In my last Blogrige post, I promised the next one would relay a recent positive customer experience. As a bonus, I will actually share two. They were each minor, but it is amazing how the little things lead to engagement and advocacy for a business.
My first encounter was several weeks ago at a not particularly fancy restaurant. The service was very friendly and the food was very good. But that’s an expectation, not a desire or differentiator. The tables and architecture were designed to permit conversation at the table and minimize the overall noise level. That starts to be a differentiator these days, although I believe it should be a requirement. Maybe it is a sign of aging!
What really struck me was the small table when you entered the restaurant. It had a linear array of cheap reading glasses in increasing strengths for use by guests. Simple to do? Yes! Inexpensive? Yes. But in how many restaurants have you seen that, even expensive restaurants. They might have something if you forgot your glasses and ask, but what a neat and simple customer differentiator. We didn’t need the loaner glasses, but I am still talking about them (and blogging!).
The second experience relates to service recovery. I have over recent years ordered coffee from a roaster in Kansas who is little known but nationally acclaimed. I placed an order just before going on vacation and in the special instructions asked that the order be shipped a week later. It was shipped the next day and spent most of the week outside my front door in heat and rain. I wrote an e-mail to their customer service when I returned, expressing my first-ever disappointment with the business. I got an immediate reply with an apology, an explanation of changes being made to their website, and a request for exactly how I had entered the information so they could do a root cause analysis. The reply also included a request about what would be a good time to send me a fresh shipment of the coffee, which came by FEDEX on the exact day I requested. So not only is their coffee really good, but you can’t beat their customer response time or service recovery!
The Baldrige Criteria state that characteristics of customer engagement are: customer retention and loyalty, customers’ willingness to make an effort to do business with your organization, and customers’ willingness to actively advocate for and recommend your brand and product offerings.
Although I can’t endorse companies by name in these blogs, here are two that have my loyalty and advocacy! Got any similar stories of simple indicators of customer engagement culture?
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