Your continued business is important to us. That's why the AA wanted to charge me more.

£201 for home start, roadside assistance and relay to renew my AA cover seemed a bit steep to me.

So i went online and found the cover for £134 with the RAC.

I called the AA and was told because I was a loyal customer and they would like to keep me that they would see if there were any special online deals at the moment.

£134 was their best prize which I eagerly snapped up.

The more I reflected on it the more i started to get cross. If I hadn't rang up then my loyalty would have been rewarded by paying £65 more for my cover.

Apathy and customer inertia are not reasons for charging me £201. How does that reward loyalty and make me feel valued?.

Give me the best available price at Renewal. This leaves a nasty taste.

Message to the AA treat existing customers fairly and reward me for loyalty with your best price.

John Lewis, where's your passion gone? Your twitter peeps are robots

I found a suit jacket I loved in john Lewis Cardiff but to my disappointment not a matching pair of, what Paul Hogan would call, strides.

The customer representative in menswear, Dan, proactively offered to look online for me. Customer delight ensued. 

He then rang and put me on to the Southampton store to complete my order. From my postcode they were able to find my address (joined up thinking) more customer delight

So delighted was I, that I bought 3 shirts and two ties (that I hadn't planned to) plus the suit that I had wanted to buy.

As a result of Dan's actions one suit sale achieved /rescued £158 plus an additional £100. Happy Chief Financial Officer.

Absolutely delighted,  I decided to tweet my satisfaction to @johnlewisretail. From a reward and recognition perspective I believe  it is important to catch people doing it  right : and to reward, recognise and positively reinforce the right behaviours. So I make a point of commenting and recognising great experiences because it is all so easy to focus only on what went wrong.

I didn’t tweet my delight for egotistical purposes and to get a retweet but moreover to say well done to John Lewis for having employees who live the brand values.

So i was rather non-plussed by the bland reply of  "thank you we'll pass it on". Surely a bit more delight and passion for Dan's actions from the twitter peep would have been in keeping with my expectations and the cultivated brand image.

I now feel that I have been knowingly undersold. Not what I expected from John Lewis. Has something gone wrong in the recruitment of their twitter peeps.

What do you think ?

 

Yes we know customer service is important but

How many organisations are:

•  reminding staff that customer service is important ?
•  reminding staff that customers have a choice and don’t have to do business with us ?
•  rolling out customer programmes repeating the above and more ?

How many colleagues are saying we know, we get it, tell us something we don’t know ? Giving a great customer experience will ensure that customers come back time and time again, which is good for the business and then surely good for staff ?

So here’s the conundrum – why is it when I go into certain stores, I’m met with at best indifference or at worst a sullen and morose face who can't be bothered ?  Clearly there’s a disconnect between the organisation what it says it stands for and its customer facing staff. Why is that ? 

Could it be that ?

• Staff see management or senior leadership modelling behaviours that are far from customer centric. If they can’t be bothered, why should we they think ?
• Customer facing staff are prevented from giving great service because management ask them to do other things that conflict with them giving great service e.g. in retail sometimes stocking shelves and working stock/delivery is prioritised above serving and helping customers.
• Staff feel let down by management, who have made promises and not kept them.
• Staff feel they have no say in the way their daily tasks are done 
• Employees don’t feel listened to or that their ideas are never given air time 
• Colleagues see the organisation making huge profits but personally feel undervalued in terms of their remuneration.
• There are no perceived  career or personal development opportunites.

What do you think the reasons for the lack of engagement amongst customer facing staff are  ? I would love to hear your thoughts

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