I apologize for the rant and for being misunderstood. I firmly believe that companies should continually strive to delight their customers and to work towards excedding expectations.

Chalk it up to either jealousy or what sometimes seems like living the life of Sisyphus, when the (same cast of characters, year-after-year) Beloved Brands are brought up. However, my life is devoted to making the place I work one of them!

While I have a lot of respect for Bruce — this is an area where we disagree. I do believe that what he writes about is applicable for most organizations that just want to embrace experiences and continue their normal operations. What I am proposing is for those companies that want to leapfrog their competition in the process and want to advance their customer service levels to meet (sorry, exceed) the expectations of their customers as a way to become more profitable and more customer-centric. It takes a lot more than preparing for and delivering against expectations — it takes a very deep analysis of the feedback provided and closer relationships to find out what their expectations are and how we can exceed them, and a complete revamp (in some cases maybe just a lengthy advance) of the corporate culture.

This will separate you, at great expense of time and changes, from the regular people who just want to do the same they are doing now, with a different experience. Just my thoughts…

Thanks for the read!

Thanks a lot for the comment and the read. That is an excellent point you make— we can apply the same concept to any business process: internal or external, customers or partners or employers. Further, if you were to make the changes necessary to make this model work — you would do that. You would actually become a new culture, focused on over-delivery. I think it is quite interesting to explore the model further — thanks for that point.

Thanks for the read and the comment. I loved your post.

I totally agree with you that mediocre companies make the good ones stand out. I just wish more people were to see it that way and try to create above average (or even above mediocre) organizations for their customer service initiatives. It would go a very long way towards becoming the ones that capture the customer as opposed to the ones that lose the customers.

And, yes — it is an iterative process, so there is no rest for the weary.

Thanks for the read and the comment. What Verizon did, and I just read your story – don’t have first hand knowledge of it otherwise – was the same mistake most people make: they “forgot” to align the three elements of delivering a new experience: people, process, and tools. They created a new interface, in response to something that probably customers wanted (I tried that with my provider in the past and quickly realized it was not going to work), but did not align the systems (and more than likely the people) with it. The exceeding customers expectations bit takes the entire organization to change and adapt to the new model. I thought that since we are going in the direction anyway, since we have to change due to the advent of the social customer, it would be a good time to bring it up for consideration.

I have had customers in the past that tried different iterations and models of the same, and they were very successful and satisfied. The model works — as long as the entire organization is aligned behind it.

Thanks for the read!

And thanks for agreeing with me in regards to the cultural aspects that are necessary to make it as a beloved brand. to me that is the most important part of this discussion.

This was the point made by most people so far. If we are constantly over-delivering then we are raising the bad in each interaction so we may never catch up. Which elicited three responses:

1) what is the difference between then and now? we are always struggling to meet expectations — wouldn’t it be better to do the same and deliver better interactions (see next two points as to how)?
2) In one of the places where I am syndicated (CustomerThink) Professor Steve Vargos commented and said that it is not usually the case, that raising delivery does not raise expectations. This also correlates to my experience — people are more grateful for the improved and better experiences, but it does not become the expectations — and even if it did (see next point)
3) you are now prepared to continue to deliver against that new expectations, since you revamped your culture, hierarchies, policies and systems to deal with it.

The second most common comment was on service recovery vs service delivery, and how delivering above expectations would simply negate the effect of service recovery in instances where things went wrong. Alas, my perspective is that either things won’t go wrong that often, or as it is customary and proven with loyal customers — service recovery won’t need to be excessive to prove effective.

As for your second point: statistics. Beloved brands are not actually 2 standard deviations from the norm. They are the norm for companies that realized the value of their customers and over-delivering to them Whether by design (Ritz Carlton) or by need (Harley Davidson) these are the brands that realized that customer-centricity and over-delivery has its rewards. And, anyone can do it if they align their tools, processes, and more importantly people behind it.

Thanks for the read (long week, so sorry for the long delay in replying)

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Scott:
My apologies, but I feel that your approach just supports mediocrity and based on where we currently are in the spectrum of paying attention to our customers, mediocrity will not permit us to get to where we need as quickly as we need to. It is all about the customer and we need to keep our focus on that!