Exceeding customer expectations is tantamount to your success – in this "80 percent off" world this is more important than ever. If you do something nice for a customer on one visit, rest assured that they will expect it on their next visit. But what happens if that expected service doesn’t happen?
Take Georganne’s car dealership before. It’s a beautiful facility and the people who work there are known for their consistently good customer care. George is a loyal customer – she bought five cars there over the years – she compares the customer experience to buying a car at the Ritz Carlton, it’s that good. But one time the dealership “Jumped the Shark” and could have forever altered its relationship with customers.
Jumped the what? Okay, we’ll explain …
“Jumped the Shark” is a pop culture term that was coined by a then college student Sean Connolly in 1985 while watching an episode of “Happy Days” with his friends. In this particular episode The Fonz went waterskiing (in this bathing suit and leather jacket) and actually jumped over a shark. Sean commented that at that particular point, Happy Days had somehow crossed a line and would never be the same.
Fast forward 1997 when Jon Hein launched the website http://www.jumptheshark.com, a forum basically used to catalog when television shows went awry. Since then, however, the term “Jump the Shark” has become a pop culture mantra, “applying not only to television, but also music, film, even everyday life.” In other words, when someone or something does unexpected and completely out of character they “Jump the Shark.”
Now back to the story …
It was time for George to bring her car in for its 30,000 mile checkup, so she called to make an appointment and was told she could have her pick of days and time, so she chose a Friday afternoon, dropped her car off in a service bay with floors clean enough to eat off of, and drove away in a brand new loaner car. As in past experiences, every one of George’s expectations had been met or exceeded.
When she returned to pick it up four hours and hundreds of dollars later, the transaction was handled with the dealership’s usual impeccable care. Then they brought Georganne her car. Her less than clean car. “Wait a minute,” she said, “You always wash my car. Why didn’t you wash it today?”
George received several different answers that day and none of them made any sense to her. The answers bothered her because they weren’t “We forgot” or “We messed up kinds of excuses. The answers were a shark jumping, “We don’t do that any more.” It wasn’t that the dealership hadn’t washed her car that day that bothered her, it was the fact that they hadn’t washed George’s car and they always wash her car when it’s in for service. They wash everybody’s car. So we called the owner, not to complain because they forgot to do something Georganne expected, we called because she really likes the place and this single, albeit little, thing really bothered her.
The owner explained that not washing client’s cars was a corporate decision he had made based on a number of reasons; reasons that indeed made sense to us operationally, but did not make sense from a customer service perspective. In a hyper-competitive world you simply cannot take away something customers enjoy and have come to expect without an explanation. If you do, the only winner will be your competition.
It’s called the Circles of Excellence. Imagine a smaller circle within a larger circle. The smaller circle represents that things you have to do just to be in business today. In a store these things would include having a place for customers to park their cars, people to ring the register, bags to carry their purchases home. Rich calls these things the ante in a poker game; if you don’t have them, then you’re not in the game.
The larger, outer circle represents the extras you do for customers that make your store unique, special and memorable; things like: a hot cup of coffee on a cold day, the special events you do in-store that customers can’t wait to attend, a handwritten note thanking a customer for his/her business, or washing a car after servicing it.
You own the outer circle; it’s yours to do as much with as you want. Just remember that once you exceed a customer’s expectations, those expectations become the norm, and in essence, become as expected as those things in the inner circle. If you stop doing things customers expect then you’ll jump the shark and the only winner will be your competitors.
Coming up with outer circle extras that keep your store ahead of the pack takes vision because you have to constantly think up – and consistently deliver – new ways to dazzle your customers. And annoy your competition.
