Customer Service vs. Experience

(VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION):

HI, Blair here with MXM. If you hear any screeching in the background it's because a couple of our trainers this morning are here because we did our first outdoor team training we are allowed to do. And they got to see some of their customers back for the first time. They've been done for a little bit but I'm looking at the MyZone board and one of them still has a heart rate over 80% and I hear them bouncing around over there. Anyway, if you hear something in the background, that's what it is.

I've been taking you on a random walk through of our Member Experience manual here at Worx. We've been talking about some of the concepts in there and we think it's really important to get a clear definition of words. Remember that customer service and customer experience are two different things. You can have tremendous customer service in the middle of a horrible customer experience. The example I use a lot of the time, is this; your plane could be delayed, your luggage could be lost, it's been a horrible flight and you call someone at Delta's call center and they are just remarkable and they do everything they can to help you and they bend over backwards going out of their way for fabulous customer service yet it still remains a bad customer experience.

We like to define what "service" is. Right at the beginning of the Member Experience manual, we explain what it is then we move forward onto what we are going to be talking about in the manual. Ron Kaufman, to me, is one of the best educators and mentors on customer service and customer experience. He wrote a book called, "Up Your Service". I went and listened to him when we were down in Palo Alto, we used to do these breakfast briefings over at Stanford. Every chance I got I would go over there and sit in on these breakfast briefings. And he was one of the presenters and I just fell in love with his work. He uses this description: Service is taking action that adds value to someone else. Now, not as value in our opinion because changing a name on an account, that's not a value add process for somebody else. Now you might be able to make it a value add process by asking if they'd like a bottle of water, how can I help etc. But you have to think about this, a lot of the things that we call customer service in business are not value add for the customer. It's just a nuisance, why couldn't I do that online?

So I want you to think of customer service a bit differently. Taking action that adds value for someone else. Then we talk explicitly that customer service is never ever going to be a place or a phone number for us. And you can generally tell when companies are getting things right or wrong when customer service is sort of defined as a place to go or a place to call and not part of their DNA.

So that's sort of the starting point of the member experience manual. I've taken you thorough some of the concepts. I'll keep taking you through more and more of the concepts. I keep saying if you want this I will send it to you then realized when I went to send it to somebody, we have a lot of high res photos so I have to do some file minimizing in the PDF version of this!

That's it for today, really simple lesson. I hope your reopening is going well. Remember, we have feedback systems for everybody in the industry. We have the shutdown feedback system, the reopen feedback system. Phenomenal information. Hope your reopen goes great, we'll keep you posted on ours!