Delightful Customer Service: 12 Steps to a Better Bottom Line

Customer service is in a crisis mode. Consider the facts:
• The American Customer Satisfaction Index stood at a barely passing grade (74) in its first year of measurement (1994). Today it is still in the low 70’s.
• 60% of so-called “satisfied” customers regularly switch companies or brands.
• Last year, over one quarter of a billion Americans stopped doing business with companies with which they were “satisfied.”
• The average company has 11% of its revenue at risk as a result of customer problems and how they are handled.
• $1 spent on advertising yields less than $5 in incremental revenue, but that same $1 spent on improving customer service can yield more than $60 in incremental revenue.
It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to discover the evidence of customer service that’s missed its mark:
• Clueless clerks roam the aisles of your supermarket or department store.
• Customer service reps themselves often need “anger management.”
• Customer service people answer questions with “I don’t know” or “that’s the policy.”
• Customer complaints are often either ignored or treated with disdain.
• Customer service hotlines are simply not answered or place the caller into an automated menu “black hole.”

Clearly, the efforts to date to improve customer service have failed. Previous rules and metaphors have done little to halt the flow of buyers wandering aimlessly in search of real relationships with sellers.

Everyone talks about customer service, but little is done to convert the rhetoric to reality. This presentation, based on Dr. George’s most recent book on customer service, focuses on the concept of customer delight as a strategic marketing advantage. If you have suffered through countless books and presentations on customer service and are thoroughly confused, this practical presentation will identify “12 Steps to a Better Bottom Line.”

This interactive presentation highlights 18 worksheets, which help you to discover what it takes to delight your customers. These worksheets are designed for you to assess critically where your organization is relative to delighting customers. Also, completing appropriate worksheets will enable you to put the concepts you’ve learned into action with customer delight the result of your efforts. (Book Available)

Success Leaves Clues

This presentation focuses on successful marketers and explores their strategies for success. This lively, interactive session identifies ten universal rules for strategic success with countless clues. Participants can forever shelve their "ad hoc" approach to strategy and can take home an approach that can be implemented the next day. In essence, this approach to marketing strategy is comparable to a chess game. The secret is to outthink your competitor. Participants are reminded that it is not “history that repeats itself,” instead it is the “failure to learn from history that repeats itself.”

Some of the rules include the following:
• Rule 2: Know What's Under Your Umbrella
• Rule 4: Know Your Playing Field
• Rule 5: Know Who You Are Playing Against.

These rules and others are invaluable if you want to avoid an "ad hoc" approach to developing a winning marketing strategy. In particular, Rule 3: Get and Stay Close to the Customer, is the basis for my extensive research, writings, and presentations on customer service.

This interactive presentation highlights a dozen worksheets designed for audience members to critically assess where their organizations are relative to developing a winning marketing strategy. Also, completing appropriate worksheets will enable you to put the rules you’ve learned into action. The result: delighted customers and increased profits. (Book Available)

Think Like a Brand, Act Like a Retailer

Traditionally, retailers consider brands as those items on the shelf or on the rack that consumers come in their store to purchase. While this is true, it misses the concept of a brand and the importance of branding. Retailers have a tremendous opportunity to develop a differentiated brand but only if they realize that they are a brand. In fact, everyone is branding, whether we realize it or not. Branding is the sum of the good, the ugly, the on and the off-strategy actions that we take. It is defined by a finely worded CEO pronouncement as well as by every aloof employee and derisive consumer comment.

Brands are sponges for content, images and fleeting feelings. Everything a company does creates impressions, good or bad. If the branding process is not strategically focused the results may be catastrophic, even if the intentions are well founded.

You cannot entirely control your brand. At best you can only guide and influence it. But how do you do that? During this lively, interactive presentation, Dr. George introduces 10 key branding concepts designed to insure that your retail operation is engaged in “an intimate dance with your customers.” The topics covered will include the concept of branding to leveraging the power of the retailer’s brand in an ever-changing market.

Attendees will learn how to insure that the retailer’s targeted audience clearly recognizes its identity (beyond products on the shelves) and that the target market is able to clearly distinguish it from competing retailers.

Food Shopping: What is This Thing Called Customer Service?

Typically, when asked about selecting a primary food retailer, customers tend to focus on non-customer service variables, namely, cleanliness, quality and price. However, whenever customers are asked, “What improvements would you like to see in your primary grocery store?” the resounding reply is, “better customer service.” However, the issue of what specifically constitutes better customer service has not been the focus of any known reported studies.

In essence, the three most mentioned factors (cleanliness, quality and price) are the “ante” to attract customers. Every food retailer, at a minimum, must offer these attributes. They are necessary, but not sufficient, to positively differentiate one food retailer versus another. However, the growth of food shopping alternatives in the form of super centers, club stores, chain drug stores, limited assortment and dollar stores, Internet, etc. have obviated the traditional food retailer’s cleanliness, quality, and price points of differentiation.

Results from a national research project highlight the key customer service variables sought by consumers as well as an assessment on how well food retailers are performing on these variables. The study looks at all shoppers as well as perceptions by sex and age. Finally, the presentation considers several strategic alternatives to adopt a customer service point of differentiation.

The Ultimate Consumer Survival Guide: How to Get What You Want and Deserve (Every Time)

Shopping may be Americans’ favorite pastime, but many shoppers don’t even know the rules of the game. Companies and their customers are both frustrated by the shopping process. For example, what’s the most important thing to know before you buy something? How reliable are brand names if you’re looking for quality? How can you get results when you complain about an item? Your answers can indicate whether you’re a skilled survivor in the shopping world, or whether you need a guide to rescue you. Sometimes the most expensive item may be the best for you, and at other times, the cheapest may work.

The people who play smart and win at the game of shopping know what they want, prepare properly, and follow through until they’re satisfied. This lively presentation, filled with lots of examples, details a seven-step approach that starts with knowing what you want and ends with making sure you got it. (Book Available)

10 Critical Trends Affecting the Food Industry

Remember, Noah started building the ark before it started to rain. This fact-filled presentation identifies key trends that will significantly impact food manufacturers, wholesales, retailers, and food service providers. We will characterize each trend and challenge the audience to identify the impact on their respective business. Participants are encouraged to swim out and catch the next big wave rather than to wait for it to hit the shore.

The Revitalization of the Center of the Store

A new source of old profits focuses on recognizing what is necessary to make the center of the store exciting for customers and profitable for the retailers. The key to this approach is using cross merchandising based on how consumers shop and eat, and not how suppliers want to sell! We show examples of retailers that have made strides to re-capture the sales of the largest and most profitable section of the store. We also identify manufacturers that want to get involved with retailers for center of the store and what they are doing.

How to Compete Against Giants and Win

We look at the strategies that have been successful for supermarkets when Wal-Mart came to town, and show retailers that Wal-Mart has weaknesses and how to take advantage of them. Most importantly, we urge retailers not to take Wal-Mart lightly but to develop an approach that focuses the retailer’s strengths against Wal-Mart's weaknesses.

$5,000 per speech

In the last few years, Dr. George has written the following, in collaboration with Dr. John L. Stanton:

Delightful Customer Service: 12 Steps to a Better Bottom Line, SLC Publishing,
Sewell, NJ (2005).

A Focus Group Guide for Supermarkets, SLC Publishing, Sewell, NJ (2002).

A Customer Service Manual for the Environmental Protection Agency, Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, D.C. (2000).

Success Leaves Clues, 2nd Edition, Silver Lake Publishing, Los Angeles, CA (1999).

Delight Me...The Ten Commandments of Customer Service, Raphel Publishing,
Atlantic City, NJ (1997).

21 Trends in Food Marketing for the 21st Century, Raphel Publishing, Atlantic City, NJ (1997).