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JJ's Tips in this issue:
1. JJ's Honeymoon & Keeping Customers Happy
2. Your Thoughts Are Powerful
3. JJ's Favorite Quotes
4. Tele-Coaching & Tele-Mentoring
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In my February newsletter you read about my marriage on January 10, 2004 to Scott
Petermann. We just returned from our 12-day honeymoon cruise aboard the Holland America
m.s. Zuiderdam to the Caribbean out of Ft Lauderdale, Florida.
We had a wonderful time looking out from our veranda cabin at the great weather and
beautiful views of islands such as St Thomas, US Virgin Islands, and Nassau, the capital
of the Bahamas.
Talk about customer service, this year-old ship, housing over 1800 passengers for seven
days, gave the best customer service I've ever seen! And unlike a lot of other cruise
ships, it did not require that tips be left for those who served us all week.
We did elect to leave tips to the man who took care of our state room and the two waiters
serving our table in the evening 5-star restaurant. They earned our praise and support as
they quickly filled our many requests with genuine smiles and concern for our well-being
day after day.
The Zuiderdam cruise ship's extraordinary service didn't just happen because they hired
nice people. They hired hand-picked people from Indonesia and the Philippines through
their governments, and trained them and retrained them in the 5-star Holland America way.
They didn't settle for people with mediocre attitudes to serve as their crew. They
selected people who were dedicated and committed to personal and professional growth and
were eager to learn how to give extraordinary service in order to launch themselves into a
service career.
They were also willing to sacrifice seeing family and friends for six months at a time.
One of our waiters who served our dinner each evening told us he had only 28 days left on
his six-month tour until he could see his family again and go to work for a large hotel in
his homeland.
As managers of service personnel, we should all be so lucky to find such dedicated people
to serve our customers!
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Summary of lessons learned from this experience:
Use the following tips as training tools.
Present this situation to your group and brainstorm solutions together, or submit your own
situation question to be answered in an upcoming newsletter.
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SITUATION QUESTION:
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How can you predetermine that your staff will consistently represent your company,
division or department in an exceptional way?
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SOLUTIONS:
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Your thoughts are powerful, so imagine the way you want your group to perform! How are
they performing now? Are you getting complaints? Remember, statistically, only 4% of those
who have a complaint will complain. The other 96% vote with their feet and go somewhere
else. Don't you, if a
competitor can serve you better and you don't have to put out a lot of extra effort?
Assume your staff's service will happen just as you pictured it. Your positive attitude is
monumentally important in setting a higher standard for your service or sales group.
1) Find the courage to clean house and get rid of the dead wood or free loaders,
especially the inherited ones who never meet your standard.
2) Create a multiple-interviewer process with all interviewing on the same points.
3) Profile your best staff members in the position for which you're hiring. Some of the
areas of focus should be: positive attitude, great people skills, communication skills and
service and sales skills (everyone's in sales, service and marketing regardless of their
title), outgoing personality, good work history and ethics, goal and growth oriented
personally and professionally, etc.
4) Ask if they have ever won anything in their life. If they can tell you about something
that they won and what they did to get it, you probably have a goal-oriented person. When
a person is willing to give up something to get something, you'd also better have some
kind of career path available to offer them.
5) Provide on-going training even if you have to provide it yourself. Have your super
stars reinforce it on a regular basis. Pair a new person with an experienced one who
upholds your standards. Bring in an outside
trainer/consultant to take your group to its next level periodically.
6) Encourage teamwork and camaraderie. Look for ways to have fun with your team. Celebrate
their meeting the higher standard, meeting personal and team goals, birthdays, holidays,
etc. Create a work family, large and small, having fun together as a high-production and
service-oriented group. This
tip will cut your turnover down too because they won't want to leave their great work
family.
7) Be the manager your staff can count on to be visible (not always in meetings),
accountable, honest, well informed and knowledgeable, and will go to bat for them
regardless.
8) Constantly look for ways to improve your team's service to customers and to each other.
Ask them to suggest ideas to improve the processes and ways of thinking, and share
research they have done or discovered that would benefit the group.
9) Work on yourself first! Are you a great leader? What changes do you need to make before
you can raise the standard for your group and expect them to support the new direction?
10) You're the captain of your Zuiderdam. Your mind is powerful! It has the power to
create the picture you want in your staff's heads. They'll work to fulfill that picture
with your guidance if you've earned their respect and admiration.
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JJ's FAVORITE QUOTES:
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"When a man is sufficiently motivated, discipline will take care of itself."
Albert Einstein
"Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it, you will land among the stars."
Les Brown
"To be healthy, wealthy, happy and successful in any and all areas of your life you
need to be aware that you need to think healthy, wealthy, happy and successful thoughts 24
hours a day and cancel all negative, destructive, fearful and unhappy thoughts. These two
types of thought cannot coexist if you want to share in the abundance that surrounds us
all."
Sidney Madwed
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Tele-COACHING & Tele-MENTORING
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
IN 2004, DO YOU WANT TO IMPROVE?
Customer service or sales?
Inbound or outbound call center sales and service?
Dealing with irate internal or external customers?
Motivation and growth of your people?
Leading and Coaching your staff?
TRY our one-on-one Tele-Mentoring (phone coaching service) that is
available to business owners, executives, managers, supervisors and staff members.
Call for your FREE CONSULTATION now! 800 500-9656 or 408 866-7673
_________________________________
EVALUATION OF YOUR ENVIRONMENT:
_________________________________
Have you had an Evaluation of Your Environment lately so you could receive suggestions on
improving it? (It's like the doctor's check up, you often don't know you need it, until
after you've had it.)
http://www.jjlauderbaugh.com/about.html
****************************************
ABOUT JJ:
****************************************
JJ Lauderbaugh, CPCM
408 866-7673 or 800 500-9656, 189 Altura Vista Dr., Los Gatos, CA 95032.
JJ works with companies that want to give exceptional customer service to increase sales,
and with Directors and Call Center/Help Desk Managers who want to improve human
performance.
She's an international speaker, trainer, facilitator and certified management consultant
(CPCM) on customer service management, specializing in performance improvement, call
centers, up/cross selling and outbound calling.
For training resources, free articles, tips and streaming video, go to our
web site at http://www.JJLauderbaugh.com
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Copyright and Reprints:
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Reprint permission is granted when the following credit appears: © JJ Lauderbaugh, CPCM,
Lauderbaugh & Associates, Inc., 2003. Reprinted with permission from JJ's Tips, a
monthly internet newsletter. For your own personal subscription, email
jj@jjlauderbaugh.com.
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