Short inspiring stories about customer service
I was at a quail Hunt, and looked more out of place than an eskimo in a desert. My ulterior motive was to meet my CEO mancrush - the late Herb Kelleher the former CEO of Southwest Airlines.
During skeet shooting, I asked him a clumsy question about his secret for great customer service.
He said “I leave it up to my people” then continued to enjoy his smoke.
Those 7 words described his customer service ethos.
A very simple formula but how many CEOs implicitly trust their teams in this way?
He wasn't all talk either, here is a legendary story about the great Herb Kelleher:
A woman who frequently flew southwest would complain after every flight by writing into customer service.
She hated everything about the Southwest experience. She really wanted southwest to look and feel like every other airline.
She hated the casual nature of the attendants, their dress code, and the lack of assigned seating.
Eventually customer service sent her latest note up the chain to Herb Kelleher the CEO - he replied within 60 seconds:
“Dear Mrs. Crabapple, we will miss you. Love Herb.”
Just like that, he fired a loyal customer because of his implicit trust in his customer service team.
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It was harder to get a job baggage handling at Southwest than it was to get into Harvard.
The late great Tony Hseih was another customer service legend and while there are many stories about his customer service practices, my favorite two stories are these.
A customer called into Zappos (an online shoe retailer), and wanted to order shoes but also talk about their life.
The call went on for 10 hours and 29 minutes!
In almost every other call center in the world that call will be seen as a failure of epic proportions.
The late Tony Hseih’s Zappos celebrated it and bragged about it.
Another customer called at 2am looking for a pizza recommendation and a friendly representative helped him with that request, they never discussed shoes.
Zappos was so legendary that everyone who ran a contact center in the mid 2000s went on a pilgrimage to Zappos to learn from them.
I remember taking my team to Vegas for the tour led by Tony Hsieh himself. Someone asked him his secret and he gave a very long answer but the core of it was as long as he got the hiring right nothing else seemed to matter.?
That's it, as always thoughts and criticisms are always welcome.
Order your copy of my latest book:?Waiting for Service