OCEAN DRIVE
STYLE
The Avalon Hotel puts the excitement of Ocean
Drive at your doorstep. Experience the acclaimed
classic seafood grille, “A Fish Called Avalon”.
700 Ocean Drive
Miami Beach, Florida
800-933-3306
book online for best rates:
www.southbeachhotels.com
BEACHFRONT
LOCATION
The South Seas awaits you. Indulge yourself in
our trendy South Beach neighborhood. On
premise, enjoy the casual poolside cafe & bar.
1751 Collins Avenue
Miami Beach, Florida
800-345-2678
service, essentially making them part-owners of the company. The Taylor
family, which founded Enterprise, had
started several other very different but
successful companies, all using this model
of customer service top to bottom, first
and foremost.”
Outsourcing Customer Service
PROBLEM: More than ever, companies—
especially public companies—are under
pressure to deliver profits, and the knee-jerk reaction is often to cut costs. Outsourcing is an apparently easy way to
do that, but this “solution” is a double-edged sword. “If you are trying to improve profits by cutting costs, one
reaction of that is ‘let’s outsource,’
but the people you outsource to are
going to frustrate your customers,”
Kazanjian says.
SOLUTION: This one is simple but
can appear costly—don’t outsource
customer service. “Obviously people
don’t enjoy calling overseas call centers,” says Fast Company’s Lidsky, “and
most of the companies that made our
list just don’t do that. You might run an
efficient call center, you might even be
passionate about running call centers,
but you can’t possibly be as passionate
about my products or services as I am.”
One winner that made the list was
virtual shoe store Zappos, among the
most wildly successful companies in
e-retailing. Zappos enjoys fantastic customer loyalty, and just seven years after
launching, it shipped more than one out
of every 100 pairs of footwear sold in
this country. Not only does the company
keep its call centers, which it considers
the key to its success—domestic and
internal—but it relocated its corporate
headquarters to Las Vegas, losing top executives in the process, because the city
provided the best setting and employee
pool for its call centers. In addition,
to better appreciate company culture,
every new employee, from accountants
to managers, goes through the two-week
customer service training program and
then works two weeks in the call center
before reporting to his or her regular job.
Fixing Problems
PROBLEM: Even at the best-run
companies, things go wrong. At first
glance one might expect customers
to be loyal to companies that never do
Who Does
Customer
Service Right?
Jonathan Tisch cites these
companies as models
Zappos The nation’s No. 1 shoe retailer
has low prices and a huge selection in stock,
but what wins customers is fast-and-easy
free shipping—even on returns, as every
order comes packed with a free return label.
Not sure of your size? Zappos encourages
customers to order two sizes and send one
back, for free.
Enterprise Rent-A-Car
Employees call you by name, routinely follow up
after a rental to inquire about your experience, and quickly resolve problems. But
Enterprise’s biggest innovation was to
go further than any of its competitors: It
invented home pickup and return service for
all rental customers. After all, most people
who need to rent a car don’t have one.
Loews Hotels As a midsize, domestic luxury chain, Loews does not enjoy the
name recognition of some competitors,
but it makes up for it with effort. One of
the “service ahas” CEO Jonathan Tisch
lists in his book is, “Tradition is great, but
so is occasionally overturning tradition.”
Luxury hotel chains traditionally used a
formal, marble-clad, cookie-cutter style,
whereas every Loews is uniquely designed
and decorated to fit its locality. Luxury
hotels traditionally do not welcome pets,
wrong, but the truth is that fixing problems can be even better than not having
them in the first place. Professor Joe
Hall teaches operations management
in the MBA program at Dartmouth
College’s Tuck School of Business and
consults on making operations lead
to improved customer satisfaction.
“Toyota did a study looking at customer repurchase intention for its
Lexus division, which was very high
( 78 percent) for the industry, but the interesting thing they found is that owners
who had problems with their cars that
were addressed were even more likely
to buy again than those who never had
a problem.”
SOLU TION: Resolve problems quickly,
to the customer’s satisfaction. Travelocity, the only Internet travel agency to
