Tag Archives: customers

FAB Christmas

Aren’t the holidays about giving?

What’s it like to give the perfect gift or get the perfect gift?  

Growing up in a big family and because it was costly to buy everyone a gift, our family practiced what we called Kris Kringle which went like this:

On Thanksgiving, we would all pull names out of a hat and that was the person you had to get a gift for.  But there was a twist, you had to do nice things for the person for all the days leading up to Christmas. And, you had to do this secretly since your recipient was not supposed to know who had them as a Kris Kringle.  The sneakiness made it all the more exciting as a child.

You would come home from school and your bed might be made. Or there was your favorite candy bar on your pillow at night. Your chore was somehow done without you doing it.   I remember there was also this feeling of kindness in the house which wasn’t always the case with 8 children!

The tradition continued on Christmas Eve when we would guess who was doing the nice things for us.  Some years it was hard because the person didn’t do much!

Our family tradition continued even when we were married and living in different states.  Gifts arrived anonymously in the mail and the feeling and spirit was the same as when we were all living under the same roof.  Guessing became more difficult since the spouses were included but the fun was the same.

I don’t think this is stretch to connect this to good service.  The feeling you get when doing something for someone else is at the heart of kindness and good service (blog June, 2018).  Or, the feeling you and the receiver gets when you surprise them with something they like is also the same with good service.  In fact, this very idea relates to one of our top service concepts: “surprise and delight.

So, this Christmas season, think of surprising someone you know or even a total stranger with a gift or act of kindness.  I promise you will benefit as well as them.

Happy Holidays!

Follow up. Follow Through.

The title of this blog has become a phrase that a few of us at Fabricare use to make sure we handle a customer request or issue at the highest level.  Although following up on something is a basic business practice, we want to have a conversation on how that relates to customer service.

Let’s look at one example of how we use this concept.  

We recently cleaned a nice shirt, and it came out of the cleaning process without a button.  The button was unique to this shirt and replacing it with just another button wouldn’t be the same.  

Often these types of “issues” cause employees to panic as they don’t want to tell the customer of a problem.  But procrastination is the worst thing one can do when you won’t be able to deliver an order on time. Here are the steps on how we handled this situation, and how to handle similar ones.

Step #1 – Contact the customer immediately:
Do this even before you know how you’re going to solve the problem.  Often, people avoid this step and try to solve the problem or get information to give the customer but this just delays communication.  This first step also gives you an opportunity to engage an extra time which is just good service. At this first step, since you don’t really have information yet, you can offer a couple of initial options to the customer along with an apology:

“Dear John, we are reaching out to you because a button is missing on your nice Gucci shirt. We know how a button is an essential part of the garment so we don’t want to replace it with something that is not acceptable to you.  While we research replacing with an exact match, we want to let you know the situation and see if you’d like the shirt back with a replacement button while we reach out to the manufacturer. We want to get your shirt back to you as soon as possible and apologize if this causes a delay.”   

Step #2 – Explore your options immediately:
Reach out to others in your organization for ideas on how to solve the problem.  Reach out to your industry contacts for solutions (e.g. fellow dry cleaners). Reach out to contacts outside your industry for ideas (e.g. retailers and manufacturers).  

Step #3 – Execute your plan:
In this example, we exhausted our resources and had to go directly to Gucci. This meant mailing the shirt to Italy so they could match the button exactly.  We quickly sent the shirt while getting them to commit to an estimated time frame. At this point, use your calendar or some other system to make it impossible for you to forget to follow up.  At Fabricare, we use the weekly clipboard for this as well as the calendar.

Step #4 – Communicate with the customer:
Tell him what you’ve done, the next steps and the estimated time frame. Apologize again for the delay and empathize with him for the fact that clothes are seasonal and he is without his shirt for part of that season.  

Step #5 – Follow up:
Check on the status of the order on the date they gave you in step #4.  Often businesses don’t have the sense of urgency you have with your customer and aren’t as committed to due dates. Check to see if it’s on schedule or going to be delayed.  Follow up with the customer and tell him that you’ve been checking on it and that it’s on time (or delayed). If delayed, get the supplier to commit to another date and then follow up again on that date and repeat communication with your customer.

Step #6 – Follow through with the customer:
We sometimes call this “closing the door” because even though things may seem resolved, they’re not really “good” in the customer’s mind. At this step, we communicate with the customer that the order is complete and we will deliver it immediately.  Finally, at this last step, we again empathize with the fact that we didn’t deliver his order on time and as a result will put a credit on his account as a goodwill gesture.  

Issues come up in every business and most people understand that.  
How you solve these issues will often make the difference between making a customer for life or losing them.  

Kindness

Service is ultimately about being kind.

When I first had the idea of developing a culture of service, I quickly wrote down the top ten “concepts” I learned over my 30 years in service industries.  It wasn’t until my web designer told me there were 11, not 10 concepts that I realized I miscounted. As it turns out, the 11th may be the most important that I had heard while listening to a podcast on customer service.  The 11th Fab Service concept we’ve all heard at some point in our lives “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  Also known as “the golden rule.”  The company featured in the podcast was The Colonel Littleton leather company.  When the founder was asked what’s his secret to his great customer service, he said it’s simple and we have it posted in big letters on our factory floor.  He was talking about the golden rule.

Isn’t it that simple?  Do we really need more advice than that?

For some more ancient wisdom, I like to get advice from the Stoics who had some sound fundamental advice on how to live and behave. I’m most intrigued by the stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius who was the Roman Emperor in the second century.  Here the most powerful man of his day, and possibly ever, believed that joy in life comes from “acts of kindness to other human beings.” He wrote those words in his “Meditations” which was a diary to himself on how to be better.  The Roman emperor writes that the secret to joy is being kind to others? Who was this guy?!

In reading on customer service, I just saw that there are 1,324,570 books available on sales and marketing from Amazon and only 30,198 on customer service.  Is it no surprise that good service in our world today is lacking yet we are bombarded by sales and marketing messages by the second?  

Being service-oriented is an attitude but it also has to be practiced.  

Reading about how to give good service is easy.  Putting it into practice is another story. Reading about being kind is easy.  Being kind when someone is rude to you is difficult.

So how do you act kindly when a customer is demanding or even wrong about a situation?  Like everything else in life – practice! Practice not getting upset when outside of your job.  Practice not judging a situation before hearing the other side. Practice putting yourself in the other person’s shoes.  Maybe he had a bad day or is dealing with some personal issues, etc.

If Marcus was right, the service industry provides ample opportunity to find joy. I think it starts there. Being grateful for the opportunity to serve and being positive about it.  That attitude will certainly result in kindness, which is the ultimate in good service.

“Have It Your Way”

Burger King made that there theme line for many years and I can still remember the jingle from when I was a kid, “…special orders don’t upset us…have it your way at Burger King”. BK was trying to differentiate themselves from McDonalds who had fixed sandwich selections.  For a fast food restaurant, this was a great differentiator. Fast and however you like it.

“I’ve cracked the code” a recently married man exclaimed.  “I say to my wife, guess where I’m taking you for dinner and wherever she guesses I take her there!” This is an example of our second top service tip noted in the first blog- “listen to what the customer wants and give it to them.”  No, your spouse isn’t your customer, but as we’ve said before, we’re about service to all!

I learned this while at the Zingerman’s customer service training class in Ann Arbor Michigan.  To show they practice what they preach, on the second day of the training, I found a Zingerman’s candy bar on my desk.  I was the only one. I didn’t know why and then I realized, the day before, my friend sitting next to me was eating the same candy bar and I said “that looks good.”  The trainer overheard me and placed it on my desk before the class began. Listening to the customer isn’t always direct but sometimes subtle. Sometimes they’re not even asking or know what they want!  

Special instructions or special requests are an important part of our business and for most businesses and they’re also are part of the concept “listen to the customer.”

At a recent meeting with some of our managers, I ordered some lunch with Uber Eats.  I noticed that each of our 4 orders had a special request. One no onions, one special dressing, etc.  I asked our team whether they thought the restaurant (where we frequent often) would get all of orders right.  Vanessa, our GM, said a quick no understanding how difficult this is. I thought, given that the special requests were typed in and part of the Uber Eats app, that they’d get it right.  

Vanessa was correct.  

At Fabricare, we have pop up messages that notifies the customer service team of an individual’s preferences so the team member invoicing the order knows exactly how a customer likes his order.  We also have the customer’s special instructions print on each invoice for everyone to see as the order goes through the whole cleaning process.

Yet despite our sophisticated point-of-sale system and these direct requests, and our concerted effort to get the customer’s order correct, we still fail sometimes.  

Why?  

As I’ve noted in previous posts, writing these blogs helps me solve some issues as well as share our passion for service.  I’m not writing to brag about how good we are. In fact, as I’ve stated in the outset, we have set out primarily to improve our business and be an example of great service for any industry.  So why do we fail to get special request right 100% of the time?

When I think of the concepts in this blog and what we’ve learned, I would start with the idea that it’s not the employee’s fault.  We have learned that mistakes are often rooted in either poor systems or good systems with poor training.

So, I have to ask myself, “do we have a good system for handling special requests?”  Do we train our staff on the system for inputting special requests and then executing them for each and every customer?”

I will answer the above with a “no” and begin the process of focusing on how we can make special requests systematic and then train from it.  Stay tuned……..

 

Gratitude

With the holidays upon us, it’s a good time of year to talk about gratitude.  At Fabricare we just sent out thank you cards to our top customers known as our “Fab Faves.”

What’s a Fab Fave?  

Our Fab Faves are our loyal customers who use us far more than the average customer; who are influencers, and/or have been with Fabricare for many, many years.  These are the customers who really appreciate our service and who simply “get us.”  Whether it’s because of our home delivery service, our Fab App on-demand service or our premium/hand finished services, these are the customers who value us so much that they return every week.  They are like family.  

So, like family, we send them a holiday card.  Each year, we send these out around Thanksgiving because we are truly thankful for their support and loyalty.  Like Pareto’s Law, also known as the 80/20 Rule, these few customers represent the lion’s share of our business, and we are very grateful for them.  As our thank you card says,

Thank you for choosing us.
Thank you for staying with us.
Thank you for making us better.

Customers have so many of choices for everything.  Especially today where everything can be delivered to your doorstep, making business even more competitive.  Once a customer tries your service, they then get to make the decision whether to use it again. Another choice and one not to take for granted.

And yes, we even want to thank them for making us better.  

At Fabricare, we believe in constantly evolving and improving.  Our best customers ask us for special requests that often turn into new ways we do business.  When customers couldn’t make our store hours, we opened on Sundays.  Then we added a 24-hour drop off option for them.  Then, to make it more convenient, we added home delivery & pick up at no additional charge.  To make home delivery even easier, we developed an app for on-demand service with the tap of your finger.  These are just a few examples that were the result of our customers’ requests, which in turn has helped us evolve into a better service provider and, ultimately, a better business.  

So, gratitude has to be a big part of giving Fab Service.  Never take anything for granted, especially your faithful customers.