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Event Review

Michael Heppell is the ideal speaker to book when times are hard. The man is irrepressibly cheerful. When he smiles, it’s with his entire face, and when he laughs, it’s with his entire body. His stocky frame moves constantly, fidgety with enthusiasm, as if it has been fitted with batteries that are too powerful. And his warm Geordie accent gives him a kind of everyman friendliness. This is a salesman who cares about his customers. If he weren’t on stage speaking about business, you imagine he’d be welcoming you to the busiest market stall on Tyneside – a stottie king, selling feel-good Northern fayre.

Heppell clearly believes his audiences should go home feeling entertained as well as informed. For the first few minutes of his speech to the London Business Forum (LBF) at the Lewis Media Centre, it felt as if we had accidentally wandered into a stand-up comedy gig. But then the serious work of the day began, as we were asked to consider who our principal competitors might be. In the present climate, Heppell argued, the answer is: everyone.

“You are in competition with everyone who picks up the phone faster,” he shouted. “You are in competition with everyone who delivers an order quicker. You are in competition with everyone who exceeds expectations more regularly. You are in competition with everyone who lives values more passionately. You are in competition with everyone who understands a customer’s needs more clearly. You are in competition with everyone who has a better tone on the phone. You are in competition with everyone who goes an extra five miles when you are patting yourself on the back because you went an extra one.”

Customers are coming to expect more than ever, Heppell argued, but it needn’t cost you the earth to meet their expectations. To prove this, he asked us to recall our best experiences as customers, then to estimate how much these acts of good service has cost each of the companies concerned. Among over 200 people, the highest sum mentioned was only £100.

“Compare that with what you spend on corporate literature,” Heppell suggested. “The best customer service experiences [are those] where somebody was creative, somebody interacted in a great way, somebody took the lead, somebody felt confident to do something.” For the most part, such acts cost nothing, he stressed. What’s more, they will ultimately make you money in repeat business and improved customer retention. Or, if you’re in the public sector, they should enable you to hit your key performance indicators more easily. “Whatever it may be, it all gets better with better levels of service.”

When you add value to your products or services intangibly in this way, it can turn customer satisfaction into customer loyalty, Heppell continued. “Customer satisfaction is worthless, but customer loyalty is priceless. In fact, when you have got loyal customers, they will do anything before they switch. You can drop the ball. You can get it wrong. You can muck things up and they are still going to stay loyal to you. And they are going to be out there being advocates for you as well. Is there any better advertisement than a loyal customer who stands in front of somebody who says, ‘No, no, no! You should do this because that was my experience.’”

It used to be the case that businesses could win customer loyalty simply by “wowing” their customers. But now there’s a kind of “arm’s race” of customer service going on, Heppell suggested, in which you need to do more to maintain your competitive advantage. “It isn’t about how we wow people [any more],” he said. “I think it's about the ‘son of wow’ or, as I like to call him, ‘weewow’.”

In aggregate, the little things count for a lot, he explained. Think of it as an emotional bank account for the customer in which you make a small deposit with every good experience that you create. Often, companies will only throw resources at customer service after a customer has had a bad experience, but “if you have a customer who has had many weewows – many deposits – and then you drop the ball. What do they do? They forgive you. But they don’t just forgive you, they forgive you and it’s like they want to help to put it right.”

He cited a recent survey by a US researcher called Wendy Levinson, carried out on behalf of a big insurance firm, which found that the main factor contributing to the likelihood of a doctor being sued was their bedside manner. “Doctors who spend three minutes more [than average] with their patients never get sued,” Heppell said. The essential finding of the survey was that people don’t sue friends. Indeed, one case study referred to her doctor in these terms explicitly; she couldn’t bring herself to sue him after finding out he was responsible for a diagnostic error.

So, “what do customers say about you?” Heppell asked. “I'd rather get bad feedback than nothing, because then I can do something about it.” The customer you need to worry about most in the next 12 months is the “silent customer”, he argued, because they are the one who is going to switch to another brand. “The silent customer won't tell you what you have done wrong. They won’t tell you why. They will just very, very quietly and very discreetly go off and do something somewhere else. You'll never know why. You can never learn from it. Awful thought isn’t it?”

One of the best ways to head off this problem is by making more of an effort to personalise your services, Heppell suggested. That is, you need to make your customers feel they are really involved in how your organisation operates. “Do not just personalise once, but personalise, personalise and personalise again,” Heppell shouted. “That is going to be one of the big, big, big developments.”

At the same time, you need to be careful about how you deal with customers on a more personal level. For example, you need to make sure your customer services staff are skilled in the art of expectations management. “Only ever say what you will do,” he said, rather than promising an outcome before it is guaranteed. Under-delivering is the opposite of a weewow. Yet it is often encouraged by corporate bureaucracy. If a customer-facing member of staff needs to ask for permission in order to solve a small customer problem then your system isn’t working. People need to feel empowered to create weewows, Heppell insisted. And there are three things you as an executive can do to help them:

1. Specify how much they can spend solving a customer problem.
2. Specify how much time they can devote, as a priority, to solving a customer problem.
3. Define the boundaries for this kind of initiative-taking based on your company values.

To illustrate the value of these principles, he told the story of how one of his own staff had rushed a signed copy of one of his books to a prospective client who was due to fly out of the country and wanted something to read on the plane. She spent a considerable amount of money getting a cab to the nearest bookshop and time persuading his staff to allow her to leave the book on his desk, but the recipient in question is, apparently, still talking about his “weewow” four years later. Until you teach people to act like this, Heppell emphasises, they won't.

The fundamental leadership challenge here is to get your staff looking for, and seizing, weewow opportunities, he said. “A lot of the time, I believe the reason why great service doesn’t work is because people don't want to see where they can serve,” Heppell said. Empowerment is one prerequisite of an initiative-taking culture, he reiterated. But equally important is recognition. At too many companies, there’s an annual “customer service week”, or similar, after which things are allowed to stagnate once more.

This is why, at Heppell’s company, every member of staff has a bell on their desk, which they are required to ring whenever they feel they have created a positive customer experience, without being requested to do so. Several benefits flow from this simple habit, Heppell explained. “You put the bell there. DING! You ring the bell. First thing that happens, what do people do? They turn to you and say what? ‘What did you do?’ What if you haven't rung the bell for a couple of weeks? What are you thinking? Better get out there and help a customer, hadn't I? Better do something so I can ring the bell. People are looking and I haven't rung the bell.”

When people share success stories, they become “the folklore of the organization,” he concluded. “It’s a wonderful, wonderful thing.”