"Raving Fans" Researches "Friendliness"

I was recently reading "Raving Fans" by Ken Blanchard. It is a book I read every few years just to refesh myself about good customer service - afterall most customer service out there really sucks. It is nice to know that there are some people out there who are preaching that customer service can be an easy system to implement.

Anyhow, there was a reference in the book which said "Our research shows that friendly people talk about things not related to business." I thought this to be a very interesting comment. Businesses and marketers tend to measure the cold, hard and factual aspescts of a business. They ask questions like "What makes you satisfied", "What featuers do you want in the product" or "How does our quality compare to that of our competition" and on and on this fact-finding goes.

In light of these "fact-finding questions" (which I do not discount as important), it is refreshing to see someone a sense that there are people out there who ask "what does frieldliness look like" or "what does joy mean to you" or "describe a fun experience." These are emotional questions, and they are actually how a business delivers its marketing and its service. I mean think of it - the quote suggests that people who want to deliver good customer service actually have a vision of what "friendly service" means. They are not making assumptions, and they are not imposing their own definitions - they are actually researching their customers.

Now, since I do have a background in psychotherapy, I know that simply asking "what does friendliness look like" is a sure-fire way to turn an emotional research topic into the same-old fact-finding missions that many researchers typically use. If a researcher wants to get a full understanding of what a friendly experience looks like they need to get a respondent to a place that is outside their logical head responses. They need the respondent to be able to tap their own emotions in order to answer the question.

What I want to note, however, is that there is no justice in doing emotional research and then attempting to "mechanically" implement a friendly customer service plan. For example, it does no good to say "Our research shows that friendly service means that we should not talk about business - therefore, all employees will talk about the weather, sports or a top-5 TV show." What this does is that it objectifies the customer, the employee and the experience that they will share.

What needs to be done is to trust that employees will know, from their own experiences, how to be friendly and how to give friendly service. However, to help them along, researchers should videotape customers describing, feeling and actually receiving friendly customer service and then show this to employees. From here, we can give employees much broader guidelines in terms of what to talk about and to evaluate each customer encounter as a special opportunity to make real friendly contact, because employees will see exactly what a customer who is receicing friendly service looks like.