Chip R. Bell's Blog, page 30

National Customer Service Week Bulletin: The Circus Principle

National Customer Service Week is October 7-11, 2013. It is a week we spotlight the power and prosperity found in delivering an innovative customer experience. In the days leading up to Customer Service Week we will offer a key principle you can use to elevate the delight in your customers’ experience. Let’s have some fun today with the Circus Principle.

Ask ten global road warriors to name the best airline in the world and nine will likely have Virgin in their top five. Founder Richard Branso...

National Customer Service Week Bulletin: The Speed Limit 23 MPH Principle

National Customer Service Week is October 7-11, 2013. It is a week we spotlight the power and prosperity found in delivering an innovative customer experience. In the days leading up to Customer Service Week we will offer a key principle you can use to elevate the delight in your customers’ experience. We continue today with the Speed Limit 23 MPH Principle.

Walk into the lobby of the five-star Mansion on Turtle Creek hotel in Dallas and the first thing you notice are the extraordinary flowers...

National Customer Service Week Bulletin: The Purpling Principle

National Customer Service Week is October 7-11, 2013. It is a week we spotlight the power and prosperity found in delivering an innovative customer experience. In the days leading up to Customer Service Week we will offer a key principle you can use to elevate the delight in your customers’ experience. We continue today with The Purpling Principle.

Paul had decided to pop “THE” question to Adrienne at lunch in the romantic, ten-table loft section of Tucson’s Smuggler’s Restaurant. Paul had req...

National Customer Service Week Bulletin: Applying the Big Boy Principle

National Customer Service Week is October 7-11, 2013. It is a week we spotlight the power and prosperity found in delivering an innovative customer experience. In the days leading up to Customer Service Week we will offer a key principle you can use to elevate the delight in your customers’ experience. We continue today with The Big Boy Event Principle.

The night before my annual physical examination I received a text from my physician reminding me that the morning exam would be started with a...

National Customer Service Week Bulletin: Use the Cracker Jack Principle

National Customer Service Week is October 7-11, 2013. It is a week we spotlight the power and prosperity found in delivering an innovative customer experience. For the next nine days, we will offer a key principle you can use to elevate the delight in your customers’ experience. We begin with the Cracker Jack Principle.

Consider a common service experience: Taking a shuttle bus from the off-airport car rental lot to the terminal. A quintessentially unremarkable event? Not in Atlanta, at least...

If Cracker Jack’s Ran Your Customer Service

A large brokerage company added a twist to their toll-free telephone cue—“…punch 6 if you’d like to hear a duck quack!” Word of the playful feature spread and soon millions of people were weekly calling to hear the duck. The company had to remove the unique feature because it overloaded their phone system and ran up a huge tab! The story communicates just how bored customers have become.

Something else has happened to your customers. They’ve been getting way over-stimulated. Television has bec...

Extending the Service End

Watching a skilled magician is an exercise in awe. Try as we might to see through the sleight of hand, we come away amazed. We know there is a rational explanation. But in our hearts we aren’t so sure. It leaves us with a feeling of enchantment. Innovative service––service that takes customers breath away–is strikingly parallel to fine stage magic.

One innovative service technique underutilized is focusing on the “outcome after the outcome.” It means thinking about what the customer will be do...

Shift the Customer’s Focus

Transference is the magician’s tactic called misdirection. It involves establishing a frame of reference that occupies someone’s attention while something completely different is happening. The magician who gestures to the left or right of the audience is almost always moving the audience’s attention to where the trick is not happening––or to be precise, away from where the effect is subtly being staged.

Transference happens in everyday life. The nurse asks the patient about their weekend whil...

Take the Show on the Road

When Al Hopkins was a young boy he watched the other ten-year-olds wait for customers to stop by their sidewalk lemonade stands in the hot summer sun. Al abandoned the “stand” concept and took his lemonade business door-to-door. He made enough money in one summer to buy a new Schwinn Flyer bicycle with a siren!

Innovative service is distinctive, unique, unusual, atypical, unexpected, and all the other words you can think of that insinuate a pleasant surprise. This brand of service yields in cu...

The Alchemy of Mentoring

The word “alchemy’ has its origin in ancient times when certain practitioners were able to turn common metals into precious metals, like gold and silver. But, the other part of alchemy was the creation of an elixir that, when drank at a certain time (say 5 o’clock), granted the person who consumed the drink immortality and youth. (Today, we would refer to that elixir as Jack Daniels Whiskey—just kidding!).

But, the alchemy description is relevant for mentoring in many ways. Mentoring is the tr...