Institutionalizing Repeatable great customer service
While picking up my coffee at Starbucks this morning I witnessed an act of outstanding customer service. A woman with a child – apparently a regular – was about to enter the store as she was talking on her cell phone. At the last minute she decided to hang outside for the call and finally moved away from the store. When one of the Starbuck employees saw that, he fixed her usual drink, ran after her in the street and gave it to her with compliments of Starbucks. WOW…
You may disagree, but I happen to think that this was not a random act of kindness. I believe that it reflects the hiring and training policies that Starbucks has with regards to customer service. Some companies are just better at institutionalizing consistently delivering excellent customer service than others. And I do not believe that you can only achieve that in luxury retail chains. There was actually an interesting article reviewing just that in the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review (here).
…hey Verizon…pay attention!
[Technorati Tags: starbucks customer service marketing]
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 12th, 2005 at 1:15 pm
Let’s try to find a better word than “institutionalizing.” Agreed, though about Starbucks - yesterday I saw one employee training two other employees. They were being “assigned” to observe the baristas at work and take notes…Do you know their recruitment campaign invites people to “create the experience.” You are right - their strategy is very deliberate and they hire people who are more likely to deliver great service vs. those who would require “institutionalizing.” (See some of my posts re Sheraton which makes employees repeat a service promise vs. delivering an experience.)
May 13th, 2005 at 6:28 am
Institutionalizing great customer service
[Source: Emergence Marketing] quoted: Let’s try to find a better word than “institutionalizing.” Agreed, though about Starbucks - yesterday I saw one employee training two other employees. They were being “assigned” to observe the baristas at work an…
May 14th, 2005 at 1:39 pm
I agree that the choice of words was not the best - I made some changes. Let me know if you have other suggestions…
April 1st, 2007 at 1:01 am
I heard on TV that Starbucks are considering Free coffee on Thursdays. But no one has heard this in my circle of friends but me. Is this true!
thank you