Guest Post: 10 ideas from Micah Solomon's High-Tech, High Touch Customer Service, by business keynote speaker and author Micah Solomon

10 Ideas from High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service by Micah Solomon

{This is a guest article by hospitality writer/reviewer  Josiah Mackenzie.Thanks, Josiah! }

High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service by business keynote speaker, customer service consultant, and bestselling author Micah Solomon is packed with good ideas – here are ten of my favorites after reading it last week:

1. “Technology needs people—and a culture that supports those people’s best efforts.
2. “Expect things to go wrong. Plan for this eventuality, keeping the emotional needs of your customer central.
3. “A well-thought-out problem-resolution process starts by active ‘harvesting’ of complaints—by being eagerly open to receiving input.
4. “For masterful companies, providing something extra is the standard throughout the customer experience. These extras are always the things the more shortsighted among a company’s stakeholders want to cut first, but without them it’s almost impossible to differentiate your service.
5. “Nobody ever shouts out, ‘Yeehaw—I just had an incredibly satisfactory customer service experience.’ But if your service truly anticipates your customers’ desires and wishes, your customers will be well on their way to feeling they can’t, or certainly don’t want to, live without you.
6. “Any business advantage you pride yourself on can be copied by a competitor….The culture of your company is the exception to this rule. Strong company cultures are overwhelmingly knockoff resistant.
7. “Ritz-Carlton’s Three Stages of Service are: 1. Warm welcome 2. Anticipation of and compliance with guest needs 3. Fond farewell
8. “Restaurateur Danny Meyer: the two things people want from the hospitality experience are a sense of acknowledgment and, on returning, a sense of being remembered.
9. “Small Error + Slow Response Time = Colossal PR Disaster. The magnitude of a social media uproar increases disproportionately with the length of your response time.
10. “You need technologically savvy people supporting your social media customer service work, but the people actually helming the operation and responding to customers need to be the same ones who are expert at day-to-day customer service operations and are responsible for interacting with your customers.”

And a bonus tidbit from Cornell’s Center for Hospitality Research: a 250-room hotel will have approximately 5,000 staff-guest interactions per day. As Micah says,  “There’s no way someone in a leadership position can dictate every single one of those five thousand interactions. Rather, a leader’s only chance to get the preponderance of these interactions right is to develop a shared cultural understanding of what needs to be done—and why.”

The book is a great read for anyone looking to design and deliver better customer experiences with the help of technology. See the details here….

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