Rebecca Caroe

My first Reply to you.

I’m not a fan of exceeding expectations. What happens when you order a pizza. They say it will be 20 minutes. You take a shower and the doorbell rings. The delivery person says with a big smile, “Here’s your pizza” You’ve just dripped water all over the carpet and state the obvious “but your early”…. to which the pizza person replies “Yes – (smile) we always exceed the customers expectations”

In my world, delivering Expected is better than Exceeded.

Good work on the Blog.

You said it so well here: “Good customer service” is just the price of admission. In order to win at customer service, we need to set ourselves apart by being exceptional. We need to WOW our customers, not by performing random acts of kindness but by executing a strategy to exceed our customers’ expectations.

The WOW experience happens when you least expect it.:)

My friend Becky has a wonderful post today called How to Win at Customer Service. Why do I think it is wonderful? Because it made me think and inspired this post. I often tell my clients and you my readers that we should not sell products and services,…

There’s a franchise coffee place here called Dutch Brother’s. They hire mostly young adults (Eugene being a University town, there’s no shortage of 20somethings looking for a few hours of work). The stores are all parking lot drive-thru kiosks. And pretty much without fail, they are the most customer friendly places in town. Here’s why.

Regular customers drive up to not only a personal greeting, but their favorite coffee already made and waiting for them.

The people working are always smiling, always energetic and usually have some kind of wonderful music playing to keep them energized. I’m known by name and by coffee in two of the kiosks in town.

When a new kiosk opens in town, coffee is sold for one dollar in all the kiosks the whole day in celebration.

This company gets it. They serve good coffee, yes, but the service is what makes them one of the more popular places in town. To me they are exceptional and the thing that sets them apart from others is that feeling of one-on-one I get from their employees.

I could go on and on about them, but half the marketing team is going on a coffee run and I don’t want to be left behind.

Great post but let me play with the words a bit: We may not remember great customer service but we will remember great customer experiences. Subtle perhaps but the example you give was more an experience than a service in my way of thinking. It’s like those of us who visit Starbucks regularly–the service is consistenly good, but we expect that. The experience happens after we get our beverage. And that usually is better than good, as it it built around conversation, taste, visual and auditory senses. The difference: a service happens; an experience excites our senses.