Ned's Blog

Have you every bothered to think about the great cliché “Customer Service” that most companies strive to achieve. Customer Service is really providing the customer with what the customer expects to receive as a minimum acceptable service. If the customer receives that then he or she is not necessarily happy but accepting of what he or she has just received from that service provider.
It actually is just OK and nothing more. This means that what most companies aspire to achieve is nothing worthy of note.
A Customer Experience is the difference between OK and WOW. A customer who has received a WOW experience will return again and again and he or she will tell their friends about it.
In this life where we all appear to be time deprived, then anything that saves time such as speedy service is WOW.
WOW is also receiving service above and beyond the normally accepted “customer service” and I received a really WOW experience when I dined at the Cable Bay Vineyard restaurant on Waiheke Island recently.
The Customer Experience I gained was the difference between the usual New Zealand restaurant experience of eating a meal and that of having a dining experience. The food was good but the service was awesome. Well Done.
Since then I have eaten at several other restaurants around the Country and the one thing I have noticed is how many wait-people take the food orders and then when delivering ask who ordered what – even for a table of two!!!
The message they are giving is that they don’t care about you and they don’t give a rats rump who ordered what – eat up and get out. Now that is acceptable customer service in New Zealand at the moment but it is not delivering a customer experience and our tourist trade should be demanding better.
But let this not stop at restaurants, retailers also need a kick up the rear end. Ask where the jackets are in an apparel shop you will probably be pointed to a rack further down the shop by an assistant who has reluctantly had to put their personal phone call on hold to point you in a direction away from them.
This old Grump expects a WOW experience as a customer and my friends do as well so if you are running a business and reading this then the way to be way ahead of your competitors is to provide a good Customer Experience and not just Customer Service.
As Tom Peters pointed out many years ago “You only have to be a little bit good to be way ahead of your competitors”
How sad.