Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

Service is taking action to create value for someone. Does that make sense? Does it actually describe what you do? Sure it does. Doesn’t it also make sense for everybody else within your organization and what they do serving other people? Okay. Next question. How good or bad is the service you provide? Who has the answer to that question? Yeah. Not you. Not you. It’s not coming from your metrics. No, no, no, it’s the someone who’s being served, who makes the determination whether or not they got the value that they needed, which would allow you then to figure out what action you’re going to take.

And the problem with this is that different people answer the question with different language. Some people say terrific, outstanding, incredible. Somebody else will say, it’s terrible, it’s lousy, it’s awful. And you get to a country like Singapore and things get really weird because, for example, if you ask a Singaporean, do you like the food? They will answer like this. “Not bad.” If they don’t like it, they’ll answer like this. “Pretty good.” Now imagine you get those in your verbatim and you’re trying to do a sentiment analysis. You’re going to get it completely wrong. So I realized we had to have another way of talking about how good or bad is your service, but from the recipient’s point of view.

So I created something called the Six Levels of Service, and the lowest level is when you completely mess it up. You send the wrong spare parts of the wrong location. You send somebody who’s not qualified, they don’t have the right tools with them. And we call that level Criminal. Here’s how you say it. Put your hands together like handcuffs. Alright. You did that really quickly, right? Prior experience. Okay, everybody hands together like handcuffs and go like this. Criminal. Here we go. One. Two. Three. Go! Criminal. Okay. One level above that is when you serve someone and they get what they need. But the experience is not very nice. Maybe it’s incomplete. It’s impolite. It’s late, but eventually they get what you need. And we call that Basic. And say it like this. Basic. Ready? One. Two. Three. Go! Basic. Good. Now that, we don’t want to be there. So we take another step up and you get to the level that produces what we usually call customer satisfaction. You do what it is that the customer expects. So it comes on time. It’s the right part, but there’s nothing particularly special about it.

Now to say this one cross your arms, please. Just cross your arms. Take the sound of your voice and move it up in your nose. So it goes like this. Expected. One, two, three. Expected. In the old days, we used to say that a satisfied customer… And how did you satisfy a customer? By meeting their expectations. We used to say that a satisfied customer was a loyal customer. Is that true today? Not at all. Customers can swap out pretty quickly. You can have an installed base and just have it swapped out. You may have the installed base, but they’re going to hire somebody else to come in and service it afterwards anyway. Uh-oh. So that’s why expected is in the bottom half. So then if we take another step up, it’s when you serve someone the way they like to be served. The way they hope for, the way they prefer. And as you can see, I call it Desired. Now, here’s the way to say this one. It’s a little morning exercise. Please take your shoulders and roll them back. Roll them back. Here we go. Come on. Your shoulders aren’t broken. Okay, here we go. There you go. Okay, now add the sound. It goes like this. Desired. Here we go. One. Two. Three. Go! Tell your partner how well he did that. So, so, so just to get a little bit of morning wake up, let’s do all of these from the bottom up to where we are. Ready? Down near the bottom. Hands together like handcuffs is Criminal. One step up, Basic. Cross your arms. Expected. Shoulders, Desired.

What’s higher than desired? Well, when you know how someone wants to be served. For example, one person says, don’t call me. I’m always out on the road. I’m busy. I’m in meetings. Send me email. Somebody else says, why did you send me an email? Why didn’t you call me? And that’s just one example. When you know how somebody likes to be served the way they desire, then you can get to thinking about what else could I do that they didn’t ask for, that I didn’t promise. And when they get it, it’s going to be like getting a gift. And they go, “Oh, what a nice surprise.” So the way we say this one is with your hand, you go, “Surprising”. Try it. One, two, three, Surprising. Higher than surprising is astonishing. This is extraordinary. This is incredible. This is the OMG and the word I use for this is unbelievable.