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| Zane Cycles - A Story of Customer Delight! |
Most of the times, we hear about bad customer service and customer complaints. It would appear that there aren't too many instances of genuine customer delight. Probably, the reason is that to provide customer delight or excellent customer service, there should first be a strong intent from the company to do so. Secondly, that intent has to be translated and transformed as the essential culture within the company wherein every employee lives and breathes in providing exceptional service. Thirdly, demonstrating such positive service is not easy and is often expensive. It is not just about making an unhappy customer - a happy one or matching the pricing offers by competitors. It is about ensuring that customer service provided is more than what a customer considers reasonable! That is when good customer service becomes exceptional and leads to customer delight. That is how potential or casual customers become lifetime or loyal customers. As is often said, you toil for ages to build loyal customers but it hardly takes a few moments to destroy that relationship.
In the words of Chris Zane, CEO of Zane’s Cycles, a $15 million dollar bicycle business in Connecticut and author of Reinventing the Wheel: Creating Lifetime Customers, “These types of relationships are not easily formed nor are they formed overnight. They require exceptional care, attention, and a focus on continuously exceeding expectations. At Zane’s, where we have chosen to compete on service rather than on price alone, it means providing unparalleled customer service. We can never accept an unhappy customer, nor look at unsatisfied customer as an inevitable part of doing business. This method goes beyond the mindset of making an unhappy customer happy or simply matching the offers of our competitors. Creating lifetime customers requires that you offer every customer or potential customer more service than they consider reasonable. Further, it means that you actively solicit customer feedback about what you could be doing better and use that information to expand and tweak your offerings to best service the customer.”
Noted here-under is one of the many real-time incidents from Zane Cycles.
About ten years ago, two weeks before Valentine's Day, a female customer, whom we will call Sue, stopped into the store to buy a bike for her husband. Because she had gone all out to get the very best bike she could for her husband, she needed to pay us in increments. So, she put a deposit on the bike until she could save up the remaining $200 to pay it off. Wanting to surprise her husband on Valentine's Day, Sue asked Greg, a Zane's employee, if he could put the bike in the display window that evening after she had decorated the bike with some ribbon, balloons, and a sign she made that read, "Happy Valentine's Day, Bob." Greg, of course, said he was happy to help her pull off the surprise and that he would put the bike in the front window.
Sue planned to bring Bob by the store, along with a few co-workers who were in on the surprise, prior to their romantic dinner. She had been dropping hints along the way and couldn't wait to see the expression on Bob's face. Everything was in place, except that Greg had forgotten to put the bike in the display before heading out that day.
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| Zane Cycles - A Story of Customer Delight! |
Obviously more concerned with rectifying our mistake than the budget to do so, we spent about $400 to correct our error and maintaining the integrity of our lifetime customer culture. Plus, considering that Sue and Bob could be worth $25,000 to Zane's Cycles, it was well worth the investment, particularly because I don't think Sue expected as much as we gave her. We provided more than she thought was reasonable, and as a result, we turned a terrible mistake into a positive experience for Sue, Bob and all of Sue's co-workers.
The best part of the story, though, is that Greg the employee who forgot to put the bike in the display sent me an envelope in the mail with a $400 check enclosed to reimburse us for the cost of rebuilding the customer relationship and a letter apologizing for jeopardizing a prospective lifetime customer. Of course, I never cashed Greg's check. I have it framed with the letter above my desk as a reminder that although we lost a few hundred dollars that day, it was worth every cent in two culture-reinforcing ways. We managed to save our relationship with the customer, and we had the great thrill of witnessing our employees take our principles to heart. To me, that was priceless.
This is just one instance of a great customer service experience. There are more of such experiences out there in the world. It is said that a customer who has tasted exceptional service increases the prospects of the company manifold through word-of-mouth advertising - a powerful advertising tool. The same goes for bad customer service. That said, when we experience poor service, it is important to not just let it go or just tell our friends but also to give an opportunity to the company to rectify its mistake. For all we know, it might be a genuine mistake and the company may actually jump at the opportunity to rectify the error. We have seen in few cases when poor service made way for exceptional service when we provided feedback to respective companies like Reliance and TP Link. Of course, not every company bothers such as Samsung and HTC. You can read those blogs here and here. Perhaps, they feel they are so big that customer loyalty is not important.
Note: Zane’s cutting-edge marketing techniques have been used as case studies in more than a dozen college textbooks worldwide and have been the subject of several articles in publications such as The Harvard Business Review, Inc. magazine, Fortune, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, as well as being profiled in Alpha Dogs, a HarperCollins bestseller by Donna Fenn.
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