How to WOW Your Customers

By: Duke Rohe drohe@att.net

Overview: Tom Peters, co-author of In Search of Excellence, exclaimed: Don’t just satisfy your customers, WOW them! Here’s a tool that overlays your existing service delivery systems to discover missed opportunities in pleasing your customers.

Purpose:

Open up considerations for service change.
Point areas for deliberately, repeatedly impressing your customers.
Open up thinking of the staff for ways to impress their customers.

Participants: This could be a service SWAT team. It could be a general awareness to an entire department on how to turn work into service that is appreciated.

Materials: None

Time: 30 to 45 minutes

Procedure:

Use the WOW pointers below as an overlay tool for designing WOW service into every deed or interaction for your customer.
Identify which could make a difference to your customer and your service delivery.
Adopt it, Standardize it, Personalize it and Expect it from your deliver system.

WOW Pointers

Ask them, instead of assuming, what they would want?
Think of the least expensive, most thoughtful thing you could do for them.
Send a patient a “Thinking of You” card, with an appropriate note signed by the entire care team (placed in the patient chart for signature).
If customer experience is long term, pick up on something tangential they said they were concerned about, then later inquire how things are going about it.
Look for inexpensive amenities that are sweet, cute, and memorable.
Write the customer a note of encouragement, phrase or sentence; sign it, then leave it in a place that will be picked up and noticed by them.
Throw a smile in their direction: look strongly into their face, cock your head, smile a BIG smile, and hold it there UNTIL they return the smile back. (I have a 90% hit rate which lifts me up and may lift them up).
Demonstrate attention to detail: both in the quality and friendliness of service.
Quickly understand the customer’s need. On an obstetrics floor, if a mom had lost her baby in childbirth, a subtle laminated picture of a ‘tear drop’ was placed on the door. The meaning of this was known by all, so they could reshape their interaction from a congratulatory to a nurturing mode. Any caregiver entering the door had a sense of the pain the patient might be experiencing.
Offer options. Give more control back to the customer over their experience. Pretend you are Burger King: Have it your way.
Don’t give the customer what the customer wants; give the customer what will make them successful.
Answer questions before they are asked. Consider every question asked as a candidate for building the answer intuitively into their environment. In every way, how can you turn them from helpless to self-sustaining.
Clean. New looking. Fresh. People equate their environment to the service they are given.
At points where there are unavoidable delays, keep the customer surprised with progress follow-up that they have not been forgotten along something to absorb their time during the wait.
Keep clutter to a minimum. Fine hotels would never tape a notice or schedule in view of their customer.
Warmly welcome the customer. Make it like home. Clearly shift the center of attention from you to them.
Give the customer what they are not expecting. In a clinic, if it is your birthday and you sit down at a blood draw station, one of the blood collectors dawns a ribbon sash, comes out, sings happy birthday, then give you a gift.
Add humor where appropriate. “Our flight today allows each of you to have a row to yourselves, however we would like to encourage you to all move to a window seat so our competitors will think we have a full cabin”.
Expressing appreciation for choosing your organization. Gratefulness is easy to express and be felt when it comes from the heart.
Allow their time in the customer experience to be totally theirs. If you have to move one, apologize for not being able to spend more time.
Provide a LifeLine communication means for questions and concerns when they walk away and reflect. Hand them your business card.
Help the customer have the resources they need for successful a encounter. One hospital had a little note pad and pencil in each room to take notes while the doctor spoke. And the pencil had the hospital’s name on it.
Make their experience so good they would be willing to pay extra to come back and just have you as their server.