Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization by Leonardo Inghilleri, Micah Solomon, Horst Schulze

consider-ate service rule that everybody on staff can implement.
    Here are a few other examples of how you can anticipate customers’
    wishes with simple, thoughtful procedures:
    ? It’s the middle of summer, and the customers who are entering your Atlanta boutique are escaping 95-degree heat. What would such customers likely want? Wouldn’t they be pleased to find ice water with lemon slices on the counter when they walk in the door? You can easily establish this procedure as part of a daily weather-dependent setup.
    ? Do you know those signs that read, ‘‘If this restroom needs attention, please let us know’’ or, worse, the ones you see on airplanes that say, ‘‘It is not possible to clean up after every customer’’ and go on to suggest you sop up the basin with a hand towel as a courtesy to the next customer? The best procedural approach to restroom cleanliness probably isn’t to install similar signs that put the onus on your customers for maintaining a clean facility. Here’s a unique solution (in an admittedly rarefied setting): The staff at Charlie Trotter’s famed restaurant in Chicago decided the only way to ensure its restrooms met the restaurant’s standards, rather than leaving the next guest’s experience at the whim of the last, was to themselves discreetly check the towels and soaps after every use. 2 (We don’t necessarily recommend this extreme approach for you, except as a thought exercise; it’s obviously a nonstarter if you run a crowded pub, for example. However, another proactive procedural approach—perhaps an attendant on busy nights—may be worth considering in such a situation.)
    ? What if you are on Taco Bell’s executive team? Although your company’s roots are So-Cal, if you’re thinking like a customer, you’d fit watertight overhangs over your drive-through windows in most other locales. Customers in Sacramento might not care, but in Seattle don’t you think they would prefer to skip the side order of soggy elbow and damp power window electronics?

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    Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit
    It’s important to build in mechanisms to ensure that company employees are frequenting your own physical and online facilities, because nothing is quite like the feedback you get this way. (By the way, if
    ‘‘company employees’’ currently means just yourself, still do your best to sample your own wares objectively, although achieving the anonymity we recommend below will be a stretch.)
    We’ve all been to places where it seems no employee has ever eaten the food, attempted to reach the ill-placed toilet paper dispenser in the customer washroom, or noticed the way that items you’re trying to purchase seem to vanish from the website’s shopping cart. To avoid being one of these companies, institutionalize the internal, systematic use and testing of your own services or products. Offer deep discounts or comps for employee purchases, but with a string attached: If employees use your services, they must take detailed notes and—if this is realistic—remain anonymous, so they experience the same service other guests would.
    Building procedural anticipation requires ongoing, daily effort. It requires managerial vision, judgment, and persistence. But it brings you closer to achieving customer loyalty.
    Mr. BIV and the Art of Eliminating Defects
    Sometimes problems have come up before and have been noticed by employees but are still hanging around. May we introduce you to Mr.
    BIV? When he’s in charge, nothing ever changes.
    Mr. BIV is a playful acronym coined by the group Leonardo worked with at The Ritz-Carlton. Addressing Mr. BIV helped them win two Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Awards. It remains one of the most useful—and easy to implement—quality improvement systems we’ve seen.
    Mr. BIV is a streamlined, simplified, and easy-to-teach way to look for defects and defective situations; it can be adopted throughout an entire organization without requiring