where it was quite cold. He was playing outside and it was cold and he had steam coming off in from all the sweat. I just thought What a guy Bruce is just a God on The point is, he cares about the audience. There's no perceived indifference. He's not just going through the motions, is he? So the question for you is when you do whatever you do with your customers. How are you going to show them that you're not indifferent to them? You're not just going through the motions. 29. Idea 22 - Be Flexible: we talked earlier about breaking the rules, and this one's a little bit similar, but not quite the same, which is flexibility. So how can you give your customers a bit of choice about how they do things a bit more flexibility than they're expecting? So, for example, when I'm dealing with my customers, they can phone me at the weekend if they want to, and I might be out and about. I might have to answer my mobile when I'm on a beach or whatever, but that's that's okay, That's fine. Maybe I won't answer, but at least they welcome to phone me at the weekend. It's not a problem, or they confirmed me after five PM So better flexibility about when you deal with a person is one I mentioned earlier on. I do love my bank first direct, and they are 24 7 so you confound them at midnight. You can find them on Saturday night, Sunday at 3 a.m. They are always there on that flexibility. I find that really useful, and obviously it cost them a little bit more to have somebody on a long time. But it might mean they're less busy during the daytime, so it may not cost them much at all. But to give me that bit of flexibility, I love that. Similarly, I mentioned Accardo delivering food on they deliver in the evenings up to 11 PM So if you want your Ricardo delivery at half past 10 in the evening, they can do that. And that's great, because delivering just in the daytime is not a lot of use if you're out of work. Another example of flexibility was that my daughter's wedding. She had a guy playing the piano who was fantastic on. He arrived pretty early because there was less traffic than he thought he didn't want to be late on. Then he said, Look, I'm here only I may as well start And then Yet she carried on later as well, because he was just having such a good time. And he just said, Look, I know I'm supposed to finish at eight, but I'm just gonna carry on if you want, And he completely ignored his contract. He was there any way he was having fun. Why not? Of course, that means that I would recommend him toe anybody else. He was completely brilliant. So there was that flexibility with him. Another example would be my training courses. If people want them to start at a different time, I don't go note. They always start at nine o'clock. I'm quite happy to start earlier or later. If you want. I can finish earlier or later on. Sometimes get people saying, Would it be all right if we finished a bit earlier? And I'm thinking find it's less work for me? But to have that flexibility, customers really like that. I'm flexible about the number of people as well. Sometimes I say, You know, we said 20 was the maximum, but could we have 22 people? I don't mind absolutely if they can fit in the room. But customers love that little bit of extra flexibility there. Couple of more very quick examples, the ability to cancel. So if I've got a training course booked in a couple of weeks time and you can't make it, something happens is a disaster. I don't mind. I will have a day off. It's fine. I almost count on a few things getting canceled so I can get a bit of time off, actually, so that's fine, and I think my customers really appreciate that flexibility. I don't say no, no, no. You still gonna pay me even if you cancel it. So bit of flexibility there on the person who does my gardening as well. It's great, You know, sometimes nothing's really changed in the garden and we ring them up and say, We just don't need anything this week And he's fine with that and I really like that, and that's another reason I would recommend him to anybody else. My final example is another Curry example, which is that sometimes I can't decide when it's two of us. Eating. Should we have one rice or to rice is because one is not quite enough. And two rice is We probably won't finish. And I was in a restaurant one time and we were saying, I don't want to have one or two on, the waiter said. Would you like 1.5 raices? And I thought, That's brilliant because they're only ladling it after some big pot, aren't they? So we just had 1.5 rices, and that little bit of flexibility, I thought was brilliant. So what can you do to be a bit more flexible in the are at the moment because almost certainly that would impress your customers. 30. Idea 23 - Life Should be Fun!: method Number 23 for delighting your customers is Can you have some fun? How can you make it fun? I've already mentioned the Italian restaurant where the guy sings along toe opera, so that's pretty good. I got three other examples on one of them is Eddie Stobart is a transport company in the UK , and they have these Lorries on the motorways everywhere, and they have girl's names on the front of their trucks. I think. Originally Eddie Stobart probably named the 1st 5 trucks after his five daughters or something like that. Perhaps his wife and his four daughters, I don't know. But then they've carried on. So every trucks got a name, and I don't know whether they use that at head office to keep track of where all the trucks are. They probably don't Therefore, we just got number plates for that. But I love the way that there's a girl's name on the front of every Eddie Stobart truck. My kids, when they were little, were fascinated by that. They will be looking what's the name on that one? And I know there are people who collect all the names and there's an Eddie Stobart Fan Club . And it's just a little thing that makes Eddie Stobart a little bit better than the other transport companies. They've made it fun, so that's really clever. And my next example is that my toilet is twinned with a toilet in Nepal and you can pay. It's quite a lot about 50 quid or whatever to have your toilet twin. And what happens is that that £50 goes to Nepal to to actually build a toilet in a village that can't afford proper sanitation. So it z just a way to get people to give money to charity, really, But it's a great way because I get a photo of the toilet in Nepal to put on my wall here. So in in my toilet here, I've got a photo of this sort of tin shack in Nepal, and it says your toilet is twinned with and it says the name of the village, and it says the grid reference of where my Nepalese toilet is. I almost want to go there on pilgrimage and see it possibly even use it, who knows? But I think what a great way to get people to give money to Nepal and Nepal's a brilliant country. By the way, if you if you are wanting to give some money to charity, I would consider Nepal. The people are so lovely and it's pretty poor. They could really do with help. So that was, I thought, a really nice way to make it fun on my final example of fun is completely different to charity in Nepal. And it's if you're staying in a hotel. Wouldn't it be nice to have a celebrity voice wake up call so you can choose who you have waking you up? You could have George Clooney going. Hello. Time to get up. Or you could have John Cleese going Wake up what you're doing in bed, Ondas A whole load of voices you can have and how brilliant is that? You know, who would you have waking you up in the morning? I don't know. So I think that's really fun, by the way. It doesn't actually just shout at you are you have to pick up the phone, but the phone rings. You pick it up and they're on the phone. You've got, you know, Tony Blair or Donald Trump or Barrack Obama or Kylie Minogue or whoever you want actually phoning you up to wake you up. It's not really them. Of course it's an imitation. But the voices are really, really good. And the point is, it's a bit of fun and well done to that hotel for finding a way to make even wake up calls fun because they probably the least fun thing in life. So what they've done is they thought, What is not much fun? Wake up, cause how can we make them fun? Let's have celebrity voices and I think that's brilliant. So the question for you is, what do you do that isn't really fun at the moment, and how could you make it fun? 31. Idea 24 - Fast or Slow?: method Number 24 for delighting your customers is speed now. No, every customer cares about speed, someone to have a lovely chat. But a lot of customers, like including me, just want it to be done quickly. So I've already mentioned how when I went to BMW, they knew my name. But what was even better than that was they had all the paperwork ready and waiting. So they had about 10 people coming in that day, and all 10 were already laid out on the desk at eight o'clock when I went in there and they would say, Good morning, Mr Kraft. It's a service to you've got today and they would pick up my card on there. It waas, and I just thought, That's fantastic. I love this place. There's no messing about. I just get served fast. So how could we serve our customers quicker now? Help lines are an interesting example, because usually when you phoned up for help with your computer, your telly or whatever it might be, you have to wait ages before you get through. And for the cost of just a few extra people on that help line, I mean, it's nothing, and I think a really good company. So, for example, I have already been going on about first direct my bank. When you ring them up, you get served pretty much straight away on what they've done is they've paid a little bit more tohave some more people on the phone lines, And would it be worth you doing that? So you can offer that really great service to your customers, and then you'll be recommended to more people and you'll get more business because of it. There's a bakery down the road from where I live, Posh Bakery, doing really good business, and you can actually preorder your bread on. Then you could just go down there and collect it, and it's ready for you. You still have to queue to collect it, though. When I last went, there's a queue of people getting their pre ordered bread, so they need one more person on the pickup counter. But there, nearly there, it's nearly brilliant. Another example would be with the rise off talk, take away orders, which is called Deliveroo. That was it, Um, what's happening now is that when you go to a restaurant quite often your meal takes ages because lots of deliveroo people are coming in to get food and they get priority because Deliveroo has quite strict rules about how fast they have to be given the food by the restaurant. Otherwise, the restaurant will be taken off their list. So the problem is the restaurant is serving deliveroo before the ordinary diners. And that's starting to be a problem so that restaurants somehow needs to find a way to satisfy both deliveroo and the people who are sitting there because people don't like being kept waiting. I went on holiday to Russia, and in Russia they have a sort of rule that speed is good. So if you go to a cheap restaurant, you wait ages for your food on we went toe one restaurant, which didn't seem that much more expensive, but it was really weird because the starter arrived and as soon as I had started eating my starter, the main course arrived and then the putting around and it was all just queueing up. But I was thinking it was I said to the guide, What's going on and he said, are this is a good restaurant. This is really fast. I'm thinking no, the right speed would be good, but they seem to think in Russia, the faster the better. So I think just getting it at the right rate would be good. Um, an example of a restaurant getting it right. I think there's one place I go on the way to take your older on an iPad, he says. So what would you like? And he clicks on the drinks and the food on the iPad instantly sends it to the kitchen. So as soon as he clicks on the meals you're gonna have. That goes to the chef who starts cooking them on. When he clicks on the drinks you want, somebody else serves the drinks out, ready on the bar. So he says, I'll just get your drinks. Now he goes and he comes back and there they are. And I thought, that's really neat. They've thought about speed, so that's really good. And I could imagine a world coming soon where there's a screen at your table, perhaps built into the table or never and you could just order and it'll appear so wouldn't it be great to be in a pub or a bar and you could just click on another drink, another gin and tonic. Andi, it would just arrive, and I think that's gonna come. So speed is really, really important. But always remember that some people prefer to chat. There are people less impatient than me in the world who actually want you to remember that they've got a dog and, you know, house fluffy and all of that sort of thing. So we want speed if foot for that type of customer. But for some customers, maybe a little bit more time to chat would be worth it. So for your business, how can you serve people quicker while still bearing in mind that some of them might want to chat? 32. Idea 25 - Personalisation: suggestion. Number 25 about how you can really delight customers is to personalize it for them so they know it's personalized. So, for example, we were sent a little paper insurance brochure through the post. Just just little the leaflet. Andi. Somehow they personalized the printing. So we live at number 34 on the bit that was talking about house insurance had 34 at the top in sort of brass letters on the front door. I was thinking, That's the number of our house. And then when it came to travel insurance, it had my wife's name's Sally actually written in sand Andi, because there were two l's. They were identical, so you could see that they printed it. But it really looked as if somebody had written the name in on a beach. So that was amazing, cause we read this pro shown it was absolutely personalized to us, so they somehow had a system where it took the address. It actually put it all the way through the brochure. So, using technology, if you could make it feel that personal, that's a really great way to do it. Another one I've already mentioned is getting unusual names, right? Both the spelling and the pronunciation. If you get their name exactly right, they really feel that you're dealing with them personally. On if you stay in a hotel. Wouldn't it be great if they said, Would you like the same newspaper that he had last time? So that would be another personal touch on some places. I know if you if you visit a company, they've made a note of whether you have milk in your tea or coffee or on. Do you have sugar? So that then when you when you visit, the next time they go, I think it was milk and one sugar, and you just think, Well, that's great. They've done that. Another way is to say hello in their foreign language. If you got visitors from aboard, if you could learn a few phrases of Japanese or whatever it might be, they'd be really impressed if you did that on. My final example of personalizing is there's a perp I go to occasional called the rocking a Mom's on. If you book a table there when you ring up and said like to book a table, they go, is it for a special occasion, and at first I thought, Why are they asking that? But of course, if they know it's a wedding anniversary or birthday or something, that they can then personalize it. If it is a birthday, when you get there, they'll say, You know, would you like us to come and sing? Happy Birthday will bring out a cake or whatever. So they're they're actually looking for ways that they can personalize it, And I think that's really clever. What a great question is it for a special occasion? So how can you personalize what you do? How can you make that customer feel as if what you're doing is only for them? 33. Idea 26 - How Good is Your Memory?: I think the logical progression from personalizing things is to remember the customer from last time on. I've got a few examples of this just to illustrate the point. I've already mentioned my Chinese take away place. When I ring up, they say, Would you like your usual? And they remember they don't actually remember May they just got a system. But I feel as if they remember me, and that's great. But imagine if you phoned up to take away and they recognized your voice. And they said, That's Chris, isn't it? You know, that will be really good. I used to have a doctor who remembered me. Eyes was stopped to Yeates in Bristol on when I used to go and see him. Just every two or three years. It probably waas he would go. Hi, Chris. How you doing? You know, you still working in that factory? Did you ever get that machine working? And I remember thinking that that's good. But of course, he probably just wrote some notes down a t end of each consultation in a boring bloke who works in factory. And then when I next went to see him, he's Oh, yeah, I remember him. In fact, you probably didn't even remember me, Probably just so used to working in the factory. But the point was, I felt as if he cared on the fact that he had made enough effort just to write some stuff down shows that he does care to an extent. So if you have to have a system where you make little notes about your customers, why not? My final example was that I stayed in a bed and breakfast once and they said, What would you like for breakfast? And I said, Please, could I have bacon and mushrooms? And they said, Oh, we're really sorry. I'm got any mushrooms, Really sorry. And I said, That's OK, I don't mind Bacon on its own is fine. And then when I stayed there again a few months later, when I first arrived there, they said, Oh, we've got some mushrooms, especially for you, because we know you like those. And I said, I've gone off mushrooms now. No, I didn't. I was just delighted that they had remembered me and made the extra effort of buying those mushrooms is not much money. I mean, it's probably only 50 pence or something for some mushrooms. But the fact that they'd made the effort to remember me and made the effort to buy them I thought that was really great. And I would always stay at that being be I would recommend that being be toe everyone because of that. So can you have systems that help you remember people? Can you actually find a way to remember them? And can you show them that you remember them from last time? Because if you can, you really will delight those customers. 34. Idea 27 - I Promise: method number 27 out of 30 for delighting your customers is to make a promise that you're gonna look after them to remind people that you're doing a good job. So the classic one is the John Lewis Price promise, where they promise that they will always be the cheapest. Nobody will ever be cheaper than them, never knowingly undersold. We will. We will equal anybody else's price on They always say that so no any other giving you a great service, but they're reminding you that they're doing it, and that's really the key. There are some fast food places where it says if we don't serve you within five minutes, your meal will be free. And that's an amazing thing to promise. So better than just serving within five minutes to actually make that guarantee. I mean, that's really great, isn't it? There's ah type of mattress that you can buy where they guarantee the quality, so not just the speed of service, but the quality could be guaranteed. And what they do is, they say, we're gonna sell you this mattress, sleep on it for three months, and if you don't love it after three months you can send it back and have a full refund. So that's an amazing guarantee of quality, and I think that would count as great customer service. My final example is the voicemail messages that you use. So my voicemail message says, I phone you back within 24 hours. Or actually, it doesn't. It says I phone you back the same day, and I think that sounds even better than 24 hours are phony back the same day. And I mentioned that one earlier. There's a friend of mine called Paul Tansy on his message says, Please leave a message on our phone You back. I always return my calls, and I love that because that's so clear and so strong. And when he says, I always return my calls, you know he's going to and of course, then he does so make a guarantee that you really are going to provide great service and then always do it 35. Idea 28 - Keep in Touch: method Number 28. To delight your customers is to be brilliant at communication. Communicate as much as you can with your customers. Communication doesn't cost much. It could even be free if its automated. So how can you give them maximum communication? A few examples of this tracking your parcel Wouldn't it be great if you knew where your parcel waas and you could see it on a map? Or you got little texts to say just to say it's being dispatched just to say it's at the depot just to say You'll get it tomorrow. And this is starting to happen quite a bit now, isn't it? So maximum communication. Um, then there's making sure you've got a great voice mail message saying you'll call them back the same day, telling them when you're calling them back on making sure you do call them back when you promised. So that's all part of communication. Another good one will be, if they could say will contact you when it comes into stock on, I find quite often they say, Sorry, we don't have it on. I say, Well, can you tell me when it comes in and they go No, we've got a system for that. You'll just have to try again in a week. And you just think, Well, that's rubbish. So to say, we will contact you when it comes in. That would be great communication. And then, by final example is if there's a delay at an airport and it just says, Flight delayed for two hours. Wouldn't it be great if they told you what was going on? You know, we're waiting for something to arrive or there's a part we haven't got and it's being shipped over. It's on a motorbike. It's only half on hour away now, and they can't be bothered. It's perceived indifference. They know they've got you. They know you can't do anything. But of course you can, because you might not fly with that airline again next time. Or you might be a bit more reluctant to fly with that airline. If you get a choice, you'd probably choose the competitors. So wouldn't it be great if they just made a bit of effort and communicated with you a bit more about what was going on? So in your world, how can you find an excuse almost to communicate mawr with your customers than you already do? 36. Idea 29 - Which Personality Type?: my suggestion number 29 out of 30 is cater for varying types of customer customers are gonna vary, so there's no one rule about what will delight a customer. And they're all sorts of models of personality. And I quite like the four types of people model where you've got the quiet of people in the more talkative people you've got, the more fact based people on the more emotional people, and they all want to be treated differently. So the fact based fast people, they just want speed. And I've already talked about speed earlier. How can you serve them quicker? So that's one type of customer, And you know when you get one of those because they ring up in ago, right? Can you help me with this? And you immediately know this is a speed person, So how could you have systems to make it quicker for them? That's the first thing on a and speed in two ways. Actually, the interaction needs to be quicker. Also, they need to be given what they want quicker, so they need to be having it the next day rather than having to wait a week for it. So they mustn't be kept waiting when they ring. They mustn't have a big, long conversation when they ring on, then they need to be given whatever it is they want quicker as well. So speed is one thing. Some people want lots of personal contacts, so these are the more people based type of people and the more laid back type ones. So they want to be at a chat, so you need to have a bit of time to ask them questions. Listen, thes the ones who want you to remember the previous conversation remember the name of their cat asked them about their family build a relationship, make it personal completely different to the speed customers, the third type of customers that want what's lots of detail and information. So they're quite a logical customer, but they're not in a hurry, like the Speed customers. They want to know all about exactly why and what's happening. They want to know that their parcels left the depot all that sort of thing, so give them as much information as you can, and that will make them happy. And finally you've got the other people based ones, but they're not quite as cuddly as the personal contact. They're more fun type of customers. They will have a bit of a laugh, and we've already talked about how it's great if you could make the process more fun with the personalized wake up calls and all of that sort of thing. So those types of customers, they don't want speed, they don't. They definitely don't want detail. They just wanna have fun. So if you were really, really great at customer service, you'd work out. Is it speed, personal contact, detail or fun? And you would give them whatever it is they want. So just thinking about your main customers, which of those four do you think is most important to each of your main customers? 37. Idea 30 - Where to Invest: tactic Number 30 for trying to find ways to delight your customers. And this is the final one of this epic course is to pay extra for great stuff because you don't have to do everything yourself as the manager, you can't do everything yourself on, even if you've got really good systems. Unless you got great staff, it's not going to come across. You need the creativity from the staff. You need the attitude from the staff, so pay extra to get really good stuff. So one of the things you're getting, we have really good staff is you'll get extra knowledge. So down the road from here where I live, there's a little hardware shop on the corner on. If you go in there and you say, You know the elastic band has broken in my who for whatever he'll go, I you want the type three. You want the 45 millimeter and he will go and get it, and he's got it on. The guy in there just knows everything, and somewhere like that is so invaluable. And in fact, being Q recently had a policy to employ older people so that when you go in there for a problem with your gutter or your plumbing. You get some old guy who's probably fixed it himself in his house. So I thought that was really neat that employ older people. They're probably more helpful. So pay a bit more for people who got knowledge. Another thing you want might want. PayPal is gravitas. You might want to pay for somebody who's just got that natural authority who really feels like they know what they're talking about. If somebody's showing you around a house and they're only 19 what do they know about houses ? They probably no even got a house themselves. Or if you're gonna by a, you know, a big, expensive car If if the person doesn't have a have a test that they really know because oh , yes, really good car, make your like this car. I'm thinking, Well, why should I believe you? So you want someone who is the kind of person who would really perhaps own that car? Andi, In restaurants quite often. If the owner is there on you, get served by the owner, you think, Yeah, you know, this is a really good experience I'm having, so you might want to pay extra for staff with gravitas. You may also want to pay extra for staff who can? So I'm thinking something like a hospital if you pay a bit extra and get really great nurses, doctors, porters, people who care, you don't want somebody who's just jaded and fed up. And it's just doing it by rote because they're so bored, you know, and that all the humanity has gone, so you may want to pay extra for staff who really care. You may wanna pay extra for staff who customers come relate to, so this would be an example. For example, if you were selling out is you want somebody who actually owns one or who looks as if they might really own one on that might cost you a bit more, but they're much more likely to sell it if they can say, Well, I've got one of these and I really like it. So it's got to be people who the customers could relate to. And finally you might wanna pay extra for staff who could be a role model who the customers want to be like. So, for example, if if you're employing a hairdresser or a barber, you might Some want somebody with really great hair. And I can remember when I was a teenager, I used to have to be taken for a haircut by my parents on the barber had the worst ever hairstyle. He had this really odd here. It looked like he had a dead racked sitting on his head. It was like a different color. And it's I think it may have been a wig. I mean, I don't know, but certainly you wouldn't deliberately choose to have your hair cut by that guy. So pay a bit more to have somebody who is a role model who you want to look like. So I think the moral of this is is it worth paying a little bit more for a person who's just gonna automatically give great customer service without you even having to make them do it on? The extra benefit you'll get is that they will be better at coming up with delight. Ideas on the burden won't only be on you, so that is number 30. So have a think about that one. But maybe now go back through some of the others and see which ones you're gonna use to generate your ideas for delighting your customers 38. Congratulations: Congratulations. You finished my epic customer service course. When I was recording this, I was thinking, Wow, 30 ways to come up with ideas to delight your customers. That is a lot on its not really designed for you to watch all 30 in one go. I mean, congratulations, respect if you did. But what I'm thinking, really is that you would keep this course and you'd refer back to it every now and then. You know, maybe you could look at one a day or one a week or even one a month, just to inspire you to keep you thinking about what can I do that will delight my customers on? Don't just watch it on your own once a month. But maybe with a few colleagues. Just watch my little five minute video and just say, OK, guys, how could we do what Chris was saying? You know, what can we pull from that that we can really do and just keep working on it? Keep brainstorming ideas and keep trying to improve all the time. This is so important, because if you could delight your customers, you will sell a lot more and you'll make a lot more money in the end because you'll get repeat from your existing customers, but also they'll recommend you to other people. You'll have a lot more loyalty from your resisting customers. Your build up a band of almost disciples who will then spread the word about you so delighting your customers is absolutely key. It's just a Zim Porton as having a great product or a service. So this is a really, really important subject on Also link in to me if you if you want to go to linked in, just look for Chris Craft and linking to me. I love hearing from people who've been on my courses, so that would be really great. So there we are, That's all. For now, I look forward to seeing you again on one of my other courses. Bye for now.