Ron Kaufman - Quite a Character
Report filed by Adil Ahmad (Editor Octara.Com) for Octara.Com Issue 18, January 2015
To say that Ron Kaufman is quite a character would be in the nature of an understatement. He’s a showman extraordinaire who holds his audience captive, mesmerized as it were, as he plays them like a finely tuned violin with a full repertoire of notes. A master musician and inspired conductor evoking the sheer
ecstasy and sometimes agony of understanding, as comprehension dawns of that which had all the while been sitting on the tips of our nose. Such is Ron Kaufman, a man who has dedicated his life in realizing his firm belief that every man, and indeed every woman, deserves to be treated like God’s gift to Mankind.
Ron Kaufman is a good friend of Pakistan.
An astute judge of human nature, he has ascertained that Pakistanis are perhaps amongst the most misunderstood people on Earth. That they’re a God fearing, warm hearted people, and unfortunate in that the freaks amongst them have received a disproportionate amount of attention in the world, and the world has been quick to accept the mucho macho violence as stereotypical of the nation as a whole. “Pakistani culture has at its heart tremendous warmth, kindness and generosity towards other people. So the spirit of my message and the practice of my message have resonated very well with my audience,” says Ron, alongside calling Pakistanis amongst the most resilient people in the world.
Octara Trusted Partner
Ron Kaufman is not deterred by the often frightening travel advisories that have dissuaded US citizens in particular from visiting our shores. In Octara Ron has found a trusted partner that he can depend upon to ensure the safe and seamless conduct of his visits. His message to Pakistani corporate warriors has never wavered. See people as individuals worthy of your attention and empathy. Understand what makes them tick, and then deliver for them a WOW! Experience, and add an extra few springs to their step as they go about contributing to making this world a better place. That’s the broad view of Ron’s message. The narrow view, naturally, concerns the benefits to profitability and the bottom line that superior service can generate.
2014 saw Ron Kaufman visit Karachi and Lahore with his Service Leadership full day Workshop. While Karachi has been a frequent beneficiary of his presence, this was his second trip to Lahore, and his reception here was equally enthusiastic. While in Karachi the Chairman TCS Mr. Khalid Awan had offered the welcome address, in Lahore the newly minted CEO of TCS Holdings, Mr. M.A. Mannan, was at hand to thank Ron for sharing his time, experiences and advice at a time when Pakistan was sorely in need of good counsel.
“We’re in the emotions business” – M. A. Mannan
“TCS Holdings has many businesses, and Octara is one of those businesses, and a very important one at that,” said Mr. Mannan. “All over Pakistan we have our own pool of specialized experts. Yet we realize the enormous value that global gurus like Ron Kaufman can add given their enormous exposure and international experience across industries, often by validating and reinforcing our existing thinking and practices, and identifying gaps that need to be plugged. By dedicating a day to a learning experience like this we can all gain our own inspirations and take back one idea which we can implement in our own organizations, and believe that one idea can make a big difference.”
Offering an insight that he had gained, Mr. Mannan narrated a personal experience. “I did a lot of research on the global logistics and courier industry before I joined TCS. I realized that our customers are looking for on-time deliveries and shipment packing. It’s that simple, and in that simplicity I thought that the TCS universe is at stake. During an orientation session I witnessed something firsthand at an Express Center which changed my perception of the service industry.
As I was standing there I saw a mother come in to ship a shirt to her son a thousand miles away. As our Express Center staff quickly put it into the Red Box, she leaned over the counter and fixed that shirt just a little bit. I thought to myself that this shirt was going to travel via truck to an airplane, to another truck, onto a courier’s motorbike, and then be delivered. But all the mother cared about was just that one little crease on the shirt which she wanted to be just right for her son. In that one moment I realized that we’re not in the shipments business, nor the parcels business, but that we are in the emotions business.”
Service matters in commoditized world
In his writings Ron Kaufman has made some very valid observations, said Mr. Mannan. “He says that in difficult economic times some businesses cut costs by cutting corners on customer service. This is exactly the wrong thing to do because service matters more than ever when the economy is between a rock and a hard place, a situation that Pakistan is passing through these days once again. When people buy during an economic downturn they are extremely conscious of the "hard earned" money that they spend. Customers want more attention, appreciation and recognition for their purchases, not less. Customers want to be sure they get maximum value for the money they choose to spend. The basic product may remain the same, but they want more service.
On the other hand, we live in a world which is getting commoditized very quickly. In my previous career as a banker I know what commoditized means. Each branch offering the same thing, but the branch offering greater service gets more deposits and assets.
Thank you, Ron, and thank you ladies and gentlemen for your presence here today, and I am sure what is to follow we will all relish and remember for a very long time to come. A very special thank you to our sponsors without whose active and generous collaboration we may not have been able to invite Ron Kaufman to Pakistan.”
Scuba Diving!
With the CEO Octara Jamil Janjua extending a very Lahori welcome, Ron Kaufman was up and running, breaking the ice with an expectant audience by offering some personal information, and alluding to his rather distinctive baldness. “‘There was actually a time in my life when I had hair, and lots of it!” Ron disclosed that he had been the captain of the Brown University’s Frisbee team, and that his Wife Jem is from Australia, and he had met her while scuba diving, a pastime that they’re both passionate about, and do it together all over the world. Ron has one daughter, 18 years old Brighten. She grew up in Singapore, which is where Ron’s been based for the past 25 years, and she has only just started her educational career in the USA.
Analyzing Service
Having formed a firm rapport with the large suited and booted audience, Ron pickled the pace with identifying the beneficiaries of service. Who do you serve? Customer, client, patient, and wife. Who serves
you? IT department, branches, and staff. Service can be face-to-face, over the phone, or in the digital sphere. There can be Memorial service and Religious service. Human beings need service to just survive longer than any other species on the planet given that its many years before a new born can fend for itself. We are creatures of service. If you don’t get service, or give service, you end up failing.
Service is taking action to create value for someone else Starbucks, Disneyworld, Apple, and Amazon.com
all have an aligned service culture that is customer-centric and focused on service. Do we have a good working definition for this term, service? Do we give the customer what they want? Or what they need?
Service is taking action. What is the purpose of the action? Service is taking action to create value for someone else. This definition applies to everyone. Service excellence is creating the right value for the right person at the right time. Service culture is the way we support each other and work with each other every day. The service hero, delivering above and beyond the extra mile, is not sustainable. The hero will either be pulled down to the lowest common denominator, or he will quit.
If you want to consistently deliver an excellent service experience then you also have to build an uplifting service culture. How do you do that? Ron says he has never come across an academic program designed for this purpose, nor is it taught in any MBA program. “The good news is that there is actually a plan, a methodology that you can follow. It’s a fundamental architecture. You need to build an environment where people are continually encouraged, reinforced, supported, educated, motivated, and inspired to serve.”
Education more effective than training
Training is telling someone what to do in a certain way in a certain situation where it is very important that they do it exactly right. Education is teaching people how to think so they can figure out what to do even if it is a new situation that they haven’t seen before. “You want to have your children to be well trained to drive a car, handle a knife or an open flame, but you want them educated in the fundamental principles of life so as they grow they can think for themselves and come up with the right actions to take.”
Training is very important
“I don’t want the pilot of my plane to engage in creative thinking in the cockpit! I want him to do exactly what he was trained to do, specially if something goes wrong. I don’t want him to go out-of-the-box. But in business we need people who can think. We need team members to come up with new ideas and better ways to handle a situation. We want people to make good decisions without having to ask for help all the time.”
Singapore experience
Ron disclosed that he had been living in Singapore for 25 years. He moved there at a time when all the manufacturing was moving out of Singapore to China and India. It was then that Singapore had decided to get into the service industry to compensate for the loss of manufacturing. “Singaporeans are taught in very definite manner about either being right or wrong. But service is not about being right or wrong, but about understanding what that person really want or need. Service is an emotional experience, as pointed out by Mannan, and one must develop the ability to adjust to what you’re going to do to suit the situation.”
Singapore brought in Ron to reeducate the Singaporean people. Changi International Airport – Being
the Best & Friendliest “They have an ambition. They want to be known as the friendliest and the best airport in the world. Being the best airport is not difficult for Changi, because being efficient, productive, secure, clean and fast are things Singaporeans are good at. But being friendly is not ease for Singaporeans. It’s not part of their culture. In Thailand it would be easy. ‘Swadikap!’ The reason Thai people are so gentle and
kind is because it’s in their culture. Or Japan, ‘Hai! Hai!’ All very respectful and very formal. It’s in their culture. Or Australia, ‘G’day mate! C’mon in! Have a beer!’ Why are they so outgoing like that? It’s in the beer! And the beer is in the culture! How Changi International airport in Singapore maintains its position as the number one airport in the world is because I taught them about the 6 levels of service, and I taught them about transactions and perception points, and they use it every day.”
Transaction called ‘Arrival’ & Perception Points
Changi airport has a transaction called ‘Arrival’. ‘Arrival’ begins when the aircraft door opens, and ‘Arrival’ ends when the taxi door closes. Everything in between is part of the transaction called ‘Arrival at Changi Airport’. “When you step off the aircraft you step onto the aerobridge. Don’t you notice whether the aerobridge is wet or dry, hot or cold, clean or dirty? Don’t you start evaluating the city just based on the aerobridge? You do it because it’s your first impression. Then you get into the terminal building and the transit area. Which way do you go? How far do you have to walk? Where are the bathrooms? Are the sidewalks moving? Then you go down to Immigration. Is there a line? Is it moving? How long does it take? Is there a card that has to be filled out? Where are the cards? Then you go to baggage claim. Which belt? How long did you wait? Did all the bags come? What condition are they in? Then you get a trolley. Then you walk through Customs and into the Arrivals area. There are the people holding the signs. There are the banks. There is the taxi stand. Get in line, wait for the taxi, step inside, and close the door. Now the ‘Arrival’ transaction is complete.
Immigration ‘Unfriendly’
One of those perception points consistently kept getting a low score in the category called friendliness. “In other words, people said ‘that’s not friendly’! The unfriendly department was Immigration. It’s not their job to be friendly. Their job is to check you out. But Changi International Airport wants to be the friendliest airport in the world. So they will not suffer any perception point that gets them a low score. So they evaluated that perception point and came up with an idea. They wrote script. Every immigration officer was
supposed to say to every single person all day long – ‘Good morning and welcome to the Republic of Singapore. I hope you had a very nice flight. On behalf of all of my colleagues at Immigration, Welcome. May I see your passport please?’”
“The Immigration officers were not amused by that script! It took way too much time, and there was no way to do it all day long. So they got rid of the script and came up with an idea. They put a mirror on the computer terminal facing the officer with a little sticker that said ‘smile’! That backfired as well. Instead of improving service it degraded service, because as the passenger was walking up the officer was busy looking at himself in the mirror! So they got rid of the mirrors. They came up with a third idea. On every immigration counter in both arrivals and departures they put a box of candies; little breath-mints. They changed the script to just two words. ‘Passport. Sweets?’ 66 million times a year. The Immigration scores went up. The first and second ideas didn’t work. They had to keep trying to find a way to add value.”
Making life easy by design and not by chance
“People still bring things to airports that are not allowed. They forget what’s in their bags. At Changi International Airport you do not have to throw it out. You can mail it back to where you came from, or mail it ahead to where you’re going. That mailbox is positioned right at the security screening area for your convenience. They turned a point of complaint into a point of compliment.”
“In the restrooms there is a digital screen where if you press ‘poor’ because of some shortcoming, the
beeper goes off on the monitor identifying the bathroom in trouble, and the response is immediate. Changi has installed a four storied slide so kids can play, and go up and down until they’re tired and enjoy a restful flight. Everyone is grateful for that. My wife takes me there! They have even installed a butterfly garden in Terminal 3 where you go and stand still and the butterflies come and land on you. How special is that. It creates an emotional experience during travel. They’re not just focused on running an airport, but they’re focused on creating an experience.
It’s your experience that turns them on and drives them. So it’s not package, volume, or shipping rates and on time delivery scores. These are vital, but ‘expected’. It’s the experience you create for the mother who’s shipping the shirt, as in the case of the TCS example. The Changi experience is by design, and not by chance.
Service transaction
Service is delivered in a sequence – there’s a beginning, middle and an end, and within this transaction there are multiple perception points being evaluated on the six levels of service. “Have you ever called a restaurant
and reacted to the way you were handled? If you weren’t handled properly then instead of creating value
the restaurant destroyed, degraded and damaged its value. It was just one phone call, and you went to another restaurant. The owner of the restaurant and other staff don’t even know it happened. Just one person on that one telephone call didn’t deliver service at the level it was expected and did all the damage.”
Ron’s workshop was peppered with insights and case studies. It was a lot to assimilate, but what made life
easier was the fact that what Ron said was the kind of rocket science that would pass for commonsense. Ron frequently switched the focus of the audience from himself to each other, giving the participants plenty of
opportunity to interact amongst themselves and reflect upon the wisdom being shared, and its applicability to
their own organizations and functions.
Deep in a service crisis
Back in Karachi some six months earlier Ron had said that we are deep in a service crisis. “In the operating
room, surgeons and their teams communicate in a very precise language; airplane pilots follow a strict protocol to take-off and land safely every time; and, when launching a new product, companies lay out a plan that all employees follow. But when it comes to building a strong service culture, the path to success is usually much less clear. We relegate service to a single department guided by anecdotal wisdom and less than helpful clichés like ‘the customer is always right.’
With global economies transforming at record speed, we are largely unprepared for the service demands we
face day and night from around the world, said Ron. “We promise our customers satisfaction and then allow
internal politics and inefficient methods to frustrate our ability to deliver. With service so much a part of our daily lives, why aren’t we doing it better?” Ron Kaufman knows the answer to this question, and not only
believes we can do it better, but shows us how by taking us on a journey into a new world of service that is
guided by fundamental principles and actionable models. He has discovered that while each successfully
team is different, the architecture they apply to build an uplifting service culture is the same.
Author of ‘Uplifting Service’, a New York Times bestseller, and Founder of UP! Your Service, Ron is
cited as the world’s premier thought leader, educator and motivator for uplifting customer service and building service cultures. A regular columnist at Bloomberg Businessweek and the author of 14 other books on service, business, and inspiration, Ron provides powerful insights from working with clients all over the world in every major industry for more than 20 years.
To say that Ron Kaufman is quite a character would be in the nature of an understatement. He’s a showman extraordinaire who holds his audience captive, mesmerized as it were, as he plays them like a finely tuned violin with a full repertoire of notes. A master musician and inspired conductor evoking the sheer
ecstasy and sometimes agony of understanding, as comprehension dawns of that which had all the while been sitting on the tips of our nose. Such is Ron Kaufman, a man who has dedicated his life in realizing his firm belief that every man, and indeed every woman, deserves to be treated like God’s gift to Mankind.
Ron Kaufman is a good friend of Pakistan.
An astute judge of human nature, he has ascertained that Pakistanis are perhaps amongst the most misunderstood people on Earth. That they’re a God fearing, warm hearted people, and unfortunate in that the freaks amongst them have received a disproportionate amount of attention in the world, and the world has been quick to accept the mucho macho violence as stereotypical of the nation as a whole. “Pakistani culture has at its heart tremendous warmth, kindness and generosity towards other people. So the spirit of my message and the practice of my message have resonated very well with my audience,” says Ron, alongside calling Pakistanis amongst the most resilient people in the world.
Octara Trusted Partner
Ron Kaufman is not deterred by the often frightening travel advisories that have dissuaded US citizens in particular from visiting our shores. In Octara Ron has found a trusted partner that he can depend upon to ensure the safe and seamless conduct of his visits. His message to Pakistani corporate warriors has never wavered. See people as individuals worthy of your attention and empathy. Understand what makes them tick, and then deliver for them a WOW! Experience, and add an extra few springs to their step as they go about contributing to making this world a better place. That’s the broad view of Ron’s message. The narrow view, naturally, concerns the benefits to profitability and the bottom line that superior service can generate.
2014 saw Ron Kaufman visit Karachi and Lahore with his Service Leadership full day Workshop. While Karachi has been a frequent beneficiary of his presence, this was his second trip to Lahore, and his reception here was equally enthusiastic. While in Karachi the Chairman TCS Mr. Khalid Awan had offered the welcome address, in Lahore the newly minted CEO of TCS Holdings, Mr. M.A. Mannan, was at hand to thank Ron for sharing his time, experiences and advice at a time when Pakistan was sorely in need of good counsel.
“We’re in the emotions business” – M. A. Mannan
“TCS Holdings has many businesses, and Octara is one of those businesses, and a very important one at that,” said Mr. Mannan. “All over Pakistan we have our own pool of specialized experts. Yet we realize the enormous value that global gurus like Ron Kaufman can add given their enormous exposure and international experience across industries, often by validating and reinforcing our existing thinking and practices, and identifying gaps that need to be plugged. By dedicating a day to a learning experience like this we can all gain our own inspirations and take back one idea which we can implement in our own organizations, and believe that one idea can make a big difference.”
Offering an insight that he had gained, Mr. Mannan narrated a personal experience. “I did a lot of research on the global logistics and courier industry before I joined TCS. I realized that our customers are looking for on-time deliveries and shipment packing. It’s that simple, and in that simplicity I thought that the TCS universe is at stake. During an orientation session I witnessed something firsthand at an Express Center which changed my perception of the service industry.
As I was standing there I saw a mother come in to ship a shirt to her son a thousand miles away. As our Express Center staff quickly put it into the Red Box, she leaned over the counter and fixed that shirt just a little bit. I thought to myself that this shirt was going to travel via truck to an airplane, to another truck, onto a courier’s motorbike, and then be delivered. But all the mother cared about was just that one little crease on the shirt which she wanted to be just right for her son. In that one moment I realized that we’re not in the shipments business, nor the parcels business, but that we are in the emotions business.”
Service matters in commoditized world
In his writings Ron Kaufman has made some very valid observations, said Mr. Mannan. “He says that in difficult economic times some businesses cut costs by cutting corners on customer service. This is exactly the wrong thing to do because service matters more than ever when the economy is between a rock and a hard place, a situation that Pakistan is passing through these days once again. When people buy during an economic downturn they are extremely conscious of the "hard earned" money that they spend. Customers want more attention, appreciation and recognition for their purchases, not less. Customers want to be sure they get maximum value for the money they choose to spend. The basic product may remain the same, but they want more service.
On the other hand, we live in a world which is getting commoditized very quickly. In my previous career as a banker I know what commoditized means. Each branch offering the same thing, but the branch offering greater service gets more deposits and assets.
Thank you, Ron, and thank you ladies and gentlemen for your presence here today, and I am sure what is to follow we will all relish and remember for a very long time to come. A very special thank you to our sponsors without whose active and generous collaboration we may not have been able to invite Ron Kaufman to Pakistan.”
Scuba Diving!
With the CEO Octara Jamil Janjua extending a very Lahori welcome, Ron Kaufman was up and running, breaking the ice with an expectant audience by offering some personal information, and alluding to his rather distinctive baldness. “‘There was actually a time in my life when I had hair, and lots of it!” Ron disclosed that he had been the captain of the Brown University’s Frisbee team, and that his Wife Jem is from Australia, and he had met her while scuba diving, a pastime that they’re both passionate about, and do it together all over the world. Ron has one daughter, 18 years old Brighten. She grew up in Singapore, which is where Ron’s been based for the past 25 years, and she has only just started her educational career in the USA.
Analyzing Service
Having formed a firm rapport with the large suited and booted audience, Ron pickled the pace with identifying the beneficiaries of service. Who do you serve? Customer, client, patient, and wife. Who serves
you? IT department, branches, and staff. Service can be face-to-face, over the phone, or in the digital sphere. There can be Memorial service and Religious service. Human beings need service to just survive longer than any other species on the planet given that its many years before a new born can fend for itself. We are creatures of service. If you don’t get service, or give service, you end up failing.
Service is taking action to create value for someone else Starbucks, Disneyworld, Apple, and Amazon.com
all have an aligned service culture that is customer-centric and focused on service. Do we have a good working definition for this term, service? Do we give the customer what they want? Or what they need?
Service is taking action. What is the purpose of the action? Service is taking action to create value for someone else. This definition applies to everyone. Service excellence is creating the right value for the right person at the right time. Service culture is the way we support each other and work with each other every day. The service hero, delivering above and beyond the extra mile, is not sustainable. The hero will either be pulled down to the lowest common denominator, or he will quit.
If you want to consistently deliver an excellent service experience then you also have to build an uplifting service culture. How do you do that? Ron says he has never come across an academic program designed for this purpose, nor is it taught in any MBA program. “The good news is that there is actually a plan, a methodology that you can follow. It’s a fundamental architecture. You need to build an environment where people are continually encouraged, reinforced, supported, educated, motivated, and inspired to serve.”
Education more effective than training
Training is telling someone what to do in a certain way in a certain situation where it is very important that they do it exactly right. Education is teaching people how to think so they can figure out what to do even if it is a new situation that they haven’t seen before. “You want to have your children to be well trained to drive a car, handle a knife or an open flame, but you want them educated in the fundamental principles of life so as they grow they can think for themselves and come up with the right actions to take.”
Training is very important
“I don’t want the pilot of my plane to engage in creative thinking in the cockpit! I want him to do exactly what he was trained to do, specially if something goes wrong. I don’t want him to go out-of-the-box. But in business we need people who can think. We need team members to come up with new ideas and better ways to handle a situation. We want people to make good decisions without having to ask for help all the time.”
Singapore experience
Ron disclosed that he had been living in Singapore for 25 years. He moved there at a time when all the manufacturing was moving out of Singapore to China and India. It was then that Singapore had decided to get into the service industry to compensate for the loss of manufacturing. “Singaporeans are taught in very definite manner about either being right or wrong. But service is not about being right or wrong, but about understanding what that person really want or need. Service is an emotional experience, as pointed out by Mannan, and one must develop the ability to adjust to what you’re going to do to suit the situation.”
Singapore brought in Ron to reeducate the Singaporean people. Changi International Airport – Being
the Best & Friendliest “They have an ambition. They want to be known as the friendliest and the best airport in the world. Being the best airport is not difficult for Changi, because being efficient, productive, secure, clean and fast are things Singaporeans are good at. But being friendly is not ease for Singaporeans. It’s not part of their culture. In Thailand it would be easy. ‘Swadikap!’ The reason Thai people are so gentle and
kind is because it’s in their culture. Or Japan, ‘Hai! Hai!’ All very respectful and very formal. It’s in their culture. Or Australia, ‘G’day mate! C’mon in! Have a beer!’ Why are they so outgoing like that? It’s in the beer! And the beer is in the culture! How Changi International airport in Singapore maintains its position as the number one airport in the world is because I taught them about the 6 levels of service, and I taught them about transactions and perception points, and they use it every day.”
Transaction called ‘Arrival’ & Perception Points
Changi airport has a transaction called ‘Arrival’. ‘Arrival’ begins when the aircraft door opens, and ‘Arrival’ ends when the taxi door closes. Everything in between is part of the transaction called ‘Arrival at Changi Airport’. “When you step off the aircraft you step onto the aerobridge. Don’t you notice whether the aerobridge is wet or dry, hot or cold, clean or dirty? Don’t you start evaluating the city just based on the aerobridge? You do it because it’s your first impression. Then you get into the terminal building and the transit area. Which way do you go? How far do you have to walk? Where are the bathrooms? Are the sidewalks moving? Then you go down to Immigration. Is there a line? Is it moving? How long does it take? Is there a card that has to be filled out? Where are the cards? Then you go to baggage claim. Which belt? How long did you wait? Did all the bags come? What condition are they in? Then you get a trolley. Then you walk through Customs and into the Arrivals area. There are the people holding the signs. There are the banks. There is the taxi stand. Get in line, wait for the taxi, step inside, and close the door. Now the ‘Arrival’ transaction is complete.
Immigration ‘Unfriendly’
One of those perception points consistently kept getting a low score in the category called friendliness. “In other words, people said ‘that’s not friendly’! The unfriendly department was Immigration. It’s not their job to be friendly. Their job is to check you out. But Changi International Airport wants to be the friendliest airport in the world. So they will not suffer any perception point that gets them a low score. So they evaluated that perception point and came up with an idea. They wrote script. Every immigration officer was
supposed to say to every single person all day long – ‘Good morning and welcome to the Republic of Singapore. I hope you had a very nice flight. On behalf of all of my colleagues at Immigration, Welcome. May I see your passport please?’”
“The Immigration officers were not amused by that script! It took way too much time, and there was no way to do it all day long. So they got rid of the script and came up with an idea. They put a mirror on the computer terminal facing the officer with a little sticker that said ‘smile’! That backfired as well. Instead of improving service it degraded service, because as the passenger was walking up the officer was busy looking at himself in the mirror! So they got rid of the mirrors. They came up with a third idea. On every immigration counter in both arrivals and departures they put a box of candies; little breath-mints. They changed the script to just two words. ‘Passport. Sweets?’ 66 million times a year. The Immigration scores went up. The first and second ideas didn’t work. They had to keep trying to find a way to add value.”
Making life easy by design and not by chance
“People still bring things to airports that are not allowed. They forget what’s in their bags. At Changi International Airport you do not have to throw it out. You can mail it back to where you came from, or mail it ahead to where you’re going. That mailbox is positioned right at the security screening area for your convenience. They turned a point of complaint into a point of compliment.”
“In the restrooms there is a digital screen where if you press ‘poor’ because of some shortcoming, the
beeper goes off on the monitor identifying the bathroom in trouble, and the response is immediate. Changi has installed a four storied slide so kids can play, and go up and down until they’re tired and enjoy a restful flight. Everyone is grateful for that. My wife takes me there! They have even installed a butterfly garden in Terminal 3 where you go and stand still and the butterflies come and land on you. How special is that. It creates an emotional experience during travel. They’re not just focused on running an airport, but they’re focused on creating an experience.
It’s your experience that turns them on and drives them. So it’s not package, volume, or shipping rates and on time delivery scores. These are vital, but ‘expected’. It’s the experience you create for the mother who’s shipping the shirt, as in the case of the TCS example. The Changi experience is by design, and not by chance.
Service transaction
Service is delivered in a sequence – there’s a beginning, middle and an end, and within this transaction there are multiple perception points being evaluated on the six levels of service. “Have you ever called a restaurant
and reacted to the way you were handled? If you weren’t handled properly then instead of creating value
the restaurant destroyed, degraded and damaged its value. It was just one phone call, and you went to another restaurant. The owner of the restaurant and other staff don’t even know it happened. Just one person on that one telephone call didn’t deliver service at the level it was expected and did all the damage.”
Ron’s workshop was peppered with insights and case studies. It was a lot to assimilate, but what made life
easier was the fact that what Ron said was the kind of rocket science that would pass for commonsense. Ron frequently switched the focus of the audience from himself to each other, giving the participants plenty of
opportunity to interact amongst themselves and reflect upon the wisdom being shared, and its applicability to
their own organizations and functions.
Deep in a service crisis
Back in Karachi some six months earlier Ron had said that we are deep in a service crisis. “In the operating
room, surgeons and their teams communicate in a very precise language; airplane pilots follow a strict protocol to take-off and land safely every time; and, when launching a new product, companies lay out a plan that all employees follow. But when it comes to building a strong service culture, the path to success is usually much less clear. We relegate service to a single department guided by anecdotal wisdom and less than helpful clichés like ‘the customer is always right.’
With global economies transforming at record speed, we are largely unprepared for the service demands we
face day and night from around the world, said Ron. “We promise our customers satisfaction and then allow
internal politics and inefficient methods to frustrate our ability to deliver. With service so much a part of our daily lives, why aren’t we doing it better?” Ron Kaufman knows the answer to this question, and not only
believes we can do it better, but shows us how by taking us on a journey into a new world of service that is
guided by fundamental principles and actionable models. He has discovered that while each successfully
team is different, the architecture they apply to build an uplifting service culture is the same.
Author of ‘Uplifting Service’, a New York Times bestseller, and Founder of UP! Your Service, Ron is
cited as the world’s premier thought leader, educator and motivator for uplifting customer service and building service cultures. A regular columnist at Bloomberg Businessweek and the author of 14 other books on service, business, and inspiration, Ron provides powerful insights from working with clients all over the world in every major industry for more than 20 years.
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