He’s the guy who sang ‘United Breaks Guitars’ – the  YouTube song and video that got over 11 million hits when he had a bad customer experience on United Airlines (click here to see it – it’s ok, it’s not skiving, it’s research!)

Gripevine is a public platform for customer service. Users can post their “gripes” on specific company product pages and invite their social networks to contribute supporting clicks. Gripevine says that they amplify your online voice and connects you directly with company decision makers who can get your complaints heard and resolved!

What’s interesting is that the website will use automated channels to alert companies when they have ‘Gripes’ against them and give them a chance to respond either privately or publicly. When they do respond, the customer rates his or her service to contribute to an index of customer service quality.

In other words, it rates businesses not just on their customer service, but on their ‘response’ to customer complaints which is obviously an integral element of that customer service – Potentially powerful stuff!

Gripevine also allows users to upload photos and YouTube videos with their complaints – so maybe there will be more Dave Carrolls in the future!

Bookmarks:

Here are the slides from my ‘Leading The Way’ presentation – feel free to download them. They are in pdf form – if you’d like the original powerpoint vesrion, simply get in touch and we’ll let you have them!

You may also be interested in a short paper I wrote called ‘The 7 Charactersitics Of ‘Dramatically and Demonstrably Different Businesses’ which deals with some of the issues we discussed during the session.

Finally, if you enjoyed my presentation and want to keep in touch, simply CLICK HERE to ‘sign up’ for my free monthly email ‘Remarkable Times’  and my short sharp weekly 3D Thoughts audios, that each provide stimulating news, ideas and recommendations in your inbox to help you compete, not get beat! All we need is your name and your email address and we’ll do the rest! And don’t forget, you can also ‘follow me’ on Twitter here!!!!

Bookmarks:

Well, here’s a great story of overcoming that from Norway, and it’s from a bank!

Norwegian bank DNB sponsors the Norwegian Broadcasting Boy’s Choir and got them to sing the call options, and balances!

The impact was amazing and the result was over 2 million calls to the phone line in December – the population of Norway is only 4.9 million!

No, I’m not expecting my bank manager to sing to me next time I call (although it would certainly make me smile!), but it does show the impact of doing something ‘Dramatically and Demonstrably Differently’, even if it is just ‘answering the phone’!

You can listen to them here…..

Bookmarks:

Links:

Apple’s Results Explained In ‘Pictures’!

No Need To Tweet!

Great Example Of Customer Delight From Sainsbury’s!

‘The 6 Ingredients Of Customer Delight’ Free Download! 

Bookmarks:

Here’s how Finnair ‘delighted’ their Delhi bound customers this morning:

Would hate to think what they’d do if they flew to Sheffield Doncaster airport on Yorkshire Day!

Bookmarks:

When 3 year old Lily Robinson (sorry,3 and a half year old Lily Robinson!) wrote to Sainsburys to ask them why tiger bread isn’t called giraffe bread which she thinks it should be because it looks more like a giraffe, she got a personalised response from customer manager Chris King (aged 27and a 1/3!).

As well as explaining the reasons and praising Lily for her suggestion, she sent Lily a £3 Sainsburys gift voucher – simple but effective stuff! It’ has a number of the ingredients of ‘customer delight’: spontaneous, personal, makes the customer feel valued and is ‘remarkable’ – people ‘remark’ about it!

It would have been easy to a) ignore it or b) send a standard ‘thanks for your comment’ letter, but Chris’s personalised response, although obviously taking a bit more effort certainly did the trick! (It also got Sainsbury’s some ‘free’ publicity and lots of  ’word of mouse’ - this blog is just another example!

Here’s the response from Chris a bit closer up (click on it to make it bigger!)

I highlighted a similar example last year by Marks & Spencer when one of their guys ‘delighted a customer by dinosaur’!

Personalised responses to customers are a great way of demonstating you care – they make customers feel valued, and crucially, they tell others!

Yes, personalised responses are ‘remarkable’!

Bookmarks:

They experimented with it last year, and apparently, it’s been so successful, they are now rolling it out across the fleet. The ‘app provides information about individual passengers on things such as airline club status, ticket class and special dietary requirements. They can even tell if there are several employees from the same company on a flight, even if they aren’t sitting together – not sure if that means that customers in economy can put the drinks bill on the managing director’s bill if they are in first class!

It’s a great example of utilising customer information to create a personalised experience and definitely sets a benchmark, whether you are in the airline industry or not.

How well do you know your customers? Crucially, how well do you maximise this information to create a ‘remarkable’ experience for your customers?

Bookmarks:

You don’t have to ‘Tweet’ to make the most of Twitter! That’s according to its founder Jack Dorsey. He says that it’s more than a social network!

Speaking at a conference in Germany, he described Twitter as a personal news service and said you you don’t have to Tweet to get the best from it!

“Social is just one part of what we do. We think of it as an information utility,” he said, describing Twitter as a personal news service as much as a social network. “You don’t have to tweet at all. The biggest value is finding out what’s happening in your world in real time,” he said.

He makes a good point (Then again, if he can’t, who can?). ‘Listening’ is a key ingredient of ‘Remarkable’ businesses. They proactively do it to spot opportunities, keep their eye on things that affect them and their customers, and create ‘dialogue’ with those customers and communities to build relationships.

What are you doing to ‘listen’ to what’s happening in your world?

Bookmarks:

Links:

Quiet – The Power Of Introverts!

Workplace malaise costing £93 Billion!

Sales Prevention Officers still the main cause of poor customer service!

Don’t forget, you can listen via iTunes - your 3 minutes straight to your iThingy!

Bookmarks:

That’s according to a new survey from Cognito which suggests that only 3% of UK consumers believed that customer service had improved a lot over the last 3 years, and 22% believed customer service had improved a little.

Rude staff have been highlighted as the most common reason for poor customer sevice! Almost half of those surveyed cited unfriendly and impolite staff, followed quite some way behind by timeliness (19%) and the inability to fix a customer’s reported problems (19%).

We call these ‘rude staff’ ‘Sales Prevention Officers’ and it’s scary how many of them exist in lots of businesses! In fact many of sit near or at the the top of the tree! (but that wouldn’t be you would it?)

Here’s a little download guide to spot and remove your ‘Sales Prevention Officers’!

Bookmarks: