Micah Solomon - Ignore Your Customers (and Theyll Go Away): The Simple Playbook for Delivering the Ultimate Customer Service Experience

Copyright 2020 by Micah Solomon

Ignore Your Customers and Ignore Your Customers (And Theyll Go Away) are trademarks of Four Aces, Inc.

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be used or reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by HarperCollins Leadership, an imprint of HarperCollins Focus LLC.

Any internet addresses, phone numbers, or company or product information printed in this book are offered as a resource and are not intended in any way to be or to imply an endorsement by HarperCollins Leadership, nor does HarperCollins Leadership vouch for the existence, content, or services of these sites, phone numbers, companies, or products beyond the life of this book.

Borrowing from myself: Some material in this book is adapted from the authors previously published articles. In addition, this book owes debts to two of the authors previously published industry-specific or limited-release books: Your Customer Is the Star and The Heart of Hospitality. Quotes and paraphrases from the authors articles and from these two works will not be individually noted in the upcoming text.

Disclaimer: The publisher and the author provide this material on the condition that the reader understand that we are not in the business of providing legal, accounting, or safety-related practice advice, or any other professional advice, and that all information herein is intended for general consideration rather than as necessarily applicable to any particular situation of the reader.

Book design by Maria Fernandez, Neuwirth & Associates.

ISBN 978-1-4002-1493-8 (eBook)

ISBN 978-1-4002-1492-1 (HC)

Epub Edition November 2019 9781400214938

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019946669

Printed in the United States of America

19 20 21 22 23 LSC 5 4 3 2 1

Information about External Hyperlinks in this ebook

Please note that the endnotes in this ebook may contain hyperlinks to external websites as part of bibliographic citations. These hyperlinks have not been activated by the publisher, who cannot verify the accuracy of these links beyond the date of publication

For everyone who works to delight customers every day.

CONTENTS

I gnore Your Customers (And Theyll Go Away) is a superbly enjoyable read: clever, witty, and oftentimes laugh-out-loud funny (which is not what youd expect from your run-of-the-mill business book). But dont let the light tone mislead you. What the engaging authorrenowned customer service consultant and speaker Micah Solomonis talking about here is heart-attack serious. It can make all the difference to your bottom line.

Its been our experience at Safelite AutoGlass, year after year, that following the game plan Micah lays out in these pagesparticularly around the three key themes of improving customer service, fine-tuning the customer experience, and improving the employee experiencecan lead to doubling, even tripling, of our financial success metrics, and that this can be accomplished even in the face of challenging economic times and factors.

You should be sure to take to heart the authors other pointers as well: avoiding the cliff of dissatisfaction (this is when youre not up to the speed demanded by customers, and they lose faith in you as a result), learning to serve the important and challenging millennial generation, building the systems and standards essential to reliably and repeatably serve your customers, and building a true customer service culture.

(About this last subject, culture: theres nothing thats more important than the issue of company culture, and theres no guide better able to lead you to success here than Micah.)

At Safelite, Micahs plan is in our DNA, and we define it as being people powered and customer driven. This is encompassed in the three characteristics of what we call our Safelite Spirit: a service mindset, can-do attitude, and caring heart. When you put people first, everything else falls into placeand you achieve extraordinary results.

Turn the page. Its time to start this wonderful journey with Micah.

Tom Feeney, President and CEO, Safelite AutoGlass

A t JetBlue, we often refer to ourselves as a customer service company that just happens to fly airplanes.

In the spring of 1999, before we named the airline or even knew which planes we would purchase, we knew we wanted to offer a better experience than customers were receiving across the industry. It didnt take us long to create our missionTo Bring Humanity Back to Air Travel, and, since our first flight in February 2000, weve been striving to inspire humanity one customer at a time via what we call the JetBlue Experience, an experience that is upheld and supported by multiple pillars that we must continually focus on day in and day out.

The first pillar of the JetBlue Experience is crewmember (employee) recruitment: hiring the right crewmembers who possess a strong desire to serve others and to create personalized and meaningful interactions. This is essential for two reasons: First because their unique, individual, and caring approach to hospitality truly powers the experience, and second because they inspire each other and future crewmembers as well.

The second pillar is mindsetor as Micah calls it in , culture. Mindset and culture, of course, come from both the bottom and the top. Proper crewmember selection is essential here, but so is complete buy-in, all the way up to the CEO. Every company has a culture; the question is: Are you fostering the right culture, the culture you desire? What is the mindset across all levels within your organization?

The third pillar is a technology-driven, innovative approach. JetBlue was the first in our industry to have a contact center that was 100 percent home-based, giving our customer support crewmembers the flexibility to work from home, because we believe happier crewmembers translate into happier and more loyal customers. We were also one of the first airlines to use social platforms to engage with our customers. Regardless of the channel where we engage with customers, we do so via the most appropriate technology possible, notably a conversational platform provided by Gladly that we first launched in 2017, that keeps all of our customer conversations housed in a single view regardless of the communication channel, oftentimes eliminating the need for customers to repeat themselves. Overall, this helps us create meaningful relationships rather than treating our customers like a ticket number.

And the fourth pillar, just as essential as the other three, is training and lifelong learning. And here is where Micah Solomons long customer service consulting career, and the unique book youre holding, come in. Ignore Your Customers (And Theyll Go Away) introduces, stresses, and amplifies the essentials of the JetBlue Experience through the lens of some of the greatest companies of our time, as well as via Micahs truly unique perspective and tenured experience.

I hope that as you read Ignore Your Customers (And Theyll Go Away), youll think of it from the perspective of companies like JetBlue, where we strive to be humane the way Micah counsels; efficientso customers never fall off what Micah memorably calls the cliff of dissatisfaction; and, wherever possible, to pursue anticipatory customer service