Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

You know, when the book came out, the subtitle says ‘The Proven Path to Delighting Your Customers, Colleagues and Everyone Else You Meet’. But what you’re saying is, hold on a second. Maybe the path itself has had to evolve because of the landscape that the path is on has been changing. So let me show you what I call the evolution of customer service. And we’re going to start with, you know, way back where it used to be, where if you recall, there was that expression that said that “A satisfied customer is a loyal customer.” Remember? But now we realize that’s not always true. You can have a satisfied customer, but they go to the competition the next time. Something changed or meeting expectations produces customer satisfaction. Right. But then that became not enough. It wasn’t enough to just satisfy.

So the field evolved to what I call customer delight. Surprise the customer, exceed expectations, moments of amazing magic. Okay, that was fine, but it wasn’t consistent enough. And then the field evolved again. So there became a concern really, for customer experience. End to end, total lifecycle, the journey mapping that was involved. How do we make sure the entire experience is positive? And that became what customer service meant. And then it evolved again, not just a great experience, but let’s make sure that that customer becomes our ambassador. We want the customer to be an advocate. We want the person to be loyal for us, especially with all of social media. And then it evolved again and it’s reached now the point, if you will, of what I call customer care, which is authentic concern and commitment to the well-being of the customers’ future.

We can talk about that a little bit later on. Like what is the difference between serving someone and caring about someone? But before we go there, I want you to see that what I’ve shown you here is an evolution over decades and that every single field of human endeavor, whether it’s the way we do education or the way we do communication or the way we do health care or the way you raise a family or the way you invest in financial concerns. I mean, all of that evolves over time. We happen to be alive now. It’s 2021 and may you have a good long life. But let’s always remember that who we are today comes out of a certain history and that the future is also being invented, if you will, on the back. Now, we are in a moment in time today right now, where there’s enormous change going on.

But let’s not pretend like we can just make up anything we want. We have to take into account the history itself. So let me add one more, but I’m going to add it to the bottom and push everything else up. Do you know what was there before customer satisfaction? It was customer recovery. You may be too young to know, but some people will remember that service was where you went when something broke. It was called the Service Center and they had the spare parts. And you went there because the product was under warranty and that’s what service was. And then it became satisfaction and then it became delight and experience and loyalty and care. And that’s really where we are today.