INTRODUCING: THE DEATH OF “STANDARD” CUSTOMER SERVICE AND THE RISE OF WHITE GLOVE CUSTOMER SERVICE.
Why Elite Customers Now Expect White Glove Customer Service, Concierge-Level Experiences
For decades, most companies treated customer service as a standardized operational function:
Same queue
Same process
Same escalation model
Same support experience
That model is rapidly collapsing.
Because not all customers create equal value.
Some customers:
Influence billions in purchasing decisions
Shape market perception
Control enterprise relationships
Influence Wall Street narratives
Drive ecosystem adoption
Accelerate or damage brand reputation
And increasingly, the companies winning at the highest levels understand something critically important:
High-value customers should never experience commodity service. They expect white glove customer service!
THE RISE OF THE WHITE GLOVE CUSTOMER SERVICE
The modern white glove service model is built around a simple premise:
The higher the customer value, influence, or strategic importance…
the more elevated, personalized, proactive, and frictionless the experience should become.
This is not favoritism.
It is intelligent customer strategy.
Many of the world’s most successful luxury, hospitality, financial services, and technology brands have quietly operated this way for decades.
Examples of World-Class White Glove Customer Service
EXAMPLE #1 — THE AMERICAN EXPRESS CENTURION MODEL
One of the most famous examples is the American Express Centurion Card, commonly referred to as the “Black Card.
“One of the most famous examples is the American Express Centurion Card, commonly referred to as the ‘Black Card,’ which helped redefine premium concierge-level customer experience through personalized service and elite relationship management.”
…with “premium concierge-level customer experience” linked to:
The Centurion experience was never simply about a payment card.
It was about creating:
Exclusivity
Status
Emotional connection
Personalized service
Operational prioritization
Elite access
The program became famous for:
Invitation-only membership
Dedicated concierge access
Personalized travel assistance
Event access
Emergency support
Premium reservations
White glove issue resolution
Highly personalized treatment experiences
The larger strategic insight was this:
The customer was no longer interacting with a call center.
They were interacting with a relationship ecosystem.
Over the course of my consulting and customer strategy work, I had the opportunity to help envision and architect several elite white glove customer experience concepts influenced by this exact model:
High-value customer segmentation
Concierge escalation paths
Elite service tiers
Proactive account orchestration
Executive relationship servicing
Differentiated support models for influential customers
The underlying principle was always the same:
Remove friction for the customers who matter most strategically.
EXAMPLE #2 — THE RITZ-CARLTON SERVICE MODEL
Another legendary example is The Ritz-Carlton.
Ritz-Carlton became globally recognized not merely for luxury accommodations, but for:
Anticipatory service
Empowered employees
Personalized guest memory systems
Concierge-level personalization
Emotional recovery experiences
Service ownership culture
Its Club Level experience includes:
Dedicated concierge staff
Personalized planning assistance
Curated guest experiences
Elevated access models
The company became famous for stories where employees solved highly personalized customer problems far beyond standard policy expectations.
The lesson:
White glove service is not reactive support.
It is proactive emotional relationship management.
EXAMPLE #3 — NORDSTROM’S HIGH-VALUE CLIENTELING MODEL
Nordstrom pioneered high-touch retail clienteling long before most companies understood personalized commerce.
Its highest-value customers often receive:
Dedicated stylists
Personalized recommendations
Direct outreach
Curated experiences
Appointment-based service
Frictionless returns
Elevated relationship treatment
Luxury retailers increasingly use VIP clienteling models because a very small percentage of elite customers often generate disproportionate revenue.
This is a critical modern business reality:
A tiny percentage of customers often drive a massive percentage of profitability.
THE NEW REALITY: NOT ALL CUSTOMERS SHOULD EXPERIENCE THE SAME SERVICE MODEL
This is where many organizations still fail.
They continue operating:
One-size-fits-all support
Generic escalation structures
Reactive service models
Commodity treatment architectures
Meanwhile elite customers increasingly expect:
Immediate access
Contextual awareness
Proactive service
Continuity
Ownership
Relationship familiarity
Strategic treatment
A CEO, EVP, SVP, major investor, strategic influencer, or enterprise decision-maker should never feel like:
Ticket #48372
Another queue entry
Another escalation
Another transfer
THE 10 COMMANDMENTS OF WHITE GLOVE CUSTOMER SERVICE
1. KNOW WHO MATTERS MOST
Not all customers create equal value.
Elite service begins with intelligent segmentation:
Revenue
Influence
Ecosystem importance
Expansion potential
Strategic visibility
2. REMOVE FRICTION AGGRESSIVELY
White glove customers should never:
Repeat themselves
Navigate complex IVRs
Restart conversations
Manage internal coordination
The organization should absorb the complexity — not the customer.
3. PROVIDE A SINGLE POINT OF OWNERSHIP
The most important phrase in white glove service is:
“I’ll personally handle this.”
Ownership creates emotional trust.
4. CREATE CONTEXTUAL MEMORY
Elite customers expect:
Rremembered preferences
Relationship continuity
Contextual intelligence
Historical awareness
They should feel recognized instantly.
5. PRIORITIZE SPEED WITHOUT SACRIFICING QUALITY
White glove service is not merely “fast.”
It is:
Precise
Informed
Orchestrated
High confidence
6. ANTICIPATE NEEDS BEFORE THEY BECOME PROBLEMS
True concierge organizations become predictive.
They proactively identify:
Risks
Delays
Disruptions
Lifecycle events
Unmet needs
before the customer asks.
7. EMPOWER FRONTLINE CONCIERGE TEAMS
Elite experiences collapse when concierge agents lack authority.
World-class white glove teams require:
Decision authority
Flexibility
Escalation access
Operational autonomy
8. DESIGN FOR EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE
White glove customers remember:
Confidence
Reassurance
Calmness
Trust
Competence
Not just transaction completion.
9. MEASURE RELATIONSHIP STRENGTH — NOT JUST EFFICIENCY
Traditional metrics:
AHT
SLA
ticket closure
are insufficient.
White glove metrics must include:
Executive trust
Relationship durability
Strategic account health
Advocacy
Concierge satisfaction
Influence retention
10. MAKE THE CUSTOMER FEEL IMPORTANT
Because they are.
Elite service ultimately communicates:
“You matter differently here.”
That emotional signal is enormously powerful.
THE 10 PRE-REQUISITES FOR BUILDING A WHITE GLOVE CUSTOMER SERVICE
Many companies attempt white glove service without building the operational foundation required to sustain it.
That always fails.
1. CUSTOMER VALUE SEGMENTATION
Define:
Strategic customers
Executive customers
Influence tiers
VIP treatment criteria
2. DEDICATED CONCIERGE TEAMS
Do not mix:
Standard queues
Transactional service
Elite relationship management
These require different talent profiles.
3. ADVANCED AGENT CERTIFICATION
Concierge agents should undergo certification in:
Executive communication
Conflict recovery
Emotional intelligence
Operational orchestration
Relationship management
Industry expertise
4. CONTEXTUAL CUSTOMER INTELLIGENCE SYSTEMS
Agents need:
Unified customer profiles
Historical context
Lifecycle visibility
Relationship intelligence
Preference management
5. PROACTIVE MONITORING CAPABILITIES
Elite service organizations proactively monitor:
Account health
Usage anomalies
Risk indicators
Escalation patterns
Sentiment shifts
6. WHITE GLOVE HANDLING STANDARDS
Define:
Response times
Escalation ownership
Communication cadence
Executive outreach protocols
Recovery standards
7. CROSS-FUNCTIONAL ESCALATION ACCESS
Concierge teams require rapid access into:
Engineering
Product
Operations
Logistics
Marketing
Pricing
Executive leadership
8. SPECIALIZED PERFORMANCE METRICS
Measure:
Relationship durability
Expansion rates
Executive satisfaction
Trust indicators
Advocacy
Retention quality
9. CULTURAL ALIGNMENT
White glove service cannot operate inside:
Cost-first cultures
Rigid bureaucracy
Empowerment-resistant organizations
The culture must support elevated treatment models.
10. EXECUTIVE COMMITMENT
White glove service requires leadership commitment.
The organizations that win the next decade will understand:
High-value customers should never experience commodity operations.
They should experience:
Confidence
Continuity
Ownership
Access
Orchestration
Emotional assurance
Strategic partnership
FINAL THOUGHT
The companies creating the strongest loyalty in the modern economy are no longer delivering “customer service.”
They are delivering:
relationship privilege.
That is the future of elite customer experience.
And the organizations that operationalize it correctly will create:
Higher retention
Stronger advocacy
Deeper loyalty
Greater expansion
More resilient executive relationships
Dramatically stronger long-term profitability
Because when elite customers feel truly understood, protected, prioritized, and valued…
they rarely leave.
Interested in architecting a world-class level white glove customer experience program? Contact Customer Experience strategist Steve Jeffes at stevenjeffes@gmail.com or 518-339-5857. Below is a small sample of the companies I have helped elevate their customer experience to best world-class.
If Your Company Has a Revenue Problem and Service Isn’t Part of the Growth Strategy, Fire the Leadership Team
How Leading Companies are leveraging sales in service revenue engine
Customer service is not a support function. It is the most underutilized revenue engine in the business.
Most organizations don’t have a demand problem. They don’t have a product problem.
They have a customer monetization problem.
Every day, thousands of customer interactions occur across service channels— moments where intent, timing, trust, and context converge.
And in most companies, those moments are handled correctly… but never monetized.
Not because the opportunity isn’t there. But because the operating model isn’t designed to capture it.
This is not “selling in service.”
This is precision
The right offer To the right customer At the right moment Through the right channel
And when orchestrated correctly, those moments don’t just resolve issues—
They generate millions in incremental revenue.
Before we break down how to do this, step back and look at the system holistically.
👉 This is what a fully engineered “sales in service” revenue engine actually looks like in Chart 1:Revenue Growth Engine Funnel
This model makes one thing clear:
Service doesn’t operate alone. It becomes powerful when it aggregates intelligence from across the enterprise and converts it into precision revenue actions in real time.
The Sales in Service Revenue Engine: 10 Commandments of High Performance
To operationalize this, elite organizations follow a disciplined model.
👉 Here is the complete blueprint in Chart 2, The 10 Commandments of Sales in Service:
Now let’s break down what this actually means in practice.
1. Redefine Service as a Revenue Engine
If your service organization is still measured primarily on cost efficiency, you’ve already lost.
Tie service directly to:
Net Revenue Retention (NRR)
Expansion revenue
Attach rates
Lifetime value
Industry benchmarks from OpenView Venture Partners show that top-performing SaaS and service organizations consistently outperform peers by prioritizing Net Revenue Retention (NRR) as a primary growth metric. Link to article: https://openviewpartners.com/saas-benchmarks/
This is not a support function. It is a monetization layer embedded inside customer interaction. It is leveraging sales in service revenue engine
2. Sell Outcomes, Not Products
Customers don’t buy because you offered something.
They buy because:
You identified a gap
You framed the impact
You solved something immediate
Diagnosis precedes monetization—always.
3. Engineer “Moments of Receptivity”
Not every interaction is sellable.
Top-performing organizations know exactly when customers are most open:
Post-resolution success moments
During friction discovery
At onboarding inflection points
Near renewal or value realization
Timing is the multiplier.
4. Arm Agents With Full Customer Intelligence
Without context, every offer feels random—and customers know it.
You need a true 360° view:
Usage patterns
Support history
Health scores
Lifecycle stage
This is where most organizations break.
Because that intelligence doesn’t live in one place.
WHERE THE MODEL ACTUALLY BREAKS (AND HOW TO FIX IT)
Most companies don’t fail because of intent. They fail because their customer intelligence is fragmented across functions.
👉 Here’s what’s really happening inside your organization today as depicted by Chart 3, Organizational Collaboration / Customer Service Hub
This chart exposes the truth:
Finance owns pricing signals
Product owns usage data
Marketing owns triggers
Sales owns targets
Engineering owns constraints
Customer Success owns health
And none of it is unified in real time.
Best-in-class organizations fix this by turning customer service into the central intelligence hub.
That’s when service becomes a revenue activation layer, not just a response function.
Reduce cost, not loyalty: How to effectively deploy AI without eroding your customer base.
How many times have customers contacted a company…
…and been immediately pushed into interacting with AI that has no real understanding of their situation, only to get routed in circles, repeating themselves, and never actually getting their issue resolved?
Is that good customer service? Of course not.
What starts as a simple interaction quickly turns into something else entirely:
Customers get stuck in loops
They’re misrouted to the wrong solutions
Frustration builds with every interaction
And eventually—they disengage altogether
This isn’t random. It’s a predictable pattern.
…and many companies are currently falling into this AI trap where they’ve underestimated the effort and steps necessary to shore up the foundation upon which AI operates. Without undertaking this foundational first step in implementing AI, companies are rushing toward the shiny object of immediate cost reduction, while planting a long-term time bomb of much higher customer churn driven by frustration with AI that doesn’t serve their needs.
AI can reduce cost, or it can improve customer outcomes.
Very few companies are doing both.
Customers don’t go from satisfied to churn overnight. They move through this progression, often unnoticed, until they disengage completely. So why are so many companies deploying AI in ways that feel exactly like this?
Read on to understand where companies are getting this wrong, and how to implement AI the right way without frustrating the hell out of your customers.
The Real Problem Isn’t AI – It’s How You’re Implementing It
Most organizations didn’t get AI wrong because the technology failed.
They got it wrong because they skipped the foundational prerequisites required to make AI effective in a customer environment.
Instead, they:
Deployed AI into broken processes
Optimized for cost instead of customer value
Measured success with the wrong KPIs
Ignored adoption, context, and customer intelligence
The result?
AI is performing exactly as designed, efficiently reducing cost, while simultaneously eroding customer relationships.
The Root Cause: Missing the 8 Prerequisites for AI Success
AI in Customer Experience is not a plug-and-play solution.
It is an amplifier of your operating model.
If the foundation is flawed, AI scales the flaw. Remember the old adage, Garbage In, Garbage Out? This applies to AI implementation as well.
If the foundation is strong, AI scales value.
The difference comes down to whether you’ve established these 8 Prerequisites for AI implementation:
The 8 Prerequisites to Implementing AI the Right Way
Before you can implement AI effectively, you need the right foundation in place.
These are the essential components that determine whether AI drives better customer outcomes, or quietly creates risk of customer churn.
Chart 2 – The Essential 8 Foundational Steps to Successful AI Implementation
Miss any one of these—and AI stops creating value and starts creating problems.
1.A Clearly Defined Customer Outcome Strategy (Not a Cost Reduction Strategy)
Before AI can improve anything, you need to be clear on what success actually looks like for your customers. Most organizations start with cost targets, but customers don’t measure you on cost, they measure you on outcomes.
Customer Impact: If this isn’t defined, the customer experiences faster responses but not better outcomes. Their issue may be “handled”, from the company’s myopic perspective, but the customer’s problem is not actually solved.
If your AI initiative starts with:
“Reduce cost”
“Deflect tickets”
“Replace agents”
You’ve already lost.
AI must be anchored to:
Retention (GRR / NRR)
Expansion
Time to Value (TTV)
Adoption depth
Customer effort
CSAT per AI interaction
AI should optimize for customer value creation, not cost extraction.
2. A Unified, Multi-Source Voice of Customer (VoC) System
AI can only be as effective as the data it learns from. If customer information is scattered across systems, teams, and touchpoints, AI never sees the full picture and, therefore, can rarely solve the customer’s request efficiently or effectively.
Customer Impact: The customer has to repeat themselves across channels because no one, and no system, has the full picture of their history, context, or prior interactions.
AI is only as good as the data feeding it.
Most companies rely on fragmented inputs:
Support tickets
Surveys
CRM notes
That’s insufficient.
You need a single converged Voice of the Customer (VOC) system integrating:
Before AI can understand your customers, it needs a clear and consistent way to categorize what those customers are actually contacting you about.
Customer Impact: The customer gets routed incorrectly, receives irrelevant answers, or is forced through multiple loops because the system doesn’t even understand what their issue actually is.
That’s what a ticket taxonomy is.
It’s simply a structured way of labeling every customer interaction, the why they reached out, what the issue was, and how it was resolved, using standardized categories across your entire organization.
Without this structure, your data becomes inconsistent and unreliable. The same issue might be labeled five different ways by five different people or systems.
And when that happens:
Your AI isn’t learning patterns, it’s learning confusion.
To be effective, a ticket taxonomy must be intentionally designed and consistently applied across the organization.
At a minimum, it should standardize how every interaction is classified across the following dimensions:
Standardized reason codes across all channels
Consistent tagging (intent, root cause, outcome)
Alignment across support, success, product, and training
Elimination of “miscellaneous / other” black holes
If your taxonomy is broken, your AI is learning the wrong patterns at scale.
4. Clean, Structured, and Governed Data Architecture
Even with the right data sources, AI still depends on how clean, consistent, and structured that data is. If your data is incomplete, inconsistent, or owned by no one, AI will scale those problems quickly.
Customer Impact: The customer receives inconsistent or conflicting answers depending on where they interact because the underlying data is incomplete, outdated, or mis-aligned.
Garbage in → scalable garbage out.
Before AI:
Standardize data definitions
Eliminate silos
Persistent customer IDs across all interaction channels
Address and geographic area standardization (For customers living in Pennsylvania the state is standardized consistently as “PA” (vs. Penn, Penna, Pennsyl., etc.)
Ensure data completeness and integrity
Establish governance and ownership
Owned customer product and engaged services sources from the standard product and services hierarchy and catalog.
Without this:
AI doesn’t create insight, it creates noise at scale.
Not all customers are the same, and they shouldn’t be treated the same. Yet most AI implementations apply a one-size-fits-all experience, regardless of customer value, risk, or lifecycle stage.
Customer Impact: A high-value, key market influencer or at-risk customer gets the same automated experience as everyone else when what they actually need is priority handling or a human interaction.
Not all customers should experience AI the same way.
AI should not replace humans, but rather it should know when to bring them in. The goal isn’t maximum automation. It’s making sure the right issues get the right level of attention at the right time.
Customer Impact: The customer knows they need a human, but the system keeps forcing automation, increasing frustration and effort with every failed attempt to resolve the issue.
The goal is not maximum automation.
The goal is optimal intervention.
AI must be designed to:
Detect complexity
Identify emotional friction
Recognize high-value customers
Trigger escalation early
Without this:
You automate frustration instead of resolving it.
7. Integration with Customer Success, Training, and Adoption Systems
Customer service is only one part of the customer journey. If AI is not connected to onboarding, training, and adoption, it’s solving surface-level issues while deeper problems go unaddressed.
Customer Impact: The customer keeps contacting support for the same issue—not because support is failing, but because they were never properly onboarded or enabled in the first place.
This is where most organizations fail—and where the biggest opportunity exists.
AI cannot sit only in customer support.
It must connect to:
Onboarding and implementation
Training and enablement
Adoption tracking
Success planning
Because:
Customers don’t churn because support failed— they churn because they never realized value.
Insights alone don’t create value, action does. If AI identifies problems but nothing changes as a result, you haven’t improved anything.
Customer Impact: The customer provides feedback or signals frustration but nothing changes. The same issues continue to occur, reinforcing the belief that the company either doesn’t care and/or isn’t listening.
Feedback loops into product, training, and CX design
Measurable outcomes tied to action
If AI doesn’t change behavior, it doesn’t change results.
The biggest risk with AI isn’t immediate failure.
It’s that the damage happens gradually—and most companies don’t see it until it’s too late.
Chart 3 – The Hidden Timeline of AI-Driven Customer Churn
By the time churn shows up in your metrics, the customer made that decision long before.
What “AI Done Right” Actually Looks Like
Coincidentally, I had a very different experience just yesterday, and it perfectly illustrates what AI looks like when it’s implemented correctly.
I had to call SiriusXM regarding a complex billing and contract renewal issue, the kind of situation that typically breaks most AI systems.
When the AI answered, I’ll be honest, I cringed.
Based on my recent experiences, I fully expected to get trapped in another frustrating loop.
So, I did something intentional.
I explained the entire issue in full detail—six sentences, including dates, billing discrepancies, contract terms, and my interpretation of the problem.
In other words: Exactly the kind of complexity that usually causes AI to fail.
What happened next genuinely surprised me.
The AI responded with a complete and accurate understanding of my issue, not a partial match, not a guess, but a clear articulation of what I was trying to resolve.
Then it recommended a specific path to fix it.
At that moment, I thought: “Okay, here’s where I get transferred to a live agent to actually make the change.”
But that didn’t happen.
Instead, the AI executed the change itself.
It updated my contract. It corrected the billing issue. And while I was still on the call, I received a confirmation email validating the resolution.
I literally paused and thought:
“This is how AI is supposed to work.”
I went from expecting frustration…to experiencing what can only be described as surprise and delight.
Why This Worked
Experiences like this don’t happen by accident.
They are the result of doing the foundational work outlined above:
The AI clearly understood complex, natural language input
It had access to clean, structured customer and contract data
It was integrated into backend systems capable of taking action
It operated within a well-defined decision and resolution framework based on a clearly defined set of business rules for allowable solutions.
And critically, it was empowered to complete the solution-outcome, not just deflect the interaction
The Contrast Couldn’t Be Clearer
Across more than a dozen other companies I recently contacted:
AI misunderstood intent
Forced me into predefined “closest match” categories
Could not handle edge cases or complexity
And required escalation after increasing frustration
In this case:
The AI understood
The AI resolved
The AI delivered the outcome end-to-end
That’s the Standard
This is the difference between:
AI as a cost-reduction tool vs.
AI as a customer experience and value engine
One creates frustration at scale. The other creates loyalty at scale.
What Happens If You Skip These?
You get what most companies are experiencing today:
Lower cost per interaction ✅
Faster response times ✅
Higher deflection rates ✅
And simultaneously:
Lower retention ❌
Reduced expansion ❌
Increased customer effort ❌
Silent churn ❌
AI didn’t fail—you deployed it into an incomplete system.
The Bottom Line
AI is not a customer service tool.
It is a customer intelligence and value optimization engine—if implemented correctly.
The companies that win will not be the ones that deploy AI fastest. They will be the ones that build the right foundation before scaling it.
Final Thought
AI will not fix a broken customer experience.It will scale it.
The question is:
Are you scaling efficiency and cost reduction—or are you scaling customer value?
“If your AI is frustrating your customers, it’s not a technology problem—it’s a capability design problem.” –Steven Jeffes
The Experience Behind This Perspective
The ideas presented in this article are grounded in more than four decades of work across customer strategy, customer experience, consulting, technology, and—more recently—AI-driven customer intelligence.
Over the course of my career, I have had the opportunity to work with or consult for organizations such as Lockheed Martin, Carrier Air Conditioning, General Electric, IBM Global Services, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Unisys, Accenture, Cox Automotive, Wave Systems, and INEOS Automotive, as well as lead CX and CRM transformation initiatives with global brands including American Express, Intuit, Microsoft, HP, Samsung, Sony, AT&T, Verizon, Macy’s, Pfizer, Capital One, AstraZeneca, Best Buy, Vanguard, Dell, Toyota, Ritz-Carlton, Amazon, Google, General Mills, Oracle, Adobe, Southwest and Delta Airlines, Regent Cruise Lines, Siemens, Wells Fargo, and many others.
Across these engagements, I have helped organizations:
Transform customer service operations from cost centers into profitable, revenue-generating functions
Architect end-to-end customer experience and customer success operating models
Design and implement Voice of Customer systems that convert fragmented data into predictive insight
Deploy AI-enabled customer service and customer intelligence capabilities that improve both efficiency and customer outcomes
Uncover hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue opportunities through structured, customer-driven insight programs
Across every one of these initiatives, one lesson has remained remarkably consistent:
Technology alone does not create better customer outcomes. It’s how that technology is designed, integrated, and acted upon that determines success or failure.
The organizations that get AI right are not simply automating interactions.
They are building systems that understand their customers better, act on those insights faster, and continuously improve the experience over time.
An Invitation to C-Suite Leaders
If you are a CEO, Chief Customer Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, or other senior executive looking to implement AI in a way that drives measurable customer and business outcomes—not just cost reduction—I would welcome the opportunity to connect.
I work with executive teams to:
Design AI-enabled customer experience and customer success operating models
Build and operationalize Voice of Customer and customer intelligence systems
Align customer service, training, and customer success into a unified, outcome-driven model
Identify and activate revenue growth opportunities within existing customer bases
Ensure AI implementations improve retention, expansion, and long-term customer value
The companies that will outperform in the next decade will not be those that deploy AI the fastest.
They will be the ones that implement it the smartest—grounded in customer understanding, operational discipline, and a relentless focus on outcomes.
How Customer Advisory Boards Reveal New Revenue Streams Hidden in Your Existing Customer Base
Executive Summary
Many companies search for growth through new markets, acquisitions, or product expansion. Yet some of the most valuable revenue opportunities already exist inside their current customer base.
When organizations create structured environments where customers openly discuss challenges, future needs, and industry changes, entirely new revenue opportunities often emerge quickly.
Across multiple Customer Advisory Board (CAB) programs I have designed and facilitated, these conversations have uncovered more than $500 million in previously unidentified revenue opportunities. Additional significant revenue discovery is almost guaranteed in future customer advisory boards given the approach I am about to lay in this and future CAB topic series blog articles.
1. The Untapped Revenue Inside Your Customer Base
Most organizations pursue growth through new products, new markets, or acquisitions. While these strategies can generate results, they often overlook one of the largest opportunities already available: unmet customer needs.
Over the course of facilitating Customer Advisory Boards and executive focus groups across more than fifteen organizations, structured customer discussions have repeatedly surfaced revenue opportunities that were invisible in company data.
The discovery process is illustrated in Graphic 1: The $500M+ Customer Insight Funnel.
Graphic 1 illustrates how structured customer conversations reveal operational pain points and unmet needs. These insights move through a progression—from identifying unmet demand to validating opportunity areas and ultimately developing new revenue streams. Over time, organizations that systematically capture these insights convert customer conversations into a powerful engine for innovation and growth.
2. The Revenue Discovery Gap
If the opportunity exists within the customer base, why do many organizations fail to discover it? The answer lies in what can be described as the Revenue Discovery Gap.
Most organizations rely on three sources of insight: • Analytics data – reveals past behavior but rarely unmet needs • Sales conversations – focused on tactical issues • Internal innovation sessions – based on internal assumptions
These blind spots create what can be described as the Revenue Discovery Gap, illustrated in Graphic 2.
Graphic 2 highlights the difference between traditional insight sources and direct customer engagement. Analytics and internal brainstorming provide useful information but rarely uncover the deeper operational challenges customers face. Customer Advisory Boards close this gap by bringing customers directly into strategic conversations about future needs.
3. How Customer Advisory Boards Unlock New Revenue
Customer Advisory Boards create a structured forum where organizations engage directly with thoughtful customers about industry trends, operational challenges, and future needs.
The strategic value created through these conversations is illustrated in Graphic 3: The CAB Value Pyramid.
Graphic 3 illustrates how CAB programs create value across three layers. The foundation is customer insight, where structured dialogue reveals unmet needs. Those insights drive innovation and revenue creation, which ultimately leads to deeper strategic partnerships where customers become collaborators in shaping future solutions.
Real Examples: Revenue Generators That Emerged From CAB Conversations
Example 1 – Automotive Concierge Ownership Service
During a Customer Advisory Board discovery session with a group of vehicle owners and fleet customers, I asked a simple question that often reveals entirely new opportunities:
“What services would you pay for — or pay more for — that we don’t currently offer?”
The room quickly began discussing the complexity of managing every aspect of vehicle ownership.
Customers described the number of tasks required throughout a vehicle’s lifecycle:
• Scheduling routine maintenance • Coordinating service appointments • Arranging transportation while the vehicle is being serviced • Managing repairs and insurance claims • Organizing detailing and upkeep • Transporting vehicles between locations • Dealing with unexpected breakdowns or logistical issues
One customer summarized the frustration succinctly:
“Owning the vehicle is the easy part. Managing everything around it is the real headache.”
Several CAB members then converged on the same idea: they would gladly pay a reasonable premium for a fully managed automotive concierge service that would handle every operational aspect of vehicle ownership.
The proposed service would function as a single point of coordination for the entire vehicle lifecycle, managing:
• Maintenance scheduling and service logistics • Detailing and vehicle care • Transportation to remote or alternate locations • Insurance and repair coordination • Lifecycle tracking and vehicle replacement planning
In essence, customers were asking for a “vehicle ownership management service” where they never had to think about the operational details of maintaining their vehicle.
Multiple CAB participants emphasized that the service would not only save time but also reduce stress and uncertainty associated with vehicle ownership.
Several customers indicated they would be willing to pay $1,000–$2,500 per year per vehicle for such a service if it were executed reliably.
Across a large installed customer base, a premium concierge program like this could realistically yield $50–$120 million in new service revenue while simultaneously increasing customer loyalty and retention.
The insight did not emerge from product analytics, surveys, or internal brainstorming.
It emerged from a structured conversation among customers describing the real-world friction they experience every day.
Example 2 – Veteran Affinity Credit Card
In another Customer Advisory Board discovery session involving credit card customers, participants were discussing the emotional connection consumers increasingly want to feel with the brands they support.
Several CAB members raised the idea of financial products tied to causes that customers deeply care about.
One participant suggested an idea that quickly gained traction among the group:
A credit card specifically designed to support U.S. veterans.
Customers explained that many Americans actively look for ways to support veterans and veteran-focused organizations but often lack simple, everyday mechanisms to do so.
The CAB participants proposed a credit card that would direct a portion of card proceeds — such as transaction fees or annual membership fees — to vetted veteran support organizations.
The idea resonated strongly across the group for several reasons.
First, it allowed cardholders to support veterans through everyday spending rather than requiring separate charitable contributions.
Second, it provided a simple way for consumers to align their financial behavior with causes they care about.
Several CAB members indicated they would gladly pay a premium annual fee for such a card, viewing the additional cost as a meaningful way to contribute to veteran causes.
Participants also pointed out that no major financial institution had yet created a credit card explicitly structured around supporting veterans in this way.
Strategic Product Design
The financial institution ultimately designed a new credit card that maximized the benefits available under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA) and the Military Lending Act (MLA).
The product incorporated benefits such as waived annual fees, enhanced rewards programs, charitable contributions to veteran organizations, and other military-focused features that made the card uniquely attractive to veterans, active-duty service members, and the millions of Americans who support them.
By aligning the product design with existing military consumer protection frameworks, the institution was able to create a differentiated financial product while maintaining full regulatory compliance.
This meant the concept could serve not only as a new product offering but also as a powerful market differentiator capable of attracting an entirely new audience of customers motivated by purpose-driven financial products.
CAB participants suggested that the product could appeal not only to veterans and military families but also to the millions of Americans who actively support veteran-focused initiatives.
With the right positioning and partnerships with credible veteran organizations, such a product could realistically yield $30–$75 million in new annual revenue through a combination of annual fees, transaction volume, and expanded card adoption.
More importantly, it would position the issuing financial institution as a brand aligned with a cause that resonates deeply with many consumers.
Once again, the idea did not originate inside the company.
The idea and new revenue stream came directly from customers when they were invited to participate in shaping the future of the products they use.
Example 3 – Predictive Maintenance & Failure Prevention Services
During a Customer Advisory Board discussion involving enterprise equipment operators and fleet managers, participants began describing a common operational frustration: unexpected equipment failures that created costly downtime and disrupted operations.
Several CAB members explained that while existing products performed well, they lacked advanced tools that could predict failures before they occurred.
Customers suggested that if the company could combine equipment telemetry, operational data, and predictive analytics into a monitoring service, they would gladly pay a subscription fee for predictive maintenance insights that would help them prevent downtime.
The proposed solution included:
• Continuous monitoring of equipment performance data • Predictive alerts for potential failures • Maintenance scheduling recommendations • Performance optimization insights across fleets or facilities
Customers emphasized that avoiding even a single major failure could save tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in operational disruption.
Because of that, they viewed the service not as a cost, but as an operational insurance policy.
Several CAB members indicated they would be willing to pay $500–$2,000 per asset annually for such a service.
When applied across large installed equipment bases, this type of predictive maintenance platform could yield $40–$80 million in annual recurring revenue while simultaneously improving customer uptime and satisfaction.
In many industries, the shift from reactive support to predictive service has become one of the fastest-growing sources of new service revenue.
Example 4 – Industry Benchmarking & Performance Intelligence Platform
In another Customer Advisory Board session involving senior leaders from multiple organizations within the same industry, participants began discussing a challenge many of them shared.
While each company collected extensive internal performance data, they had very little visibility into how their operations compared to industry peers.
CAB participants expressed strong interest in an industry benchmarking and performance intelligence platform that could provide anonymized insights across participating organizations.
Customers explained that access to credible benchmarking data would help them make better strategic decisions, justify internal investments, and identify performance gaps earlier.
Several participants suggested they would gladly pay for such insight if it were provided by a trusted industry partner.
CAB members proposed a subscription-based benchmarking service available to participating organizations.
Early estimates from CAB participants suggested companies would pay between $50,000 and $150,000 annually for access to credible industry benchmarking intelligence.
If adopted across even a modest number of customers within the ecosystem, such a platform could yield $25–$60 million in recurring annual revenue, while positioning the provider as a trusted strategic intelligence partner within the industry.
In addition to the direct revenue opportunity, these types of platforms often strengthen customer relationships because they provide ongoing strategic insight rather than simply operational support.
4. The Revenue Discovery Framework
Organizations that consistently uncover meaningful revenue opportunities through CAB programs typically follow a structured process.
Step 1– Identify the Right Customers Step 2– Curate the Advisory Board Step 3– Design the Discussion Step 4– Facilitate Discovery
Step 4 – Facilitate Discovery (deeper dive, sample content of next blog topic on CABs)
Even with the right participants and discussion topics, the role of facilitation remains critical. The quality of insights generated during a Customer Advisory Board (CAB) session depends heavily on whether participants feel comfortable sharing candid perspectives—even when that feedback may challenge existing products, services, or strategies.
To create an environment where honest dialogue can occur, I begin every CAB session by establishing a simple set of ground rules designed to encourage openness, respect, and constructive debate.
CAB Ground Rules for Productive Discovery
Ground Rule #1 – Radical Honesty Is Expected All ideas and comments are welcome, no matter how negative they may be. If we are going to improve, we need complete honesty. I often remind participants of an old saying: only your best and most trusted friend would tell you that you have a dirty face or bad breath. The same principle applies here—honest feedback is a sign of trust.
Ground Rule #2 – Candor Will Never Be Penalized No feedback, regardless of its severity, will ever cause leadership to view participants negatively. On the contrary, those who share completely honest perspectives will be valued as trusted advisors to the brand.
Ground Rule #3 – Challenge Assumptions Participants are encouraged to speak openly and challenge assumptions. Many of the most valuable insights emerge when customers question ideas that organizations have long taken for granted.
Ground Rule #4 – Respect Every Voice Only one person speaks at a time, and all participants must respect each other’s viewpoints and perspectives. Productive CAB sessions depend on thoughtful listening as much as thoughtful speaking.
Ground Rule #5 – Think Like Owners As with brainstorming, no suggestion or criticism is off-limits. Every idea will be treated with respect and serious consideration. During the session, participants are not simply customers, they are co-CEOs helping shape the future of the company.
Segueing from this final ground rule, I then introduce an exercise designed to shift the mindset of the room even further.
Graphic 3A – Participant Certification of Company Ownership.
To shift the conversation from customer feedback to strategic thinking, each participant receives a Certificate of Ownership above that symbolically appoints them as the temporary owner and CEO of the company for the duration of the CAB session.
After distributing the certificates, I explain:
For new customer led problem identification and rectification focused sessions, the question becomes“For the next few hours, you are the owners of this company. You can change anything you want—products, services, pricing, policies, strategy, or how we operate.”
For customer led new revenue focused sessions, the question becomes “For the next few hours, you are the owners of this company. You need to focus on new revenue generation ideas that would sell easily – new products, services, premium services, events, partnerships, etc.”
Participants are then asked a simple but powerful question:
“If you owned this company, what changes would you make on day one, week one, and month one?”
This exercise immediately moves participants from the mindset of customers providing feedback to owners responsible for improving the business. The result is more candid conversations, more strategic thinking, and insights that rarely surface in traditional customer meetings.
A deeper look at the full methodology behind designing and facilitating high-impact CAB sessions, including facilitation techniques, session structures, and insight extraction frameworks will be covered in the next article in this series:
This process is illustrated in Graphic 4: The Revenue Discovery Framework.
Graphic 4 above shows how organizations move from customer insight to measurable revenue creation. Each stage builds upon the previous one, transforming structured customer conversations into a repeatable pipeline for innovation and growth.
5. Strategic Benefits Beyond Revenue
While CAB programs are powerful engines for uncovering new revenue, their impact extends far beyond innovation alone. They strengthen customer relationships and can serve as an early warning system for emerging risks.
This dynamic is illustrated in Graphic 5: The Loyalty Multiplier Effect.
Graphic 5 shows how including customers in strategic conversations creates a reinforcing cycle of engagement, advocacy, and loyalty. When customers help shape solutions, they often become advocates for the brand and long‑term partners in its success.
6. Types of Revenue Opportunities CABs Reveal
Revenue opportunities uncovered through CAB discussions typically fall into four categories:
• New services • Premium offerings • Product enhancements • Entirely new offerings These categories are illustrated in Graphic 6: The Revenue Opportunity Spectrum.
Graphic 6 demonstrates how CAB insights often begin with incremental opportunities such as services or premium offerings and can expand into entirely new products or businesses.
Internal brainstorming generates ideas, but it often lacks market validation. Customer Advisory Boards introduce perspectives internal teams cannot replicate.
The difference between internal ideas and customer‑validated insight is shown in Graphic 7.
Graphic 7 highlights how internal brainstorming often produces ideas based on assumptions, while customer‑driven innovation begins with real operational problems and validated demand.
The Strategic Imperative
Many successful growth strategies begin in the same place: a room full of customers sharing honest perspectives about their challenges and future needs.
The overall strategic impact of customer‑driven discovery is summarized in Graphic 8, Strategic Impact of Customer‑Driven Discovery.
Graphic 8 reinforces the central idea of this article: when organizations systematically involve customers in shaping their future, they unlock new revenue streams, stronger loyalty, and long‑term strategic partnerships.
“Every company has untapped revenue hiding inside its customer base. The companies that discover it first are the ones willing to ask their customers the right questions.”
The Experience Behind This Perspective
The ideas presented here are grounded in more than four decades of work in customer strategy, customer experience, consulting, and technology leadership.
I have worked with or consulted for organizations including Lockheed‑Martin, Carrier, General Electric, IBM Global Services, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Unisys, Accenture, Cox Automotive, Wave Systems, INEOS Automotive, American Express, Microsoft, Samsung, AT&T, Verizon, Pfizer, Capital One, Toyota, Amazon, Google, Oracle, Adobe, Southwest Airlines, Delta Airlines, Siemens, Wells Fargo and many others.
An Invitation to C‑Suite Leaders
If you are a CEO, Chief Customer Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, or senior executive seeking to uncover new growth opportunities while strengthening customer relationships, I would welcome the opportunity to speak with you.
Customer Advisory Boards are one of the most powerful, and most underutilized, strategic tools available to executive leadership teams.
When designed and facilitated correctly, CAB programs do far more than generate feedback. They uncover entirely new revenue streams, reveal emerging market risks before they become crises, and transform customers into strategic partners in shaping a company’s future.
Over the past four decades working with global enterprises across industries—including financial services, automotive, technology, healthcare, and manufacturing—I have helped organizations design and lead Customer Advisory Boards that have revealed hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue opportunities while simultaneously strengthening long-term customer loyalty and advocacy.
In the next three articles in this series, I will go deeper into the mechanics behind these outcomes, including:
How to Design and Run World-Class Customer Advisory Boards that consistently produce strategic insight and breakthrough ideas.
How Leading Companies Convert Customer Insight Into Revenue, transforming CAB conversations into new services, premium offerings, and entirely new business models.
The Hidden Strategic Value of Customer Advisory Boards, including how trusted CAB members can serve as early-warning systems for emerging operational, regulatory, and market risks.
Because when companies move customers from the sidelines into the strategy room, they don’t just learn more about their markets.
They start discovering opportunities their competitors haven’t even seen yet.
Covered in this blog article: A) The brand promise B) Customer bill of rights definition C) Why the customer bill of rights is needed and important D) Company mantra, tagline, and brand promise examples E) The hierarchy of company mantra, tagline, brand promise and customer bill of rights F) Customer bill of rights company examples G) Internal service organization customer bill of rights treatment standards H) How to get started creating your own customer bill of rights
The Familiar Brand Promise: We have all heard of a brand promise and have an idea of what this is all about. Simply put, a brand promise is the definition of the high-level quality of experience a company’s customers can expect to receive during every interaction with the company and its customer facing employees. The brand promise speaks to the brand’s purpose and speaks to the value that the brand will deliver.
Customer Bill of Rights Why Needed & A Simple Definition: The downside of a brand promise is that it is short of specifics on what the customer can expect during their interactions with the company. To bridge the gap between the higher-level brand promise and to explain what the customers can specifically experience when interacting with the company, we introduce the relatively new customer bill of rights. Here is a simple definition of what a customer bill of rights is:
A customer bill of rights is a public statement designed to communicate to customers what specific service level standards and guarantees the company is going to provide to them.
Hierarchy: Company Mantra, Tagline, Brand Promise and Customer Bill of Rights: To first explain how a brand promise ties into the customer bill of rights I thought it important to review the hierarchy of company-customer experience value statements starting with the Company Mantra at the highest level. Simply put, a company mantra states what the company stands for and why they exist. Here are some examples of company mantras that demonstrates “their why”. (a great related read on this “Finding your Why” by Simon Sinek):
A) Company Mantra Examples: Disney: “Fun, Family Entertainment.” Nike: “Authentic Athletic Performance.” McDonald’s: “Fun, Family, Food.” Next down in the hierarchy of company-customer experience statements comes the company tagline that supports the company mantra. A tagline is a very short and memorable phrase used to convey the value of a brand experience or its products. Here are some examples of the same set of companies and their taglines that demonstrates their why:
B) Company Tagline Examples: Disney: “The most magical place on Earth.” Nike: “Just do It.” McDonald’s: “I’m lovin’ it.” Next down in the hierarchy of company-customer experience statements is the brand promise, that at a high level, clearly and concisely states the quality of experience a company’s customers can expect to receive during every interaction with the company and its customer facing employees.
C) Company Brand Promise Examples: Disney: “to create happiness through magical experiences.” Nike: “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.” McDonald’s: “make delicious feel-good moments easy for everyone.”
While the company mantra, the tagline and the brand promise all support alignment to the company/brand and its values, it does little to speak to the customer on what specifically they can expect while interacting with the company and its customer facing employees. Hence, last, in the hierarchy of company-customer experience statements we introduce a relatively new tool called the customer bill of rights that explicitly states the specifics the customer can expect when interacting with the company and its customer facing functions and employees.
Hierarchy of Customer Experience Statements: Company Mantra – Tagline – Brand Promise – Customer Bill of Rights
Since it is relatively new to the customer experience world, we are going to break from the 3 previous companies we illustrated (Disney, Nike, McDonalds) and instead highlight some innovative companies who have been bold enough to create and display their customer bill of rights.
Customer Bill of Right Examples: Here are some great small business examples that illustrate exactly what a customer bill of rights is all about: A) Herb’s Auto:
Herb’s is a great example in that it combines their goals from a customer experience standpoint Delivering “fast, Courteous Service” along with specifics on what a customer is to expect “Lifetime Oil, Filter, Lube $12.99*”.
B) Here is another great example from Eden Prairie Painting Company:
Eden Prairie Painting Company Customer Bill of Rights
I absolutely love this example as it combines a mantra/tagline along with attractive and high quality visuals of what customer can expect as well as some service level agreements and standards (e.g., “we will begin painting within 3 weeks”, “no less than 4 years experience before working in the field for our customers”) as well as a contact number clearly visible for customers to contact them (i.e. clear call to action). .
The C&R tire resonates with me personally due to the last item above. How many times have you gone into a tire or auto service establishment’s dirty/dingy waiting room waiting for service and feel like you are in the actual service bay with all the grease, oil, and grime. Some auto establishment’s waiting rooms are truly cringe worthy. That last item on their customer bill of rights is the masterful capitalization on other competitor’s weakness and making it differentiator for your own business by putting directly into in a customer bill of rights!
D) Next up, we have this small business example from a service organization, Chautauqua Opportunities:
“Chautauqua Opportunities is an organization established under the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 to fight America’s war on poverty.” This community service organization tailors their bill of rights around service standards that are appropriate for the constituencies they serve. I particularly like their statements on the delivery of their service in a way that is “non-discriminatory” and “without bias” and safeguards their constituency’s privacy, etc. which is highly applicable to their constituents.
E) Next up, we have this small business example from Capital Homes, Inc.:
Having consulted and worked for numerous Fortune 500 companies, this bill of rights from Jet Blue is absolutely my favorite. This combines the commitment on informing customers and under what circumstances, details different customer impacting events and what customers can expect for the occurrence of each event type, but most importantly details the exact specifics the customer can expect for each customer disrupting event. Behind the scenes, I can safely predict that their revenue/finance department pre-calculated the cost of the specific customer considerations (vouchers) by multiplying the cost of each consideration by the historical incident rates and customer volumes for each type of event (departure delays, cancellations, etc.). In essence, it is solidifying a predictable revenue model while communicating this to their customer base to gain competitive advantage which is brilliant.
G) My Customer Bill of Rights Examples:
Here are some sanitized (removed client identifiable information) examples from companies I have recently worked for:
Client Customer Bills of Rights – Company Commitment
H) Customer Service Organization (internal) Customer Bills of Rights Example:
At a customer service representative level, I have created the following in terms of what type of specific customer treatment we will uphold and what the customer can expect from each and every one of our customer facing people and functions:
Our Customer Service & Experience Experts Make the Following Promises to Our Customers
Customer Service Customer Treatment Bill of Rights
5. How to Get Started, Create Your Own Organization’s Customer Bill of Rights
Does your company (large or small) have a Customer Bill of Rights? This is not in a company mantra, tagline, or brand promise, but rather a simple set of rules, standards and guidelines that details the specifics of your customer service and customer experience delivery and helps set specific customer <–> customer-service expectations.
Start by discussing this possibility with your upper management and with your customer support organization. Challenge your organization to create 5-10 customer service expectations that your customers can specifically expect from your company and team. Then make sure that every employee knows and understands it is their obligation to deliver on those expectations. Key to this is aligning your internal standards, process, employee incentives and technology infrastructure to support the pledge, training your frontline employees, and recognizing customer service employee stars who are exceptional in upholding your customer service standards and pledges to your customer.
6. Summary
We have all heard of and mostly understand customer experience terms like the company mantra, tagline, and brand promise. These terms while effective in communicating the values of the company and the brand(s), these fail to communicate what the customer is to specifically expect when interacting with the company and their frontline employees for various customer needs. To address this gap in helping customers understand what specifics the company will deliver from a customer service perspective the increasing use of the customer bill of rights has been introduced by a growing number of companies. The many examples of a customer bill of rights presented in this article will give you food for thought in terms of what your own might look like. It is easy to get started to create your own and can start as simple as with a conversation with your customer facing team and upper management. If you do create a customer bill of rights, you must ensure all capabilities are in place to deliver on these customer promises, otherwise it will be judged as just a company marketing gimmick that nobody believes and you risk losing a great deal of marketplace credibility and customer faith.
7) Need help in creating your own customer bill of rights?
If your organization is seeking a proven resource in measuring and improving your customer service and experience via a customer bill of rights, then give me a call or e-mail me at 518-339-5857 or stevenjeffes@gmail.com.
Lastly, this is just one article nearly 60 articles I have written on customer strategy, customer experience, CRM, marketing, product management, competitive intelligence, corporate innovation, change management – all of which I have significant experience in delivering for Fortune 500 companies. In fact, my blog is now followed by nearly 106,000 world-wide and was just named one of the top 100 CRM blogs on the planet by Feedspot, alongside Salesforce.com, Infor, Microsoft, SAS, etc. – Reference this informative site here: https://blog.feedspot.com/crm_blogs/.
Topics covered in this blog: 1) The simple definitions for the Internet of Things (IoT) and Telematics 2) Illustration of IoT personal and business devices, uses 3) IoT Trends 4) IoT Growth in Spend and Market Size 5) IoT enablers and why IoT has become so pervasive 6) How does IoT work 7) The benefits of IoT 8) The positives and negatives of IoT 9) The most Popular IoT Architecture Platforms in 2021 10) The 10 Hottest Industrial IoT Platforms Of 2020 11) The most Popular IoT Services Companies for 2021 12) Sample IoT Use Cases that illustrate the Customer Experience Benefits • Customer, Personal IoT Digital Assistants Use Case Benefits • Business, Fleet Management IoT Benefits Use Case: • IoT Dashboard Example with Customer Experience Benefits: 13) How to get started in improving your IoT driven Customer Experience
A) Simple Definitions of IoT and Telematics:
One new term I keep hearing about over and over is the “Internet of Things”, known shorthand as IoT. I thought this was a strange term at first and was puzzled about what it stood for. As a result, I set forth to research the topic and create a simple definition for IoT as well as “Telematics” which is frequently mentioned in the context of IoT.
1) IoT Definition: IoT is short for the Internet of Things and describes physically connected objects, that contain embedded sensors, processors, software, and other technologies, and that connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the internet or by other communications networks.
2) Telematics Definition: Telematics is the practice of sending, receiving, and storing information using telecommunication devices to control remote IoT objects. In other words, and more put more simply, Telematics is the practice of managing information collected from an array of IoT devices (i.e., connected thermostats, GPS in an automobile, Alexa, Siri, etc.). For the rest of this article, IoT and supporting Telematics I will simply refer to as IoT.
Consumer & Business IoT
{click on image to expand}
B) IoT Trends and why IoT has become so significant:
With 1.3 billion projected subscriptions by 2023, IoT is about to experience another boost by the 5G technology.
By 2021, 35 billion IoT devices will be installed around the world.
The number of connected devices in 2021 will be 46 billion. (Juniper Research)
Households have ten connected (IoT) devices on average and will rise to 50 in 2021, (Economic Times)
Spending on IoT Endpoint Security solutions will reach $631M in 2021, (Gartner)
The Smart Home IoT market will grow to $53.45 billion by 2022, (Statista)
1) What are the driving forces behind all this IoT growth? 2) Why has IoT usage grown so much now? 3) What has enabled IoTs to be integral in almost everything we do, touch, etc.?
The simple answer is that the rapid increase in technological capabilities, miniaturization of devices, increased computing capacity and 24x7x365 high bandwidth are the enablers. The real reason is that this drives multiple win-wins including the decreased business cost and cycle times coupled with increases in accuracy and customer experience delivery. The chart below sums up these trends very succinctly.
IoT Enablers, Why Now
D) How does IoT work
IoT systems consist of web-enabled smart devices that use embedded systems (that include processors, sensors, data storage/management hardware, and communication hardware, to collect, send and act on data they acquire from the surroundings where they are embedded. IoT devices either share the sensor data they collect to the cloud to be analyzed or the data is made available locally to be analyzed.
In certain instances, these IoT devices communicate with other related IoT devices and act on the information they compile and aggregate from each another. These IoT devices perform most of their own processing and decision making without the need for human intervention, although persons can interact with the devices to either install them, provide updated instructions, or access and monitor the data associated with the systems they are overseeing and/or controlling.
E) The benefits of IoT, the IoT Revolution
Never has there been such a win-win enabled by technology than with the explosion of the use of IoT. Businesses win by enabling greater efficiency and accuracy while driving costs and time to market simultaneously lower. At the same time, companies can increase the ease of doing business with them through increased customer convenience along with increased customer experiences (marketing, sales, customer service, products, services, etc.) by having greater IoT enabled insights into what customer really need and want. The following chart captures some of the IoT enabled win-wins both for business and customers.
Business and Consumer Benefits of IoT
F) The Balanced Positives and Negatives of IoT
To not just present benefits of implementing IoT in the above chart, I also developed the following chart to show additional IoT positives balanced with negatives. For example, for business the benefit is the decreased maintenance cost and equipment downtime, while a negative is the risk of hacking and hijacking of IoT devices connected data and systems, etc. for both customers and businesses.
Balanced Business and Customer Positives and Negatives of IoT
G) Most Popular IoT Architecture Platforms in 2021
Here is a list of the most popular IoT platforms In 2021 from SoftwareTestingHelp.
I would also add to the top of the list Tata Consulting Services (TCS) as a company who excels in IoT strategy and integration consulting.
Tata Consulting Services (TCS)
J) Example Companies Going all In on IoT
While there are many companies embracing and adopting the concept of IoT, one stands out in particular. Honeywell has made IoT a centerpiece of their future company strategy and has developed a new IoT platform called Honeywell Forge. You may have seen some of the ads they are currently running online, on cable channels and in print. Honeywell plans to roll out versions of this IoT platform for the airline, industrials and buildings verticals.
I interviewed with Honeywell a while back for a Director of Customer Experience position and was impressed at how passionate they are was about IoT and how well they understood that it enabled much higher levels of customer experience. Other companies who have introduced IoT platforms include GE, Siemens and Johnson Controls (competitor to Honeywell).
K) Sample IoT Use Cases that illustrate the Customer Experience Benefits
1) Customer, Personal IoT Digital Assistants Use Case Benefits:
The user of at home personal digital IoT assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and Samsung’s Bixby have exploded in the past 5+ years. They have enabled an entire new level of convenience for consumers. The increased customer intimacy and insights gathering comes with the potential balanced decrease in privacy. Users of digital personal assistants are generally aware and ok with this tradeoff due to the delivered convenience and enhanced customer experience. The chart below illustrates a sample of delivered customer experiences based on the potential to learn about users/customers and the enabled delivery of great customer experiences based on leveraging these enhanced insights.
Personal Customer Experience Benefits of IoT, Personal Assistant Example
2) Business, Fleet Management IoT Benefits Use Case:
The user of IoT in fleet management has also increased dramatically in the past several years. The use of these fleet management IoT solutions have enabled an entire new level of convenience for both their business users as well as the customers they serve. The chart below illustrates a sample of delivered customer experiences based on the potential to learn about users/customers and the enabled delivery of great customer experiences based on leveraging these enhanced insights.
Business Customer Experience Benefits of IoT, Fleet Management Example
3) IoT Dashboard Example with Customer Experience Benefits:
Above is a superb example of an IoT insights power management dashboard created via Sisense, a company that “Builds custom analytic experiences” and “Embeds actionable intelligence anywhere.” to “Transform the way you work.”
In this power management example, the Sisense enabled dashboard displays all the performance measures associated with the IoT monitoring devices such as the following:
1) Device A, B, C Power usage, voltage, frequency, and current 2) Average Power by device (A, B, C) 3) Energy Consumption over time by device (A, B, C) 4) Current over time by device (A, B, C) 5) Voltage over time by device (A, B, C)
In this example above, a customer user can remotely monitor systems and proactively watch for performance measures that show power supply or regulation degradation. In times past, instead of the IoT performing the monitoring, the monitoring would instead have to be accomplished by sending a person to manually monitor 3 devices (Device A, B, C) on a periodic schedule to ensure they are operating correctly and to manually intercede if they are malfunctioning.
In the same manner that businesses have benefitted by an increase in convenience and business (B2B) customer experience, IoT has enabled the consuming public to be able to interact with their vehicles, home security systems, personal assistants, smart phones, etc. to also improve their lives through increased convenience and improved personal (B2C) customer experiences. Smarter IoT devices become smarter in automating tasks, maintaining our needs, preventing malfunctions and breakdowns, ensuring we get what we need when we need it, increasing our safety and security, while bring us life’s needs at the sound of our voices while going about our normal routines.
L) Summary
IoT stands for the “Internet Of Things” and is simply smart devices that monitor, control, and interact for a variety of functions that collect and transmit data from an array of IoT devices through telematics.
IoT has emerged as one of the fastest growing technology segments in the last several years and will continue this pace of massive growth for the next 5-10 years.
IoT rapid market diffusion has been enabled by even smaller and more powerful device level processing capacity, aided by IoT enabled cloud technology.
IoT has been embedded in almost every aspect of our day-to-day lives including cars, homes, critical infrastructure, personal wearables, etc.
IoT has delivered a tremendous amount of benefit to businesses in terms of reduced cycle times and costs.
While IoT has delivered many benefits, there are a set of downsides to IoT that must be considered and actively managed like the increased risk of hacking and hijacking.
While many businesses would point to the reduction in costs and cycle times as the major business case justification, the common denominator for both business and consumers is the increased convenience and improvement in customer experiences.
The bottom line for IoT is, as stated by the title of this article simultaneously improves customer convenience and customer experience while simultaneously decreasing business cycle times and overall cost. This statement clearly sums up why we are in the midst of an IoT revolution and why the market for IoT has and will continue to experience explosive growth.
M) Need help getting started in improving your IoT driven Customer Experience?
If your organization is seeking a proven resource in measuring and improving your customer service and experience via IoT, then give me a call or e-mail me at 518-339-5857 or stevenjeffes@gmail.com
Lastly, this is just one article of 50+ articles I have written on customer strategy, customer experience, CRM, marketing, product management, competitive intelligence, corporate innovation, change management – all of which I have significant experience in delivering for Fortune 500 companies. In fact, my blog is now followed by nearly 106,000 world-wide and was just named one of the top 100 CRM blogs on the planet by Feedspot, alongside Salesforce.com, Infor, Microsoft, SAS, etc. – Reference this informative site here: https://blog.feedspot.com/crm_blogs/
Current trends in the adoption of AI as applied to customer service.
The business case for AI adoption in customer service.
Common use cases for AI powered customer service delivery.
Real companies that have implemented AI driven customer service.
How to get started implementing AI applications for customer service.
The application of AI for customer service has been traditionally viewed with skepticism and believed to be somewhat bleeding edge as a non-matured and risky investment prior to 2018. While this has been true up to that point in time, this reality is quickly changing for the following major reasons:
AI software applications now have proven the business case for implementation in that the business value delivered vastly exceeds the initial implementation investment costs.
AI application functionality has stabilized to the point of being highly reliable and mainstream.
There are now several common and proven use cases for the application of AI for customer service.
There are now numerous best-of-breed & enterprise-level AI customer service applications to choose from vs. just a very few.
Companies have now caught onto the fact that AI can help improve the delivery of customer service and exceptional customer experiences while simultaneously accomplishing the following wins (Quadruple win!):
Decreasing the overall cost to serve customers.
Decreasing the reliance on expensive human capital to deliver customer service.
Increasing the levels of customer insights and customer intimacy.
Changing the company’s customer service from a reactive model (i.e., upon customer request) to a predictive and proactive model (i.e., upon automation detection of latent customer need).
Here are some of (small sample) the more common use cases for the adoption of AI powered customer service:
AI Powered Social Listening to detect customer issues, trends, brand mentions, etc. and with proactive workflows to help the internal team resolve these issues. This capability allows AI to perform real times scans of 1,000’s of social media posts and media channels including mobile application data to spot social mentions, potential customer service issues, potential product/service defects, brand and/or company mentions, etc. that are trending. The more powerful tools also search and respond to specific customer service inquiries from a multitude of channel sources. Here is an example of a social brand listening dashboard from Brandwatch:
Several durable goods product/manufacturing companies use this function for listening to track trending potential product defect issues like “my front loading xyz brand washing machine keeps growing mold” or “my air bag caused extensive injuries during my crash”, etc. to get ahead of potential disastrous crisis’s and then manage them proactively. Here are a few good articles that point to some of the leading social listening tools for the purpose of providing improved and more proactive customer experiences.
2. AI powered customer account authentication & access via advanced number/voice recognition and biometrics. Instead of having to remember your password for each account, wouldn’t it be great to use your own unique physical identity to securely access your accounts? These physical identity attributes include your unique voice, eye attributes, and fingerprint to name a few. Many banks are quickly adopting this new capability by allowing people to access their accounts simply by speaking their voice into their phone. I first encountered this on my personal funds account and have since seen this at several banks. Here is a great example from HSBC bank as to how AI voice recognition is powering bank account authentication and access. Source: https://ciiom.hsbc.com/ways-to-bank/phone-banking/voice-id/#tab-2
HSBC Customer Voice Account Authentication and Access
3. AI powered customer personalization. There is a growing need to better develop and understand customer profiles and to develop personalized content based on this specific profile. With the help of AI, a deeper understanding of customer’s specific needs and unique profiles is now possible. Here is a great graphic depicting this capability from Unfold Labs:
Unfold Labs AI Driven Customer Personalization Solution
4. AI powered agent matching via AI call classification and intelligent call routing. Based on triaging the reason for the customer to contact the company in #3 above, AI then matches the customer-need to the best available customer service agent (i.e., those who specialize in resolving those specific customer needs). The call is then routed to the best CS agent with a pre-brief on why the customer is contacting them, their interaction and purchase history, any previous known attempts to resolve this or any other issue, etc. Here is a great pictorial of how Genesis Predictive routing accomplishes this along with a high-level explanation of how it works.
AI powered customer service agent interaction response improvement suggestions. Bots will scan customer service agent’s sessions (calls, chat, text, etc.) and then suggest in real-time optimal answers to improve customer satisfaction and to standardize the customer experience. Here is an example of how Digital genius suggests who will respond (agent or Bot) and what the content of the reply should be:
Digital Genius AI Automated Customer Response Engine
6. AI powered customer service and ecommerce chatbots with advanced analytics. Chatbot are being used in increasing numbers by companies due to the simultaneous increase in chatbot customer service capabilities as well as decreased cost of these solutions. Here is a great example of Dom, the Dominos pizza chatbot located on messenger, Facebook, website, etc.
Chatbots are also increasingly being used to automate the ecommerce process for ordering, re-ordering, resupply, etc. Here is a great example from Hewlett Packard being used to service customers ordering or reordering toner cartridges, using the leading Netomi solution for their AI chatbot solution.
AI powered call mining & analysis with systemic improvement recommendations & workflows. These applications are designed to be the powerful engine that analyzes and recommends systemic improvements for agent customer interaction. Think of these applications as the 24×7 call center director’s expert analysis assistant that never sleeps and has the ability to monitor the equivalent of the combined workload of 100+ top expert analysts. Specifically, here is what these solutions like Call Miner from Eureka can accomplish: A) Analyze: Better understand conversations with root-cause analysis. Discover what matters most with omnichannel customer journey mapping that scores performance, tags transcriptions with sentiment and emotion, and delivers customer insights that drive business growth. B) Coach: Create cultures of improvement and persistent optimization. Improve customer experience and agent performance with automated scoring, data-based feedback, and progress monitoring. C) Alert: Real-time guidance. Gain immediate awareness of next-best actions to turn around a negative customer experience and reduce risk for fines or legal action – all driven by powerful AI and ML capabilities. D) Capture: Gather speaker-separated audio. Collect high-fidelity, dual-channel audio for the most accurate conversation analysis, with encryption to ensure the security and an always-open API to integrate easily across platforms. E) Visualize: Compel action with data. See and share the story your data tells with an interactive, easy-to-use interface that makes it easier to drill down into the detail of a single agent or customer, and visually connects the dots between insight and action. F) Redact: Accurately identify and remove sensitive numeric data. Extract the value of conversation analytics without exposing private customer information.
Eureka AI Call Miner Call Analysis and Recommendation Engine
8. AI powered Intelligent Document Processing (IDP). Leveraging Natural Language Analysis and OCR of customer documents like surveys, invoices, orders, reviews, questionnaires, etc. AI is being adapted to analyze text fields in documents to uncover customer insights and trends in order to improve systemically and increase customer satisfaction (CSAT) and service efficiency while reducing costs. There are several tools available in the market as shown on the Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) chart for Infrrd.ai which is one of the leading IDP Software vendors. View this chart here: https://www.infrrd.ai/. Other IDP leaders include Workfusion, Automation Anywhere, IBM, etc. IDP tools enable the automatic scanning of millions of documents and hundreds of millions of lines of document text, characters, numbers, symbols to extract and record key information from these documents and then aggregates and reports on the important customer facts, figures, issues, etc.
If your organization is seeking experienced assistance in lowering your overall cost to serve and increasing CSAT with automated and AI powered customer service, then give me a call or e-mail me at 518-339-5857 or stevenjeffes@gmail.com.
Lastly, this is just one article of over 50 articles I have written on customer strategy, customer experience, CRM, sales excellence, marketing, product management, competitive intelligence, corporate innovation, change management – all of which I have significant experience in delivering for numerous Fortune 500 companies. In fact, my blog is now followed by nearly 107,000 world-wide and was just named one of the top 100 CRM blogs on the planet by Feedspot, alongside Salesforce.com, Infor, Microsoft, SAS, etc. – Reference this informative site here: https://blog.feedspot.com/crm_blogs/.
How & why top companies are inverting their organization charts and putting their own customers in charge of customer operations while increasing Customer Diversity & Inclusion (D&I).
How and why this practice also leads to the following ratings:
1) Higher NPS, 2) Increased customer loyalty, 3) Increased customer satisfaction levels & CSAT, 4) Growth in customer zealots that virally promote your brands and company, 5) Increased customer diversity and inclusion (D&I).
The top 10 things you will learn by reading this blog: 1) The spectrum of customer first cultures – find out where you stand on this spectrum. 2) The trends in developing customer insights and customer feedback via customer inclusionary programs and customer onramps. 3) How customer onramps support customer diversity and inclusion (i.e., customer D&I programs). 4) Customer Experience metrics from real companies who have developed and deployed these customer onramps. 5) Creative win-wins to make your customer experience more fun, engaging, educational, rewarding, and inclusive. 6) Innovations in creating customer communities that increase brand loyalty, customer referrals. 7) Market leading companies and their case studies in leveraging customers as the Chief Customer Officer (CCO). 8) The customer organization Inversion and customer empowerment of the future. 9) Quick & easy wins in getting started in the customer inversion that will create customer zealots and a customer experience 2nd to none. 10) The top 10 things you should immediately consider implementing to increase Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) levels, NPS and customer loyalty rates by double digits.
A) The Customer Organizational Inversion-Revolution:
There is an organizational customer inversion-revolution going on and it will only accelerate in the future. What this revolution entails is a complete inversion of the customer decision making structure for companies, one where the customers (vs. the company) are in charge, leading the design of customer strategy and future customer programs. I call it the customer inversion revolution. This inversion looks something like the chart below. We will detail this customer organization inversion-revolution in following sections of this blog.
FROM:
Traditional Customer Service Organization
TO:
Customer Service Organization Inversion-Revolution
Key to implementing this customer organizational inversion-revolution is the development of customer inclusionary “on ramps” (shown in the green symbol above) that allows customers to participate and join the company team as brand partners, advocates, insights experts, advisors, etc. We will cover this more in depth in following sections but hence forward, customer on ramps will be designated by this symbol below:
Customer Inclusionary Onramp
These onramps detailed in the following blog increase customer inclusion by their very nature of creating an array of customer chosen methods for these customers to contribute to and participate in the company’s success. The enhanced diversity is derived from tapping into and leveraging the diverse set of perspectives and needs from existing customers that represent a cross-section of different cultures, races, genders, ages, political views, national origins and religions, etc. so that the best product and/or services are engaged in the marketplace.
Many companies have omitted these onramps in the vetting of new products, services, marketing campaigns, etc. and have ended up offending and alienating their own customers and potential prospects. A great web article points to how companies have fielded expensive and disastrous marketing campaigns and ads in the past only to have to quickly pull them from the market. These campaigns/ads are often a result of corporate myopathy and not taking into account a multitude of diverse perspectives enabled by an array of customer D&I onramps: “7 of the most controversial ads of our time” https://www.thedrum.com/news/2019/04/08/7-the-most-controversial-ads-our-time. A major West Coast bank vets all of it marketing concepts through a customer insights group (covered below) before ever releasing the ad and/or campaign into the market. Only after the CIG group (onramp) has weighed in and provided their approval and feedback will this bank to go market with their marketing concepts.
Bottom line, these onramps enable your customers to become brand and company partners/advocates who, through time and continued onramp participation, develop an ever increasing vested interest in the brand(s) and company success.
To be receptive to this change and to get onboard with customer leaders who are in the process of putting customers in charge and implementing the customer organizational inversion-revolution, you must first have a foundational customer centric culture. Companies that are implementing this customer centric change and building customer brand partners include Apple, Southwest Airlines, Ritz Carlton, Amazon, Marriott, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, etc. Let us first explore what a customer centric culture is and the spectrum of companies on the customer centric continuum.
B) The Customer First, Customer Centric Culture
To begin with, almost every company claims to be customer centric, that their customers are their most important asset, customer satisfaction is a priority, etc. In practice I have found that there is a spectrum of truth to these public statements ranging from treating customers as a necessary commodity to the other end of the spectrum and treating customers as equal and respected partners and treating customers as a true extension of the company-employee team.
Referring to the chart below, we can see that spectrum of company cultures and their treatment of customers based on these different company customer cultures. To simplify this illustration, I have only included 3 types of companies as follows (along top of chart):
Customer Centric Company Spectrum
“Customers are our most valuable asset”: Companies that truly value their customers and view them as an integral part of their team and company’s success. This type of company also maintains a true customer first culture, policies, standards, etc. (right side of chart, spectrum).
“We Value our Best Customers”: Companies that only strive to cater to their most valuable customers since these customers benefit the company the most (middle of chart, spectrum).
“Customers are a Necessary Commodity”: Companies that interact and ‘deal with’ customers when it benefits them (they pay lip service to slogan ‘customers are their most important asset’), left side of chart, spectrum.
On the left side of the above chart, we have a number of customer facing dimensions including the following:
1) “Customer Input”: How the company views and approaches soliciting customers for insights, input on new programs, detailed feedback (i.e., focus groups, crowdsourcing, etc.), etc. 2) “Customer Complaints”: How the company views and approaches the handling of customers complaints. 3) “Customer Inclusion, Partnership”: How the company approaches being customer inclusive by offering customers ways to partner with the company including online communities, customer co-blogging, customer spotlights, etc. 4) “Customer Engagement”: How the company approaches customer communication and creates a rewarding and engaging customer experience.
Companies located on the far-right side of the chart have the following belief that is not only a slogan, but embodied in the company culture, operations, practices, standards, rewards systems, etc.:
“Customers are our Most Valuable Asset”.
For the first customer dimension on the left side of the chart, “Customer Input”, a comment that I heard from a CEO with this type of culture is as follows:
“We make no (major) decisions (that will impact the customer) without the customer’s direct input”.
For the first customer dimension of “Customer Complaints”, a company CEO said the following,
“Customer complaints are a valuable insight and gift to help us improve, beat our competition”.
You can read the comments for each type of company aligned to each customer dimension. Bottom line, without a foundational customer first mindset, rewards and incentive system and culture, you will be impeded on implementing the effective customer inclusion program with many possible customer onramps detailed in the remainder of this blog.
C) Mainstream Customer Inclusionary Programs & Onramps:
As I mentioned before, once you have established a totally customer centric culture, the 2nd step is to build customer incremental onramps for the customer to become a brand partner and an integral part of the customer team. These onramps invite the customer to participate in a number of activities that will increase customer satisfaction (CSAT), loyalty, NPS, viral referrals, etc. Based on my experience, building these customer inclusionary onramps can net your company huge increases in key customer measures as follows:
1) NPS: +14 to 49 2) Customer Loyalty: + 4% to 36% 3) Customer Positive Sentiment: +12% to 71% 4) Customer Viral Referrals: +11% to 26%
Customer On-Ramp: Customer Advisory Board Program
1) Customer Advisory Board Program:
A Customer Advisory Board (CAB) is the composition of a group of trusted, and generally top customers, who meet on a regular basis (i.e., Quarterly) to advise the company on strategic direction such as the product and/or service roadmap and on upcoming major new programs. Customer advisory boards (a.k.a. trusted customer advisors) can also be a conduit to award top customers for their input, loyalty, spend, referrals, etc.
At a top US automotive company, we invited our top and most open/honest customers to these focus group and advisory events, paid their travel expenses, hosted a nice dinner reception and, at the end of the session, gave them an appreciation gift for their continued participation and loyalty. We also had Platinum private customer events for our top 1% spend customers which were meetings with the EVP and above for open-ended candid feedback & insights gathering discussions.
Customer On-Ramp: Customer Insights Group Program
2) Customer Insights Group Program:
A Customer Insights Group (CIG) is the composition of a wider cross-section of customers or specific customer segment(s) who meet on a regular basis (i.e., weekly, quarterly) to advise the company on new tactical programs, proposed sales campaigns, and marketing concepts, provide feedback on existing program effectiveness, provide customer experience insights based on their own actual experience, etc. Customer insights groups are usually on a voluntary enrollment basis and typically come with some sort of incentive to participate (i.e., participate and be entered in a drawing for a gift certificate).
A top 5 US bank uses these extensively and there is a directive from the CMO that no new marketing programs/materials/etc. will be fielded without first getting the input of this insights group. After implementing this program, marketing effectiveness increased by an overall 27% and the loyalty of the group increased by a whopping 38% as compared to non-CIG participants. When surveyed, 92% of CIG members indicated that they told 26+ about their positive perception of this bank CIG program (survey choices were 0-5, 6-10, 11-15, 16-25 or 26+).
Amazingly enough, 5,000 participants volunteer up to 8 hours of their time per week to participate with another 5,000 eagerly waiting in the wings for their term to participate (participation is limited to a 2-year term).
In addition, by tapping into a diverse customer set, the bank was able to avoid potential marketing disasters by stopping the fielding of proposed marketing materials that were deemed offensive and culturally insensitive by members of the customer insights group.
Customer On-Ramp: Customer Co-blogging & Co-Authoring Program
3) Customer Co-Blogging & Co-Author Program:
Customers telling their story (the voice of the customer) about their success in using your product/service and their customer experiences are 5-7x more credible than coming from the company. In addition, customer authors bring with them an entirely new audience sphere (their friends, connection, relatives, etc.) which will result in a dramatically increasing your website traffic, SEO, referrals, etc. Customers love the opportunity to be spotlighted and write their own story (with helpful company editing of course) when it comes to their experience interacting with the company. Co-blogging can also be about customer stories with a human-interest side to it vs. always being business oriented. Customer co-authored articles can be about topics such as how to gain the most value from the product/service, tips/tricks they have learned, the value they have gained from using same, etc.
We recently used this for a struggling newsletter program that had only penetrated 27% of our customer base. Six months after I implemented the co-blogging program, the newsletter distribution grew to 56% of our customer base and we experienced a simultaneous increase of 17% in new visitor web traffic.
Customer On-Ramp: Top Customer Appreciation & Recognition Program
4) Top Customer Appreciation & Recognition Program:
Remember the movie “Up in the Air” with George Clooney? He was a top traveler who strived to be in the 1% club in terms of air miles flown per year on a particular airline whereby, if he achieved this distinction, he would then be invited to an awards dinner with the CEO of the airline and be showered with a whole host of flying perks after achieving that level of spend/loyalty. Banks, hotels, brokerage firms, etc. all have an array of top customer loyalty rewards programs.
For the very top customers, there are more hands-on personal perks like a dedicated/private concierge assigned to customers like for the American Express Black credit card which can only be obtained by direct invite by American Express (i.e. not via request). A top US air conditioning company I used to work for had top distributorship recognition events for the distributors who sold the highest revenue generating air conditioning units. While focused internally for a company, many salespersons have benefitted from such top achievement loyalty programs by achieving the distinction as top salespersons for their companies and being rewarded with trips, cash, luxury items, cars, etc. as a thank you for their contributions.
Customer On-Ramp: Customer Product/Service Beta Group Program
5) Customer Product/Service Beta Group Program:
Before top companies like Microsoft and Apple ever release a new product into the market, they first try these new products with limited volunteer beta groups. They gather feedback from these beta test groups and then continuously improve the beta product before releasing the product to mitigate potentially disastrous consequences of releasing products with potential flaws that internal testing failed to consider via their test cases.
Customer On-Ramp: Customer Success Program
6) Customer Success (Spotlight) Program:
Does your company have successful customers using your product and/or service? Why not showcase or spotlight this success by detailing what they did, how they did it and the value they were able to derive from doing so? Challenge customers to submit their success stories for selection to spotlight in the newsletter, website, articles, FAQs, consideration for prizes for the top stories, etc. The more customers witness real customer successes, the more other customers will want to figure out how to acquire your product/service to emulate the success of other customers.
Customer On-Ramp: Ambassador Program
7) Customer Ambassador Program:
The Syracuse University (SU) admissions and student success programs received a big boost with the adoption of its Alumni ambassador program whereby successful alumni would volunteer to host regional recruiting events, student college send-off events, and answer questions from interested students in their area. Alumni ambassador groups increased the level of excitement and enthusiasm for new students and families while simultaneously decreasing the levels of anxiety and confusion among students and families.
The entire ecosystem of a customer first, customer inclusive company that has inverted the customer organizational structure and has built a comprehensive set of customer onramps to be able to put customers in charge of customer operations would look something like the following chart:
D) Other Customer Inclusionary Programs & Onramps:
In addition to the more popular and mainstream customer inclusionary programs above, there are several other programs that I have encountered that were effective by increasing the levels or customer loyalty and creating many customer-brand zealots (those who actively and aggressively advocate for the brand/company).
Customer On-Ramp: Creative Council Program
1) Customer Creative Council Program:
Many customers have a wide range of creative talents outside of simply being a customer. A company with a large customer base tends to have customers who are very creative such as artists, craftspeople, etc. A large SaaS software firm I consulted for would solicit creative ideas for new campaign concepts from the creative group among their customer base (and sometimes from their employees) to get the best creative concepts as possible. Many times, customers would develop far more appealing creative concepts than their own dedicated creative talent working within the company. Why not source from the best of the best, including creative customers?! This would allow the company to harness this creativity while allowing creative customers to be spotlighted for their hidden talents and feel valued by the company.
Customer On-Ramp: Talent Showcase Program
2) Customer Talent Showcase Program:
Beyond just being creative, a company with a large customer base typically includes customers who are also poets, book authors, those with interesting and varied professions such as paramedics, volunteer firefighters, food bank volunteers, world travelers, iron men or women, triathletes, extreme cyclists, paragliders, scuba divers, treasure hunters, etc. Many companies I have worked with have conducted customer showcases that highlight the interesting lives of their customer base beyond merely being a customer. These personal story showcases add a human-interest side to the customer base and tend to make customers feel more connected to and understood-appreciated by the company.
Are you planning on creating a customer journey map and want to know what the important steps and metrics are in that journey? Why not invite the customer to join in on these development sessions to provide the team with some insights, feedback, important items to consider? I have used this approach quite effectively and have developed far more qualitative customer journeys as a result. I used this approach to develop a brand new and innovative customer journey map I have labeled “The Quantifiable Customer Journey Map”. Refer to my previous blog article for insights here: https://bit.ly/3bvPRal
The Quantifiable Customer Journey Map
Bottom line, without the customer’s input, the high quality achieved in the final customer journey map would have been much more difficult and time consuming to achieve.
Customer Diversity & Inclusion Council
4) Customer Diversity & Inclusion Council:
A few companies I have worked with in the past have managed and conducted employee diversity councils whereby employees would provide their perspective on how the company can be more diverse, culturally sensitive, and overall inclusive.
A few companies have taken this further and included their own customers into the diversity council along with their employees. In this manner, the company ensures that it is considering the widest possible perspective on D&I and not falling victim to company group think.
Regardless of whether you include a formal customer diversity council, what all the above illustrated customer onramps do in essence is help build a company culture that supports customer diversity and inclusion (D&I) as follows:
1) Enables the assembling of a diverse set of perspectives, based on unique and diverse set of customer experiences, needs, etc. 2) Provides diverse feedback on potential new customer programs, marketing, etc. that might be perceived as offensive and discriminatory to certain customer groups. 3) Enables customers to showcase their diverse backgrounds, talents, interests, viewpoints. 4) Enables a voice of the customer cultivation that represents the full cross section of diverse customers. 5) Enables the delivery of the best of the best solutions by allowing feedback on proposed programs from a wide and diverse set of customers.
If your organization is seeking experienced assistance in creating these customer onramps and a more diverse and inclusive and customer first organization where customers are leveraged to assist the insights Chief Customer Officer (CCO) and are transitioned to full brand-partners/advocates/participants/etc., then give me a call or e-mail me at 518-339-5857 or stevenjeffes@gmail.com. I am also a Certified CultureTalk (https://culturetalk.com/) consultant that can help you develop and/or improve a customer-oriented, customer first culture.
Steven Jeffes, Certified CultureTalk Consultant
Lastly, this is just one article of over 50 articles I have written on customer strategy, customer experience, CRM, sales excellence, marketing, product management, competitive intelligence, corporate innovation, change management – all of which I have significant experience in delivering for numerous Fortune 500 companies. In fact, my blog is now followed by nearly 107,000 world-wide and was just named one of the top 100 CRM blogs on the planet by Feedspot, alongside Salesforce.com, Infor, Microsoft, SAS, etc. – Reference this informative site here: https://blog.feedspot.com/crm_blogs/ .
How a company’s primary Archetype drives an authentic brand and the delivery of exceptional customer service and customer experiences
After being hired as a consultant and researching numerous companies, I have discovered the following as to why some achieve market leadership while others do not. What I have discovered is that market leading companies like Amazon, Intuit, American Express, Apple, Southwest Airlines, Wegmans, Gartner, Nielsen, Lego, Hallmark, Disney, etc., have all achieved a high degree of alignment between their ABCs – their organizational Archetype, their corporate Brand and their Customer presence. They are all authentically aligned, in-synch and balanced both internally through the experienced corporate culture as well as externally through the brand and customer experience. Through my experience with many companies and brands I have also found that when these items are misaligned or not balanced, there is a negative reaction to company by the employees, customers and stakeholders.
To draw an analogy to people you meet, ask yourself, if you have ever meet or run into someone who meets the following characteristics:
1) Is a self-proclaimed advocate for protecting against sexual harassment and then makes inappropriate glances or comments as an attractive person passes by? 2) Describes themselves as a person of tolerance and acceptance but speaks in a manner that is condescending or hurtful to others, etc.? 3) Maintains they are for protecting the environment, global warming, etc. but in practice they throw litter onto the sidewalk or out of their car window and have a older automobile that pollutes a great deal?
If you have, you might walk away saying the following:
“That was totally unexpected!” “They are a phony, fake” “That person was totally disingenuous, not authentic!”
Not surprisingly, the same thing happens upon interacting with inauthentic companies as follows:
1 The company states that their customers are their #1 focus yet their delivered customer service is horrible and totally frustrates their customers. 2 The company indicates that they are for the environment from a corporate culture perspective, but print many of their marketing and other materials on physical paper stock and is not recycling on a systemic and/or widespread basis. 3 The company’s advertisements are very funny, engaging and/or professional, yet customers are offended and upset when they interact with the company’s rude and apathetic customer service representatives. 4 The company states that their culture promotes employee work life balance, but as an employee, you hardly ever see you family due to crushing workloads.
As a customer or as an employee, you’re likely to have the same reflex as when you encounter an inauthentic person. You would probably react by registering your displeasure with the company and avoid the next interaction or defect from the company as soon as possible.
In stark contrast, companies who are market leaders achieve what I call authentic ABC alignment. In this, there is perfect alignment and synergy between their ABCs as follows: 1) Archetype (company’s main personality, attributes) 2) Brand (projected company image (external) and reflected culture (internal)) 3) Customer service and experience delivery (company attitude, manners, empathy, etc.)
The following chart illustrated this perfect ABC alignment:
ABC Alignment, Balance, Authenticity
Organizational Archetypes represents a company’s dominant personality types, sometimes driven disproportionally by the CEO or CxO team in the case of smaller companies. The organization’s archetype is the true identity and personality of the company, who they truly are, what makes them go from a strengths perspective, what shadows hold them back, etc. These archetype traits are hidden to an organization until revealed through the lens of analysis tools like “CultureTalk” (https://culturetalk.com/). Performing a “CultureTalk” Analysis applies a set of lenses to be able to clearly reveal, in 20/20 clarity, a set of a company’s main personality types. Below is a chart that reveals the 12 Archetypes that a company can align to as well as examples of companies that align to each Archetype.
12 CultureTalk Archetypes, with Organizational Examples
Above Graphic courtesy of CultureTalk
Swiss psychologist Carl Jung used the word “archetype” to refer to the recurring patterns found in our universal stories. He identified the themes, symbols, and imagery as part of the human psyche. More recently, Dr. Carol Pearson built out Jung’s work with a body of research that examined archetypal attributes within organizations. CultureTalk, based on the work of Jung and Pearson, takes centuries of understanding and translates it for today’s business leaders. The result is a framework of 12 Archetypes that a company can align to in terms of its dominant personality type(s).
Organizationally, CultureTalk assessments answers the questions: What type of company are we, what do we stand for, what dominant traits represent the authentic company? There aren’t good or bad Organizational Archetypes, but each has a strength and shadow side that we need to understand in order to drive maximized organizational effectiveness.
12 CultureTalk Archetypes, Highlight: Lego Organizational Example
Lego Creator Archetype
Above Graphic courtesy of CultureTalk
As an illustration, the Creator Archetype above is described in the graphic below is focused on “the creation of things, ideas, approaches, experiences, art work and solutions” and is well represented by the very familiar and popular company Lego. Below is a more detailed description of the main characteristics (strengths) of this Creator Archetype.
The Creator Organizational Archetype
Above Graphic courtesy of CultureTalk
Lego is in perfect alignment and balance with this Archetype, driven by invention, creation, designing, dreaming, etc.
The shadows of a creator Archetype company like Lego are as follows:
Creator Organizational Archetype Shadows
Above Graphic courtesy of CultureTalk.
The full list of strengths and shadows of a creator Archetype company like Lego are as follows:
Full List of Creator Archetype Strengths and Shadows
Above Graphic courtesy of CultureTalk
It is important that a company’s Brand image be in authentic alignment with their main Archetypes, otherwise they are striving to portray an image that is out of alignment with their main personality type – trying to portray as something they are inherently not, being inauthentic to the world. This brand image is manifested in two different dimensions as follows:
1) Outside the company: The image that is being presented to the world, it stakeholders, employees, customers, etc. 2) Inside the company: The image reflected via its experienced company culture
In order to be an authentic company, it is important for a company to have its brand in alignment with its dominant Archetypes, otherwise they are portraying themselves as something they are not truly comfortable with, something they are not, being inauthentic to their main personality types and strengths.
Continuing the Lego example, we see perfect and authentic alignment with their main archetype and their brand messaging.
The Lego Brand supports driving of innovation and creativity to their customer base which encourages the creator individual archetypes. For the public to be comfortable with the brand they have to be truly and heartfelt dedicated toward driving the creativity and the passions of their customer’s creator archetypes.
The C stands for the manner in which a company delivers its Customer service and Customer experiences. Continuing with the previous Lego Creator Archetype, here is a customer service example of how the Lego Customer Brand and Culture is driving an equally consistent and authentic creator customer experience.
Here is a letter sent to Lego by a 7 year old boy named Luka who is a Lego customer regarding him losing one of his Lego figures.
The article from Beloved Brands, where this information was sourced from, notes:
“For Lego, in the world of social media, this type of story does wonders for continuing the magic of their brand. And it’s a great example of going above and beyond. What I like in the letter is how they please the boy, but also give a solid wink to the parent who is likely the bigger target of this letter. The dad ended up tweeting about the story, lots of viral hits and then picked up in the mainstream media including TV and newspapers in the UK, US, and Canada. And now millions are reading about this story (including you right now.)”
Equally important as the exceptional “surprise and delight” customer service going viral and generating a great deal of positive company and brand buzz, is that the tone and manner in which the customer service letter is written. The letter was masterfully crafted to be in perfect alignment with the organization’s primary Creator archetype, but simultaneously encourages and supports the customer’s (Luka’s) creator Archetype.
Here are additional examples of authentic alignment between an organization’s primary archetype and their brand and/or customer service and experience delivery;
1) When interacting with Disney, we expect authentic customer interactions to deliver magical and exciting customer experiences due to their primary organizational archetype being a Magician.
Source: The Disney Institute, Service Policy
The above service guidelines could have been written in the typical boring manner like many other company directives as follows:
1) We will make eye contact and smile when encountering any of our guests. 2) We will welcome each Disney guest with the following greeting “xxxx” upon meeting them. 3) Etc., etc.
Disney instead wrote these in a way to communicate the service standard, but did so in a way consistent with the Magician Archetype by illustrating the Magic of the Disney characters and how they bring magical experiences to the children who visit their venues.
The service guideline that illustrates the consistency with Magician Archetype the best above is #6. This service guideline specifically references the delivery a “magical guest experience” and reinforces the concept that Disney delivers magic (as you would expect from a Magician Archetype) via both their company brand and through their customer delivered experiences.
Magician Organizational Archetype Strengths
Above Graphic courtesy of CultureTalk
Wegmans Everyperson Archetype
2) When interacting with Wegmans food markets, we would expect all branding and employee/customer communications to be authentically in alignment with the Everyperson archetype. Indeed their values reflect this and even display the words in the values “every person”.
This employee communication from CEO Colleen Wegman is also in perfect alignment with the Everyperson archetype with the above telltale words “all of you”, “trying time for everyone”, “people – our suppliers, employees, customers, community partners -…”, “every one of you”. Again, Wegmans is a great example where they have perfect ABC alignment, authenticity.
Everyperson Organizational Archetype Strengths
Above Graphic courtesy of CultureTalk
3) When calling Nielsen or Gartner for B2B expert research or insights, we expect the brand and customer experience to be highly insightful, informed, based on analytical research – all characteristics of the Sage organizational Archetype.
Both Gartner and Nielsen also demonstrate that they are authentic to their archetype and maintain ABC alignment and authenticity.
Sage Organizational Archetype Strengths
Above Graphic courtesy of CultureTalk
4) When interacting with the Apple Brand, we would expect the customer interactions to be reflective of a culture that is about inventing new and radically different/innovative products and experiences by challenging the status quo. These innovative and inventive characteristics are all telltale signs of the Revolutionary organizational Archetype.
The way Apple has reflected the Revolutionary Archetype is via its release of new and innovative products we previously thought weren’t possible. It started with the Apple I and Apple II computers and went onto the LaserWriter, the iPod, the iTunes Store, iPhone, ipad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, etc. The release of these was accomplished with total alignment to their Brand and to the customer experience standards.
5) Hallmark, per their culture statement, believes that “care” and creating an “emotionally connected world” are the driving forces behind their delivered customer experiences and are the passions of the Lover Archetype.
What all of this demonstrates is the rule of customer service cultural archetype delivery, stated as follows:
Top Customer Service Companies –> Culture Alignment
Once you have determined your corporate Archetype via a tool like CultureTalk, the best way to ensure that both your brand and customer experience is in alignment is by direct measurement. For this measurement, I recommend a solution category called “Experience Management Measurement”. This enables companies to measure the experience for brand-products as well as the customer. One market leading tool I have encountered and recommend highly is Qualtrics (https://www.qualtrics.com/). Qualtrics was Named #1 Leader in Experience Management Measurement in Industry-Leading Product Rankings*. Qualtrics can assist you in the measurement of both brand and customer alignment by simply querying both your market and customers on their perceptions on brand and customer authenticity, perceived consistency, etc.
Just like successful people who are inherently highly consistent and authentic: values, personality, interests, actions, manners, spoken language, etc., the same consistency-authenticity driven success applies to companies. Companies that drive a totally consistent and authentic market presence tend to achieve ABC alignment: Archetype, Brand messaging, and Customer presence.
Without ABC alignment, the company appears to be disingenuous to the public and to their customers – trying to be something they are not per their primary Archetype. Only those achieving perfect alignment become market leaders as in our examples of Lego, Gartner, Nielsen, Disney, Apple, Wegmans, Hallmark, etc.
If your organization is seeking experienced assistance in deploying legendary levels of culturally aligned customer service, then give me a call or e-mail me at 518-339-5857 or stevenjeffes@gmail.com. I have also recently become a certified CultureTalk consultant, ready to help your company transform into a high performing and market leading (legendary) customer focused culture http://www.legendarycx.com
Lastly, this is just one article of over 50 articles I have written on customer strategy, customer experience, CRM, marketing, product management, competitive intelligence, corporate innovation, change management – all of which I have significant experience in delivering for Fortune 500 companies. In fact, my blog is now followed by nearly 107,000 world-wide and was just named one of the top 100 CRM blogs on the planet by Feedspot, alongside Salesforce.com, Infor, Microsoft, SAS, etc. – Reference this informative site here: https://blog.feedspot.com/crm_blogs/
The following is what you will learn by reading this blog:
The main business capabilities for a company to possess to deliver superb and legendary customer service
The most critical capabilities to develop in order to enable your front-line employees to be able to deliver excellent customer service
The introduction of the concept and definition of Surprise & Delight Customer Service and how the world’s top customer service companies deliver this consistently
Examples of the best Surprise & Delight Customer Service that I have personally encountered and how they are linked to the critical components listed in #2 above
Top customer service companies considered to be world-class in delivering Surprise & Delight Customer Service
The programs you need to implement so that your company can deliver consistent Surprise & Delight Customer Service to your customers
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SECTION 1: Benefits of having elated, “surprised and delighted”, customers:
The research I have conducted indicates that truly elated customers, who are consistently surprised by the level of service they receive from your company, go on to tell multiple friends, relatives, acquaintances, co-workers about your company, products/services and stories of their great experiences interacting with your company. This grass roots customer advocacy transforms your customers from just your customers into infectious and 24×7 adjunct company sales and marketing agents, convincing people they interact with to buy from your company.
Additional research also shows that this customer transformation does not come when they rate your company and service as merely “Satisfied” but rather only when a customer is elated and rates your customer service with a 7 , or “Extremely satisfied”, rating as shown here:
Sample Customer Service Ratings
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The following graph illustrates the correlation between the rating provided by a customer on their customer service and the strength of their company advocacy and likeliness to recommend a company.
Correlation between Customer Satisfaction Ratings and the Likeliness to Recommend/Advocate for a Company
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SECTION 2: Capabilities required to deliver exceptional “surprise and delight” customer service:
There are more than 10 dimensions in developing and delivering customer service excellence including the following:
Development of a customer-oriented vision and strategy.
Development of service excellence standards that are institutionalized across the enterprise.
Development and maintenance of a company culture that drives team unity and focus as well as customer service excellence and a mindset of customers first.
Implementation of a customer errors, omissions and anomaly recovery processes.
Implementation of a customer experience and customer service excellence measurement system.
Inclusion of customers in helping define and develop the final customer management capabilities, content, methods, etc.
Implementation of a customer bill of rights and non-negotiable customer standards.
Development of customer emotional connection points based on customer journeys.
Development of a set of hiring criteria and standards to be able to identify and source employees who have a predisposition for delivering exceptional customer service (friendly, outgoing, personable, believes in helping others, rates high on empathy, etc.)
Deployment of training that ensures front-line employees are customer service excellence certified so that they can deliver world-class customer first service.
Delivery of surprise and delight (S&D) customer service & experience through the development of S&D customer processes.
While all of the above are important I feel that the last three are of critical importance in making customers consistently extremely satisfied. In the next section we will cover the definition of surprise and delight customer service and share real examples of its delivery across many service-related industries.
Surprise and delight customer service is consistently going well above and beyond customer expectations such that customers feel both surprised and delighted by their treatment & level of service by your company.
Surprise & Delight Customer Service
Here are some examples of where I have personally encountered surprise & delight customer service:
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1) Hotels:
A) High Peaks Resort, Lake Placid, NY: I recently checked into the High Peaks Resort in the Adirondack Mountains during the time of my birthday. The front desk has a champagne reception for all incoming guests. When we were offered champagne, my wife told them that we were celebrating my birthday. The attendant responded by saying, “we will take care of it” and took the glasses away. I said to my wife, “that was confusing as they said we will take care of it” and then promptly took our glasses from us. We got to our room shortly thereafter and heard a knock on the door. It was a service attendant with a bottle of champagne and a personalized birthday card signed by the front desk staff. Talk about surprise and delight customer service!! We were so impressed! Obviously, this resort embraces and understands the importance of S&DCS as described in #11 below.
Delivery of surprise and delight (S&D) customer service & experience through the development of S&D customer processes
Here are the thoughts and emotions I recorded just after this superb treatment by the High Peaks Resort:
They really care about their customers.
This hotel really goes out of their way to make their customer’s stay memorable.
They know how to make a customer smile.
That just made my day.
Bottom line, I felt emotionally connected to the hotel and its employees following this treatment and felt like it was in business to make their customers happy vs. merely making $$$.
High Peaks Resort, Lake Placid NY
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As a global consultant I have had my share of extended stays at Marriott hotels. Here are a couple of surprise and delight stories that I have always remembered:
B) Marriott Shelton, CT. I stayed at the Shelton, CT Marriott for nearly 8 months, typically staying from Sunday to Friday. When the hotel wasn’t busy for the weekend, they blocked out my room for reservations and let me keep many of my belongings in my room so I didn’t have to pack & unpack each week and could feel at home upon returning. While away, they would gather all my dirty clothes for dry cleaning and have them hanging in my room closet upon my return. On my last evening at the hotel the hotel staff threw me a surprise farewell party! They paid for everything – dinner, drinks, etc. Talk about taking care of the customer with true surprise and delight service! I am willing to bet this instance of the delivery of S&DCS came as a result of both 9 & 10 on our list of needed customer service excellence capabilities:
Development of a set of hiring criteria and standards to be able to identify and source employees who have a predisposition for delivering exceptional customer service (friendly, outgoing, personable, believes in helping others, rates high on empathy, etc.)
Deployment of training that ensures front-line employees are customer service excellence certified so that they can deliver world-class customer first service.
Here are the thoughts and emotions I recorded just after this superb treatment by the Shelton Marriott:
I’d recommend this hotel to anybody.
They really appreciate a customer’s business.
I have never been treated so well by a hotel.
What a welcoming place to stay – they made me feel at home!
C) Marriott Princeton, Princeton NJ: Another extended stay required me to stay at the Princeton, NJ Marriott for 7 months. One evening I was entertaining clients at the bar after a day of numerous long meetings. One client was fond of RemyMartin King Louis XIII cognac which sold for about $145 per shot at the time. A tradition of Marriott was, that if you had the last shot from the bottle, they give you the bottle, made from Baccarat crystal. My client ordered three shots over the course of several hours which emptied the bottle. The bartender, being new, said he never heard of giving such an expensive bottle away and refused to provide the bottle to my client. I complained to no avail as the bartender refused to budge. The next morning while dressing, I heard a knock at the door, and it was the hotel GM with the empty bottle of King Louis XIII as well an additional half full bottle. He asked me to accept his sincere apology for a relatively new and untrained bartender who was filling in the previous evening and promptly gave me the two bottles. Needless to say, my client was thrilled by this surprise and delight turn of customer service events!! I am willing to bet this instance of the delivery of S&DCS also came as a result of both 9 & 10 on our list of needed customer service excellence capabilities:
Development of a set of hiring criteria and standards to be able to identify and source employees who have a predisposition for delivering exceptional customer service (friendly, outgoing, personable, believes in helping others, rates high on empathy, etc.)
Deployment of training that ensures front-line employees are customer service excellence certified so that they can deliver world-class customer first service
Here are the thoughts and emotions I recorded just after this superb treatment by the Princeton Marriott at Forrestal Village:
That general manager is a class act and knows how to run a hotel.
I was shocked that my disappointment wasn’t the end of the story and it turned into a positive event I will talk about for years.
It was refreshing that they admitted a mistake and then went above and beyond to make it right.
Wow! Talk about doing a 360 and turning a disgruntled customer into a surprised and delighted one!
Marriott Hotel, Princeton, NJ
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C) Marriott Philadelphia West, Conshohocken, PA (Philadelphia suburb): I was a senior executive at a consulting company in Conshohocken and traveled into the area frequently. The first several times in the area I stayed in several different hotels trying to find one that I liked. Since I was previously a Marriott top tier rewards member, I decided to give the Marriott Philadelphia West in Conshohocken, PA a try. The first time I stayed, I didn’t use the concierge lounge. On my second visit, I did use the lounge in the evening and I fell in love with the place because of one incredible (a 1 in 1,000,000 person) great human being and Marriott employee.
The person’s name is Luigi and he not only manages the concierge lounge, he IS the concierge lounge and is the epitome of what a customer should experience at every concierge lounge across the globe. Luigi has been the manager of the lounge for many years and when possible, I go out of my way to stay at this hotel due because of his level of exceptional service. Luigi always remembers my name, my wife’s name (even though he never met her), my favorite drink, food likes, dislikes, etc. I could be away from the hotel for many months and yet he always provides a warm friendly welcome” “Hello Mr. Jeffes – so nice to see you again!!” as he gives me a hug. He will tell you about all the appetizers and desserts being served that evening and then suggests some favorites. He entertains his guests by playing movies during movie night in the lounge. When he first introduced movie nights, he used his own money to provide the DVDs. Luigi clearly goes above and beyond and I can recall many surprise and delight moments where Luigi delivered superb customer service to me and many other guests. When you’re a road warrior like I was at the time, it’s the little things that make all the difference. Seeing Luigi who makes a Marriott feel like your home and provides a relaxing haven when traveling, always puts a smile on my face. Luigi has surprise and delight customer service ingrained in his DNA and I have lost count of the number of times I have encountered this from him. One occasion stands out more than others in that I had an unusually dreadful day with many things not going as planned. I started early this day and worked unusually longer into the evening. I hadn’t slept much the night before and I was tired, hungry and feeling the pressure of the awful day I just had. When I went into Luigi’s concierge lounge, Luigi immediately picked up on my unusually sour mood as I must not have greeted him in the usual upbeat manner. He immediately sprung into gear, taking the following actions:
Unsolicited, inquired of the front desk if there were any upgrades to a suite for me that evening.
Asked if he could order my dinner to have it sent right to the lounge or my room.
Handed me my favorite drink without asking.
Since the lounge was very empty that night, asked me what I wanted on the television so I could unwind.
Got me a hot towel to wipe my face and relax.
As a result, I started to immediately forget about the crappy day I had just had and started to feel myself relax. After about 30-45 minutes I was back to my old happy self with the experience of a bad day a distant memory.
What would happen to your service-oriented business if you had a Luigi? Your business volume and customer following would explode! Your customer loyalty would increase and customer service would become a distinct and immeasurable competitive advantage.
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Luigi is a natural at delivering exceptional customer service and this 1 in 1,000,000 person and service comes as a result of Marriott getting lucky enough to hire someone so exceptional. How do I know? I have stayed at Marriott properties and other hotels across the US and have not met anyone that even comes close to delivering the level of service that Luigi does.
By implementing #9 on our customer service excellence capability list, you will have much better odds of hiring someone comparable to Luigi:
Development of a set of hiring criteria and standards to be able to identify and source employees who have a predisposition for delivering exceptional customer service (friendly, outgoing, personable, believes in helping others, rates high on empathy, etc.)
Here are the thoughts and emotions I recorded when it comes to Luigi and his level of service:
I’d drive a long distance out of my way to spend a relaxing evening with Luigi.
Luigi is a 1 in a 1,000,000 in terms of delivering exceptional customer service.
Marriott is so lucky to have Luigi working for them.
If Luigi were to become the head of training for all Marriott service employees, Marriott would blow away their competition in terms of delivering exceptional S&D customer service.
I won’t list the thoughts and emotions for the remainder of my S&D examples, but the point is that delivering exceptional customer service delivers a lasting and positive emotional connection between the brand, product/service and with the customer.
Luigi, Concierge Manager at the Marriott Philadelphia West Hotel
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Ritz-Carlton, Battery Park, NYC. Ritz-Carlton is one of the top models for superior customer service world-wide and was a client in the past. Ritz-Carlton trains all of its employees to spot a customer opportunity in that they are trained to listen to and record each customer’s individual needs, issues, preferences, wants, wishes, etc. Employees are then empowered to deliver the type of service the customer wants without having to ask.
A great example is upon arriving at the Ritz-Carlton Battery Park, NYC a number of years ago, I remember casually saying to the bellman, among other topics, that I loved the view of lower Manhattan and that I didn’t eat on the plane. I had just flown in from San Francisco. Upon checking in, the woman at the front desk smiled and called me by name before I mentioned it, told me that she arranged a high room with a beautiful view of lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty and said she arranged for a snack to be waiting for me free of charge when I arrived at my room. She said, “I heard that you didn’t have a chance to eat on your way here”. All of this was noted by the bellman and passed onto the front desk without my knowledge to deliver Surprise and Delight Customer Service upon check-in, something Ritz-Carlton is legendary at providing. I would consider Ritz-Carlton the platinum standard for delivering S&DCS as they possess and effectively deploy all 11 of the customer service excellence capabilities listed above. Their excellent service is not by luck or chance; it is ingrained in their culture and at the center of Ritz-Carton’s core values, policies and processes.
2) Restaurants:
A) Water’ s Edge Lighthouse, Schenectady, NY:
Water’s Edge Light House on the Mohawk River, Schenectady NY
There are two local restaurants that my wife and I have frequented that have world-class professionals working at them. The first is the Water’s Edge Lighthouse in Schenectady, NY who employs a gentleman named Greg. We had originally met Greg at another restaurant that sadly closed. Greg is the type of individual that remembers your name when you arrive, makes you feel at home when he is serving you, makes conversation about you and your family and takes every chance to ensure you are having a great experience. He gets to know his all of his many 100’s of customers by name and goes out of his way to anticipate and suggest my next need as I am in the process of thinking about it. My wife and I now call this level of customer service “the Greg standard”. One time, we arrived on a Saturday night, having made a reservation earlier in the week. Somehow the reservation had been misplaced and the restaurant was full. When Greg learned of the situation, he said to me, “don’t worry we have you covered” and then made room for us in very short order when the place was absolutely packed. Talk about surprise and delight customer service. There was zero questioning of me about whether I had forgotten to make a reservation, which I hadn’t since I recorded the name of the person who confirmed and the time of day when I called). Greg and the team just made it right.
Like Luigi, you would be lucky to hire someone like Greg, but you’ll need a lot of luck as he too, is one in a million. By implementing #9 on our customer service excellence capability list, you will have much better odds of hiring someone comparable to Greg:
Development of a set of hiring criteria and standards to be able to identify and source employees who have a predisposition for delivering exceptional customer service (friendly, outgoing, personable, believes in helping others, rates high on empathy, etc.)
Greg (left) with the Manager of Waters Edge Lighthouse, Joey
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B) Mario’s New Lebanon, NY:
Mario’s Restaurant, New Lebanon, NY
Sarah from Mario’s in New Lebanon, NY is another person who stands out as meeting “the Greg Standard” with her warmth, professionalism and exceptional service. Sarah gets to know each of her customer’s names, likes, food and drink preferences. She remembers the new wine that you tasted the last time you were in and makes everyone feel special. We sometimes don’t even have to look at the menu as she will recommend a special that she thinks we will like or asks if we are ordering one of our known favorites. At peak hours, Sarah handles customer requests with a sense of calm and professionalism. When she is serving numerous drinks, dinners and taking orders in person and via phone, she always finds time to smile and accommodate requests, chat, ask questions, etc.
My surprise and delight example from Sarah came when I atypically came in without a reservation due to a change in schedule. Sarah looked at me and said they were full and then said, if you can wait a minute, I’ll see what I can do. Sarah did her magic and creatively asked the customers if they could move down to accommodate another guest which they all surprisingly and enthusiastically did. Sarah has a “following” that enjoy dining at the bar when she is working. Due to her pleasant demeanor and professionalism, I was able to get a spot for dinner, and even though the bar had squeezed in one more person, Sarah handled everything without a hitch and made me feel welcome. Over the years, customers have shared with me that one of the main reasons they go to Mario’s is because of Sarah and the great food. Just like Luigi does for the Marriott Philadelphia West and Greg does for the Water’s Edge Lighthouse, Sarah’s presence adds to the overall experience of enjoying a delicious meal in a great atmosphere at Mario’s. Luigi, Greg and Sarah are all 1 in a 1,000,000 service professionals who are naturals at surprise and delight customer service and you’d be extremely lucky to hire someone like them.
Sarah from Mario’s Restaurant
3)
3) Retail:
A) Amazon:
Amazon
There is a now famous story brought to light by the New York Times titled “Put Buyers First? What a Concept”. It details how a customer, by no fault of their own, didn’t receive a shipment of a PlayStation for his son just before the holidays. Here is an excerpt from this article and a potentially disastrous situation was turned into a surprise and delight customer service moment: “It was early in the morning, and I had awoken with the sudden, sinking realization that a present I had bought for one of my sons hadn’t yet arrived. It wasn’t just any present either; it was a PlayStation 3, a $500 item, and a gift, I happened to know from my sources, that he was hoping for. Like most things I buy online, the PlayStation had come from Amazon.com. So I went to the site and tracked the package– something, thankfully, that is a snap to do on Amazon. What I saw made my heart sink: the package had not only been shipped, it had been delivered to my apartment building days earlier and signed for by one of my neighbors. I knocked on my neighbor’s door, and asked if she still had the PlayStation. No, she said; after signing for it, she had put it downstairs in the hallway.
Nonetheless, I got on the phone with an Amazon customer service representative, and explained what had happened: the PlayStation had been shipped, delivered and signed for. It just didn’t wind up in my hands. Would Amazon send me a replacement? In my heart of hearts, I knew I didn’t have a leg to stand on. I was pleading for mercy.
I shudder to think how this entreaty would have gone over at, say, Apple, where customer service is an oxymoron. But the Amazon customer service guy didn’t blink. After assuring himself that I had never actually touched or seen the PlayStation, he had a replacement on the way before the day was out. It arrived on Christmas Eve. Amazon didn’t even charge me for the shipping. My son was very happy. So, of course, was I.” Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/05/technology/05nocera.html
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B) Zappos:
Zappos
Right in-line with this blog article, Zappos is an e-commerce company whose #1 core value is to “Deliver WOW Through Service”. In addition, in keeping with a customer first mantra, CEO Tomy Hsich states that Zappos is “a service company that just happens to sell shoes.” Here is a story I read while researching this article that definitely applies to Surprise and Delight Customer Service. “Recently, a newly-married couple were packing up their belongings in preparation for moving. The husband packed his wife’s jewelry inside one of her purses, and packed the purse inside what he thought was a spare Zappos box. The wife, it turns out, was intending to return that purse to Zappos using that very box. Which she then does, having no idea that inside the purse now were several thousand dollars of her jewelry!
When the couple arrives at their new home and starts to unpack, bedlam breaks out as the wife figures out what has happened and why her jewelry is missing. The rep she reaches at Zappos decides to reroute the box directly to his desk, but once it arrives, the rep fears for the safety of the valuables if he were to ship them, and purchases a plane ticket to hand-deliver the package himself. When he arrives, the incredibly grateful couple invite him in for dinner. Now they’re customers for life, as you can imagine.” Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/micahsolomon/2017/08/01/three-wow-customer-service-stories-from-zappos-southwest-airlines-and-nordstrom/#77ad6ace2aba
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Section 4: Top Surprise & Delight Delivery Companies:
Here is a list of several larger companies I consider to be at the top of their game and world-class in delivering surprise and delight customer service:
Ritz-Carlton (consulting client)
Marriott (consulting client)
Zappos
Amazon
Southwest Airlines (consulting client)
American Express (consulting client, 4 different projects)
Costco
Chic-Fil-A
Wegmans Food Markets
Publix
Apple (consulting client)
USAA Insurance
Section 5: How to implement Surprise & Delight Customer Service for your company or organization
How do companies like Amazon Ritz-Carlton and Zappos consistently deliver exceptional or legendary levels of customer service? Do they rely on being lucky enough to hire the 1 in 1,000,000’s like Luigi from Marriott Philadelphia West or Greg from the Waters Edge Lighthouse or Sarah from Mario’s above, or do they possess something else, like a secret sauce to deliver this type of amazing customer service? Having consulted for Ritz-Carlton in the past, I know that many follow a similar 5 step process detailed below.
Step 1: Map your customer journeys:
Leveraging an integrated team of process experts, customer service and front line employees, map the various ways customers journey through an experience with your company. Examples include:
Customer prospect, exploring your potential services and/or products
First time website visitor, buyer.
Repeat or renewal website visits.
Existing customer, new product and/or service purchase.
Customer returns, complaints or warranty claims.
Service termination or account closure.
Here is a chart that illustrates examples of these various types of journeys:
Customer Experience Journey Sample, with Measurements
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Step 2: LISTEN TO AND CULTIVATE meaningful and valuable customer needs, preferences, etc.:
In parallel with mapping you customer experience journeys, develop a program that continually gathers customer insights into what is most important and meaningful for each individual customer. A gift card could be given to any customer, but to know that customer A likes Starbucks, and customer B would love a Amazon Kindle gift card and customer C would value an ITunes gift card goes a long way to demonstrate that you are paying attention. It also demonstrates that you are in tune with customer interests and care about them as individuals. These 1-to-1, personalized surprise & delight moments build loyalty and make a customer feel valued.
Step 3: Map customer S&D opportunities along your customer journeys:
Once you have determined and documented the majority of your important customer journeys and determined what is meaningful and valuable to each of your customer’s preferences, start overlaying customer surprise & delight opportunities along these journeys. Here is a real example of how a client mapped a surprise a delight moment for high value customer issues. The key is to develop business rules that need to be satisfied in order for that surprise and delight moment to be fulfilled. In this case, a high value customer whose order was misplaced and later corrected once error was discovered, receives a gift as an apology for the error.
Customer Experience Journey with S&D Opportunity Process Example
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Example: Value of item lost $500. High value customer A would receive a $100 Starbucks gift card, customer B would receive a $100 Amazon gift card and customer C would receive a $100 ITunes gift card.
The next step is to distill all of the surprise & delight opportunities mapped along customer journeys into a set of front-line employee policies and procedures. Here are a couple of examples of each:
Policies:
We will compensate high value (high value is client specific) customers for errors and anomalies that are of no fault of their own.
Front-line employees shall be responsible and rewarded for turning satisfied customers into delighted, loyal customers by empowering them to easily and quickly deliver surprise & delight moments.
Each front-line employee shall undergo front-line customer service certification training to ensure they are prepared and equipped to delivery legendary customer service via surprise and delight moments, customer needs cultivation, etc.
Cultivate and reward the best employee surprise & delight customer stories from each quarter and showcase and provide rewards for ‘the best of the best’ at the end of the year.
Procedures:
If a high value customer is calling to complain about a missing shipment of high value that was lost of no fault of their own, we will compensate with an item of meaningful value to that customer worth 20-25% of the missing item.
Prior to checking into the hotel, we will check the customer preference and need profile on record to ensure all needs are met during the upcoming stay.
Employees are to document all cultivated customer preference insights during their current visit in the global customer preference database in order better serve the customer’s individual likes, preferences, needs, etc. Details on how to do this are documented in the global customer preference database procedures manual and trained on during front-line employee customer service certification.
Step 5: Develop a set of S&D hiring standards & train on S&D policies, procedures, etc.
The last step is to ensure you are hiring the best employees that they have the highest Exceptional Customer Service Aptitude (ECSA). In addition, you need to continually train and certify your employees on customer service policies, procedures, processes and how to consistently deliver exceptional, surprise & delight customer service.
1) Screen for the Best:
To hire those with the highest ECSA, you need to develop a customer service screening questionnaire as I have done for many clients to be able to consistently hire those who are predisposed at delivering great customer service and screen out those who are not. By doing this, you are screening employee candidates to find and hire only those who posses the characteristics that are most like Luigi, Greg and Sarah who are naturals at delivering exceptional S&D service.
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2) Train to be the Best, Continually Improve:
The next sub-step is to develop a set of high quality customer service training materials and processes to certify your front-line employees on exceptional customer service delivery policies and procedures. All new employees should be certified via the training and all existing employees should have to re-certify to ensure adherence to the latest exceptional customer service policies and procedures. Ongoing training for all employees will help ensure a high level of customer service is being consistently delivered.
Summary:
You can either hope for good luck in the hiring of natural and exceptional customer service employees that are 1 in 1,000,000 or you can develop a holistic Customer Service Excellence program with multiple dimensions and capabilities such that all employees perform to the level of a Sarah, Greg and Luigi. By hiring, training and enabling your front-line employees to consistently deliver surprise and delight moments for your customers, your company will develop a cult-like customer following similar to Zappos, Amazon and Ritz-Carlton. Your customers will remain fiercely loyal and will actively advocate to increase your revenue, margins and brand reputation. With all this being true, there is no excuse to not actively work on creating the best surprise & delight customer program possible?!
If your organization is seeking experienced assistance in deploying legendary levels of “surprise and delight” customer service, then give me a call or e-mail me at 518-339-5857 or stevenjeffes@gmail.com
Lastly, this is just one article of over 50 articles I have written on Customer strategy, customer experience, CRM, marketing, product management, competitive intelligence, corporate innovation, change management – all of which I have significant experience in delivering for Fortune 500 companies. In fact, my blog is now followed by nearly 121,000 world-wide and was just named one of the top 100 CRM blogs on the planet by Feedspot, alongside Salesforce.com, Infor, Microsoft, SAS, etc. – Reference this informative site here: https://blog.feedspot.com/crm_blogs/
