We Want You to Have Fabled Service

By Ignacio del Rio, Branch Manager, Ceitronics

Almost every business gives lip service to importance of the customer, but implementing outstanding customer service is much harder than saying you believe in it. One of our goals at Ceitronics is to provide fabled service—service that delights you and goes beyond your expectations as our customer. We are on that journey—we don’t always reach the destination, but we are trying.

I was first introduced to the idea of fabled service a few years ago in a workshop given by Betsy Sanders, a former Nordstrom vice president who became a legend helping to create that company’s reputation for exemplary customer service. She’s certainly been a big influence on my way of thinking.

How do you create fabled service? It’s hard. Customers expect—and deserve—good service. To provide that is our goal every day at Ceitronics. But fabled service, according to Betsy Sanders, is when you exceed a customer’s expectations—when you give service that is so extraordinary that it raises the bar, and goes way beyond the norm. After they receive such service, customers talk about it to others. Employees then try to live up to it.

Fabled service starts with the idea of ordinary people doing ordinary things in extraordinary ways. It’s having the desire to make every customer interaction one that rises to the level of excellence. It’s realizing that every interaction a customer has with Ceitronics, no matter how insignificant, is “a moment of truth.” During a moment of truth, if we fail a customer in a little thing, the customer immediately makes the assumption that we may fail in a bigger thing. The moment of truth demands that every part of our facility, every employee and every process that we carry out, reflects the level of respect that Ceitronics has for its customers.

A moment of truth can be as simple as a receptionist handling phone calls efficiently, or as complicated as drafting a well-reasoned proposal. It means that we must turn in a pristine performance from beginning to end. “Little” things become everything—Is our waiting room comfortable? Was our parking lot clean? Are our engineering drawings totally accurate? Did our project manager cheerfully and quickly solve the problem? Was our field technician polite, courteous and helpful? Was our wiring impeccable—bundled, organized, and labeled? Were we on time? Were we good communicators?

Another of Betsy Sanders’ ideas that I subscribe to is that there are only two kinds of employees in a company: front-line people who directly take care of the customers, and everybody else, who support the front-line people. At Ceitronics, as you can see from the pyramid, our project managers and field technicians are the front-line people. Everyone else in the organization, including myself, exists to give them the support they need so that they can take care of our customers. Every management role is a support role.

Ultimately, the job of everyone in our company is to support the customer. I usually can’t be out with the customers, and it’s virtually impossible to oversee service as it occurs during “moments of truth.” I have to give the front-line people the tools and resources and support they need to take care of customers. We are really fixated on that idea here at Ceitronics. Our front-line people have to be empowered to do the job. Nordstrom had one rule for its employees: Use your good judgment in all situations. Ceitronics tells its employees, “It’s OK to use creativity to solve customer problems. You can go outside the box.”

Everyone in the field has a special cell phone that includes a closed circuit walkie-talkie. If any of our project managers or field technicians have a problem on the job, they can immediately talk with someone else out in the field—no matter where they are—about how to solve it. We have customer service survey cards that we give to all of our clients at various intervals on a job. We make adjustments based on the feedback from the cards. Our employees get paid time off when they get ANY feedback from customers, either good or bad. We want to know how we are doing.

Betsy Sanders recently conducted a half-day workshop here at Ceitronics for our staff, to challenge us to develop customer service to our fullest. We all went away inspired, more determined than ever to make every customer interaction “a moment of truth.” Fabled service presents a goal that is always moving ahead and rarely will be attained—but it gives everyone here at Ceitronics a rich sense of the possibilities.