Lee Cockerell - The Customer Rules: The 39 Essential Rules for Delivering Sensational Service

THE CUSTOMER RULES

LEE COCKERELL spent his career in the hospitality business, working at Hilton & Marriott before joining Disney. He was responsible for the operations of the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando for ten years, and now consults with organizations around the world on customer service. Lees first book Creating Magic focused on leadership excellence.

The 39 Essential Rules for Delivering Sensational Service

LEE COCKERELL

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

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First published in the United States of America in 2013 by
Crown Business, an imprint of Random House Inc., New York

Copyright Lee Cockrell, 2013

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For
Priscilla

Be Nice!

At a recent family gathering in my home, the grown-ups were trading stories about companies that provide good customer service and those that dont. Out of curiosity, I asked my then twelve-year-old granddaughter, Margot, what she thought were the most important rules for great service. Without a moments hesitation, she said, Papi, the first rule is Be nice!

Out of the mouths of babes! Ive spent my whole adult life thinking about service, beginning with teenage stints working in a drugstore and a lumberyard in a small Oklahoma town and culminating in my last corporate position as executive vice president of operations at Walt Disney World, where I oversaw a workforce of forty thousand people, resort hotels with more than thirty thousand rooms, four theme parks, two water parks, five golf courses, a shopping village, a nighttime entertainment complex, a sports and recreation complex, and more operations. Along the way, I held positions that included army cook, banquet waiter, food and beverage control clerk, director of food and beverages for Hilton Hotels (including the Waldorf-Astoria), director of restaurants at a Marriott, general manager of another Marriott, and senior executive at Disney in Paris and Orlando.

Throughout these forty-plus years in the hospitality industry, I never stopped searching for better ways to serve customers. Yet despite all the vital lessons I learned over those years from hard experience, brilliant colleagues, and mentors alike, I never heard the basic truth about service expressed as succinctly or as accurately as in Margots two words.

Be nice packs a wallop. Look up nice in a dictionary and you find terms like friendly, polite, pleasant, appealing, kind, considerate, well mannered, refined, and skillful. Who wouldnt want to be surrounded by such qualities when doing business? Margots first word, be, is also profound. As I thought about her wise answer, I realized that great service is not just about what we do; its also about what we are. You can have the best policies, procedures, and training in the world, but if the people you entrust to carry them out dont have what it takesforget it. Dont get me wrong, what you do is also vital, and many of the Customer Rules in this book are about exactly thatwhat to do and how to do it. But being comes before doing, and the quality of a persons beinghis or her attitude, personality, demeanor, and other factorsis crucial in delivering superior service. As retail consultant Liz Tahir puts it, There is no way that the quality of customer service can exceed the quality of the people who provide it. Both aspects of great service, being and doing, are addressed in this book.

Think of it this way: Lets say youre a customer, and the staff person youre doing business with does everything by the book and completes the transaction efficiently and satisfactorily, but he is unfriendly, indifferent, condescending, and obviously counting the seconds until the workday ends. Now imagine doing business with someone who makes a mistake but graciously apologizes, corrects the problem, and treats you with courtesy and respect because shes happy to be where she is, serving you. Which company will you return to?

The Customer Rules is both a perfect companion to my first book, Creating Magic: 10 Common Sense Leadership Strategies from a Life at Disney, and a logical follow-up. Whereas Creating Magic was geared to leaders and aspiring leaders, The Customer Rules is relevant to everyone from the highest echelons of management to the frontline troops who interact directly with customers or clientele. Its applicable not just to customer service reps, but to salespeople and servers, tech support analysts and repair workers, desk clerks and ticket takers, delivery personnel and janitors, and even investment bankers, lawyers, teachers, doctors, nurses, and other professionals. Creating Magic made the important point that anyone at any level can exercise leadership. But leaders can lead only when there is at least one person who follows. By contrast, anyone and everyone in a company canand shouldbe responsible for serving the organizations customers, whether they do so face-to-face, over the phone, or from the distance of a managers office or an executive suite.

The Customer Rules is focused entirely on one ultimate goal: to help you, no matter what your position or job title, serve customers with such consistency, integrity, creativity, and sincerity that they will not only keep coming back for more, but eagerly recommend your business to their friends, families, and colleagues. It draws upon everything Ive learned, from my days as a frontline service provider to my years as a top-tier executive at companies with worldwide reputations for service, and from my experience as a consumer with a lifelong habit of observing how some businesses provide excellent service and others fail at that basic task. The end result is thirty-nine easy-to-follow yet essential Rules that can improve service at every level of a companys operation. If you interact directly with customers, youll learn how to deliver the kind of superior service that makes you an indispensable asset to the company that employs you. If youre a manager or executive, youll learn how to create service-driven policies and procedures and hire, orient, and train employees who will win your team or company the most valuable revenue-boosting asset you could wish for: a reputation for superior service.

The principles revealed in this book apply to any industry and any company, large or small, private or public, profit or not-for-profit. They have proved just as effective in multinational corporations like Disney and Marriott as in local shops and online retailers. They work whether the product is as high-tech as a tablet computer, as complex as health care, or as basic as shoes or coffee. The Rules are presented in concise, bite-size chapters so you can read one or more in minutes, absorb the basic lessons, and put them into practice immediately.