Examples of Employee Empowerment: What is the Payoff?

Is achieving a remarkable customer service top priority for your business? If so, you should be looking for a better combination of examples of employee empowerment and trust. There are many examples of great customer service companies: Wegman’s, Ritz-Carlton, JetBlue, Disney, and Zappos, just to name a few.

Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.

– Peter Drucker

Here is the deal…

Let’s examine some great examples of employee empowerment from a few businesses as a way to best illustrate what we mean.

PF CHANG’S RESTAURANT

My wife and I stopped by our local P.F. Chang’s Restaurant for lunch recently. It was a beautiful Florida spring day, and since it was mid-week the restaurant wasn’t too busy, so we decided to sit on the patio.

Now …

When we asked the hostess to be seated outside, we were told that it would be 15-20 minutes before we could be seated. However, we could be seated immediately if we wanted to sit inside.

When I asked why we couldn’t be seated immediately … since about half the tables were open, we were told that there wasn’t enough staff scheduled on the patio to serve more tables.

This service staff did not have the decision-making authority for creating good customer experiences!

Here is the kicker … my perspective:

If there were enough staff in the restaurant to serve the total number of customers, then why couldn’t they simply reallocate some of the inside staff to serve outside on the patio?

If the hostess was delegated the decision-making authority to take the initiative to make every customer experience a good to great one, then perhaps this might have resulted differently?

MARRIOTT

I stayed in a new Marriott Courtyard hotel a while back. The situation was that it was recently opened and should not have been opened until the problems were worked out and management was ready.

This is crazy … so many problems, and it started as a significant customer failure.

But not only did the staff take care of the issues for me, the manager, once he got me back to ‘even,’ continued to build the relationship with me. His techniques included exceptional, personalized service … using my name in face-to-face greetings, and continued follow-up and attention to detail.

Improve Employee Motivation: How to Completely Change Techniques

He made me believe I was the best customer he had ever had. Not only did I forget about the earlier problems, but I was feeling great about the entire three-day experience.

Remember …

Service recovery requires remaining with your customer, through follow-up, and through unexpected contact well after the issue.

All customers deserve our best service … but the ones that have a negative experience represent an opportunity to define a business.

Such an opportunity represents an opportunity to turn customers into enthusiasts and maybe even advocates. And that requires going beyond the ‘break-even’ point for that customer.

Research has shown time and time again that customers who reported a problem and were delighted with the outcome have higher satisfaction with the business than the ones who never experienced a problem.

So these results show the importance of turning customer failure into full customer recovery.

Why should any company not want to seize such an opportunity?

Try it … the next time you have a customer who has had a back experience with your business. You will be amazed at the results.

ZAPPOS

Here another great example …

of how Zappos employees are empowered to use the element of surprise with customers so effectively. Note this story is told by a customer:

When I came home this last time, I had an email from Zappos asking about the (returned) shoes, since they hadn’t received them.

I was just back and not ready to deal with that, so I replied that my mom had died but that I’d send the shoes as soon as I could. They emailed back that they had arranged with UPS to pick up the shoes, so I wouldn’t have to take the time to do it myself.

I was so touched. That’s going against corporate policy.

Yesterday, when I came home from town, a florist delivery man was just leaving. It was a beautiful arrangement in a basket with white lilies and roses and carnations.

Big and lush and fragrant, I opened the card, and it was from Zappos. I burst into tears. I’m a sucker for kindness, and if that isn’t one of the nicest things I’ve ever had to happen to me, I don’t know what is.

Those kinds of examples are justified by almost any cost, and the cost hit Zappos takes by doing this is paid back multiple times over by the customer loyalty they generate from making people happy.

Here is the deal …

… a company’s brand communicates every time an empowered employee takes the initiative on behalf of a customer.

JetBlue

Now … this is a story of JetBlue’s customer experience strategy built on its employee empowerment culture. I experienced it first hand and was duly impressed.

The story started a while back while I was sitting on the runway in Orlando as my homeward-bound Jet Blue flight was about to taxi toward takeoff.

Like just about every other flight that hadn’t already been canceled that day on the Eastern seaboard, ours was a couple of hours late departing. The lead flight attendant gets on the P.A. system and says something very close to:

Ladies and Gentlemen, we know we’re late taking off, and even though it’s the weather and not something we caused, we’re going to comp everybody movies for this flight.

We know you’ve all had a long day and we want it to end with something nice and relaxing.

And for those of you who were supposed to be on the Continental flight and ended up here, we don’t ever want you to go back.

The mood on the flight which could have been a rather dreary late evening affair took an immediate upswing.

People joked and smiled and made eye contact. They were noticeably brighter and calmer as the flight progressed.

What enabled this relatively small act of kindness and allowed it to become a major brand statement?

Midflight, I went to the back of the plane and asked. I wanted to know the policy that allowed a flight attendant to make such a call.

We’re allowed to make almost any decision, the flight attendant explained, as long as we can justify it by one of the airline’s five core values: Safety, Caring, Integrity, Fun or Passion.

If we can tie doing something back to one of these principles, the decision is going to be supported by the company.

What JetBlue is saying to its employees … if you act in support of the values that matter to our business, we want you to take risks to care for our customers.

This is a very simple concept, eh? But how many of us put such a thing into practice with our people?

Here is the bottom line …

Sit down today with your employees and do what Jet Blue did. Start building your employee empowerment culture today.

Create a culture of empowerment based on the values that YOUR business is built on.

We must revive the feeling of empowerment and trust in our employees. When we can empower them to act in the best interest of customers, reflecting the goals of the business, and trust them, then they are accountable and act responsibly.

When this happens – we create an environment that propels a sense of community that is trustworthy and where employees thrive and love their jobs all the more.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE DESIGN — Creative great customer experience design.

So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.

It’s up to you to keep improving your customer attention and focus. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.

When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.

Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?

Do you have a lesson about making your customer focus better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add to the section below?

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.

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Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

How JetBlue Turns Customers into Brand Advocates

A while back I was sitting on the runway in Orlando as my homeward-bound Jet Blue flight was about to taxi toward takeoff. Like just about every other flight that hadn’t already been canceled that day on the Eastern seaboard, ours was a couple of hours late departing. A good way of how JetBlue turns customers into brand advocates.

Customer retention efforts are most effective when they’re proactive, not reactive. In other words, it’s much easier to set customers up for success than to frantically rescue at-risk customers later on. Proactive customer support involves providing your customer with the necessary resources to succeed right from day one, not just when things go wrong. Here is an example,

How to create a brand advocate.

The lead flight attendant gets on the P.A. system and says something very close to:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, we know we’re late taking off, and even though it’s the weather and not something we caused, we’re going to comp everybody’s movies for this flight. We know you’ve all had a long day and we want it to end with something nice and relaxing. And for those of you who were supposed to be on the Continental flight and ended up here, we don’t ever want you to go back.”

Check out our thoughts on customer focus.

Brand advocates social media.

The mood on the flight — which could have been a rather dreary late evening affair — took an immediate upswing. People joked and smiled and made eye contact. They were noticeably brighter and calmer as the flight progressed. And I’m writing about the experience today and several thousand business travelers are reading about it.

What enabled this relatively small act of kindness and allowed it to become a major brand statement? Midflight, I went to the back of the plane and asked. I wanted to know the policy that allowed a flight attendant to make such a call.

“We’re allowed to make almost any decision,” the flight attendant explained, “as long as we can justify it on the basis of one of the airline’s five core values: Safety, Caring, Integrity, Fun or Passion. If we can tie doing something back to one of these principles, the decision is going to be supported by the company.”

Always care for our customers.

What JetBlue is saying to its employees … “If you act in support of the values that really matter to our business, we want you to take risks in order to care for our customers.”

This is a very simple concept, eh? But how many of us put such a thing into practice with our own people. Sit down today with your employees and do what Jet Blue did.

Create a culture of empowerment based on the values that your business is built on.

It is easy,

Need some help in building better customer trust from your customer experiences? Creative ideas to help grow your customer relationships?

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas to make your customer experiences better.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find him on Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

Check out these additional articles on customer insights from our library:

Should a Business Send Customers to Competitors?

An Actionable Approach to Target Market Segmentation

Examples of Customer Experience: 4 Awesome Stories to Share

The key is to set realistic customer expectations, and then not to just meet them, but to exceed them— preferably in unexpected and helpful ways.—Richard Branson. How many of you learn from examples of customer experience for elements of your marketing?

Consider this … if done well; don’t you think both could create things for customers to talk about? And therefore be enablers for your word of mouth marketing strategy. Let me share a story with you as an example

Recently I took my sister to our local credit union branch office to take care of three different transactions: getting a credit card reactivated, depositing coins, and ordering checks.

The coins required a visit, but the other two transactions could have been done by phone or maybe online. I hoped one visit to a local branch would be easier, but deep down I feared it wouldn’t.

Frankly, I expected we’d be shuttled around the branch to different people to take care of each transaction. Or, worse, told to use the phone to call the credit card support number directly.

Related: 10 Ways to Employ Customer Experience for Influence

Instead, it turned into a quick and extraordinary experience. Because when we entered the branch, a banker warmly greeted us and asked how he could help. After learning what my sister needed to do, he invited us to sit down at his desk.

He then took care of everything: Called the credit card division of Wells Fargo to activate a credit card, took the coins to the teller to make the deposit and returned with a receipt, and ordered new checks. I call attention to the fact that the banker didn’t know us or how much money we had with the credit union

My perspective:

So you see how these events represent a great way to market to customers, don’t you? Think I would talk about my experience with my friends and neighbors? Most definitely.

Let me share 3 more personal experiences, 2 very good and 1 not so good:

Examples of customer experience … PF CHANG’S RESTAURANT

My wife and I stopped by our local P.F. Chang’s Restaurant for lunch last month. It was a beautiful Florida spring day and since it was mid-week the restaurant wasn’t too busy, so we decided to sit on the patio.

However, when we asked the hostess to be seated outside we were told that it would be 15-20 minutes before we could be seated. However, we could be seated immediately if we wanted to sit inside.

When I asked why we couldn’t be seated immediately … since about half the tables were open, we were told that there wasn’t enough staff scheduled on the patio to serve more tables.

Clearly, this service staff did not have the decision making authority for creating good customer experiences!

My perspective:

If there were enough staff in the restaurant to serve the total number of customers, then why couldn’t they simply reallocate some of the inside staff to serve outside on the patio?

If the hostess was delegated the decision making authority to take initiative to make every customer experience a good to great one, then perhaps this might have resulted differently?

MARRIOTT

I stayed in a new Marriott Courtyard hotel a while back. The situation was that it was recently opened and should not have been opened until the problems were worked out and management was ready.

There were many problems, believe me, and it started as a significant customer failure.

But not only did the staff take care of the issues for me, the manager, once he got me back to ‘even’, continued to build the relationship with me. His techniques included exceptional, personalized service … using my name in face-to-face greetings, and continued follow-up and attention to detail.

He actually made me believe I was the best customer he had ever had. Not only did I forget about the earlier problems, but I was feeling great about the entire three-day experience.

Service recovery requires remaining with your customer, through follow-up, and through unexpected contact well after the issue. All customers deserve our best service … but the ones that have a negative experience represent an opportunity to define a business.

Such an opportunity represents an opportunity to turn customers into enthusiasts and maybe even advocates. And that requires going beyond the ‘break-even’ point for that customer.

Research has shown time and time again that customers who reported a problem and were delighted with the outcome have higher satisfaction with the business than the ones who never experienced a problem. So these results show the importance of turning customer failure into full customer recovery.

My perspective:

Why should any company not want to seize such an opportunity?

Try it … the next time you have a customer who has had a back experience with your business. You will be amazed at the results.

Examples of customer experience … JetBlue

This is a story of JetBlue’s customer experience strategy built on its employee empowerment culture. I experienced it first hand and was duly impressed.

The story started a while back while I was sitting on the runway in Orlando as my homeward-bound Jet Blue flight was about to taxi toward takeoff. Like just about every other flight that hadn’t already been canceled that day on the Eastern seaboard, ours was a couple of hours late departing.

The lead flight attendant gets on the P.A. system and says something very close to:

Ladies and Gentlemen, we know we’re late taking off, and even though it’s the weather and not something we caused, we’re going to comp everybody movies for this flight. We know you’ve all had a long day and we want it to end with something nice and relaxing.

And for those of you who were supposed to be on the Continental flight and ended up here, we don’t ever want you to go back.

The mood on the flight which could have been a rather dreary late evening affair took an immediate upswing. People joked and smiled and made eye contact.

They were noticeably brighter and calmer as the flight progressed. And I’m writing about the experience today and business travelers are reading about it.

What enabled this relatively small act of kindness and allowed it to become a major brand statement? Midflight, I went to the back of the plane and asked. I wanted to know the policy that allowed a flight attendant to make such a call.

We’re allowed to make almost any decision, the flight attendant explained, as long as we can justify it on the basis of one of the airline’s five core values: Safety, Caring, Integrity, Fun or Passion.

If we can tie doing something back to one of these principles, the decision is going to be supported by the company.

My perspective:

What JetBlue is saying to its employees … if you act in support of the values that really matter to our business, we want you to take risks in order to care for our customers.

The bottom line

This is a very simple concept, eh? But how many of us put such a thing into practice with our own people? Sit down today with your employees and do what Jet Blue did. Start building your employee empowerment culture today.

Need some help in building better customer trust from your customer experiences? Creative ideas to help grow your customer relationships?

Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job and pay for results.

Call Mike at 607-725-8240.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas to make your customer experiences better.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.

Client Satisfaction …10 Secrets to Improve Customer Experience

Customer Orientation … the Worst Customer Experience Mistakes

Customer Experience Optimization … 10 Employee Actions that Lower It

Building a Customer Experience Strategy for Business Success

Random Acts of Kindness for Customer Experience Improvements

10 Ways to Employ Customer Experience for Influence

Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.

6 Favorite Brands and Why I Like Them So Much

Have you ever defined your favorite brands and questioned why they are favorites? It is a key exercise we often use with our clients. This exercise helps to evaluate what should be the heart of your company’s strong brand identity by examining the best of the best.

Check out our thoughts on creative marketing.

We like to quote from the book Funky Business Forever when we discuss brands or branding with our clients:

The ‘surplus society’ has a surplus of similar companies, employing similar people, with similar educational backgrounds, coming up with similar ideas, producing similar things, with similar prices and similar quality.

It is not easy being different, is it? But all the more important.

Before we continue, let me ask you a question.

What works best for branding design in your business? We would love to hear what it was. Would you do us a favor and post it in the comments section below? Be the one who starts a converstion.

With the advent of the Internet, the number of marketing options available to both budding and experienced entrepreneurs has become staggering.

Here is a short video on brands that millennials like.

The key to a good brand is being different. There are 4 critical things to remember about brands and branding:

Every business has a brand, whether explicitly defined or not. The important question to be answered is how good is the brand?

Brands deliver emotional connection to a business’ products and services. Most purchase decisions have critical emotional components.

Your brand represents a collection of your customers’ perceptions of how they see you, how they feel about you, and what they say about you.

Your brand communicates every time it touches a customer. This makes you, as a marketer, responsible for this communication ‘moment of truth’.

Most brands sell products or services. GM sells cars. Borders sells books. Real estate brokerages sell homes. The best brands, however, satisfy desire to get at the emotional heart of the matter.

Here is a short video that will refresh a brand for you:

Beginning Graphic Design: Branding & Identity

Let’s review my favorite 6 brands and why they stand out as the best for me. This is a great way to appreciate the importance of branding and emotion.

KLM Airline

I prefer brands that are most innovative and very eager to try lots new and different ideas. And not afraid of a failure or two. KLM Airlines certainly deserves to be this camp. Real social media marketing innovators. They frequently come up when marketers are discussing the best in social media marketing.

They have been successfully executing their social media marketing plan for over 4 years, and their strategies has played a key role in their marketing and customer engagement.

If you’re not familiar with KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, known by its initials KLM, it is the flag carrier airline of the Netherlands. With headquarters is in Amsterdam, KLM operates scheduled passenger and cargo services to more than 90 destinations worldwide. It is the oldest airline in the world, still operating under its original name (Founded in 1919).

Their brand identity is built around a culture of innovativeness. Over the past four years, KLM has launched a number of social campaigns – some big, some small. They had a few failures along with great successes but they keep exploring and testing what consumers like the best.

LEGO

The Lego brand is another of my favorite brands I like best for their ability to adapt and innovate by trying lots of things. They teach us many things through their stories, storytelling, and messages. The words and images they use, then, reflect who they are, what makes them distinctive, and the brand values they want to represent to all their stakeholder communities. The brand represents their ability to influence how people see them, feel about them, and talk to others about the brand.

It is human and emotion, and at that critical time when a customer engages with one of their employees or someone in their channel, or even one of their products, their brand comes alive with engagement.

We are big fans of the Lego Company and its products. The LEGO brand is more than simply a familiar logo. It is the expectations that people have of the company towards its products and services, and the accountability that the LEGO Group feels towards the world around it.

When Lego tells its creative branding story , the Lego Brand experience teaches us to create a distinctive voice with unique words, feelings, emotion and images … dare to create differences with your communities.

JetBlue

I like this brand for creating unique selling propositions that have real value for me. They are my favorite airline, no question. JetBlue’s brand success centers on the achievable – the simple things – they knew would make a difference for their passengers. This set the stage for direct TV and XM radio, the provision of first-class seats to everyone, more legroom, great snacks and high end service at lower end pricing. No other airline offers this unique set of value propositions. They are different and their brand stands out because of those differences.

Simple. Attainable. Targeted. They delivered.

Zappos

Zappos brand is the top of my list for their awesome culture from the top to bottom of their company. They don’t sell shoes. They deliver that extra dose of love we all need from time to time. There is no secret here. Zappos became Zappos because of the fanatical customer support it offered. That, is the company’s brand.

As Tony Hsieh, the Zappos CEO, puts it,

Back in 2003, we thought of ourselves as a shoe company that offered great service. Today, we really think of the Zappos brand as about great service, and we just happen to sell shoes.

Starbucks

A favorite of mine for their aggressive innovation style and the way they engage customers. Starbucks brings us a space to enjoy the products they sell, rather than a just a product.

Some would say that it fills a psychological need that other companies have not had to do in quite the same way. The emotion is all about uplifting moments and daily ritual. Stimulating all our senses.

Disney

The Disney brand is a huge favorite because I love their products so much. Magical, fantasy entertainment. Being bringers of joy, affirmers of the good in each of us, to be — in subtle ways — teachers. To speak, as Walt once put it:

not to children but to the child in each of us.

Disney’s brand does this through great storytelling, by giving guests a few hours in another world where their cares can be momentarily put aside and by creating memories that will remain with them forever. I love living in their world of imagination.

While there are many brands I like very much, these 6 qualify as my favorites. So what stands out the most for your favorite brands?

Need some help in capturing more customers from your branding design strategies? Such as creative branding ideas to help the differentiation with potential customers?

Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.

Call Mike at 607-725-8240.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?

Do you have a lesson about making your brand marketing better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.

New York Yankees … 11 Awesome Lessons From Yankees Brand

The CVS Rebranding Strategy: a Case Study

Building a Brand … A How-to Guide for Small Business

Brand Management … 12 Ways to Humanize the Brand to Build Trust

Walmart E-commerce Strategy … 6 Reasons Why It Won’t Beat Amazon

Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.

Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.

– Peter Drucker

Here is the deal…

Let’s examine some great examples of employee empowerment from a few businesses as a way to best illustrate what we mean.

My wife and I stopped by our local P.F. Chang’s Restaurant for lunch recently. It was a beautiful Florida spring day, and since it was mid-week the restaurant wasn’t too busy, so we decided to sit on the patio.

Now …

When we asked the hostess to be seated outside, we were told that it would be 15-20 minutes before we could be seated. However, we could be seated immediately if we wanted to sit inside.

When I asked why we couldn’t be seated immediately … since about half the tables were open, we were told that there wasn’t enough staff scheduled on the patio to serve more tables.

This service staff did not have the decision-making authority for creating good customer experiences!

Here is the kicker … my perspective:

If there were enough staff in the restaurant to serve the total number of customers, then why couldn’t they simply reallocate some of the inside staff to serve outside on the patio?

If the hostess was delegated the decision-making authority to take the initiative to make every customer experience a good to great one, then perhaps this might have resulted differently?

I stayed in a new Marriott Courtyard hotel a while back. The situation was that it was recently opened and should not have been opened until the problems were worked out and management was ready.

This is crazy … so many problems, and it started as a significant customer failure.

He made me believe I was the best customer he had ever had. Not only did I forget about the earlier problems, but I was feeling great about the entire three-day experience.

Remember …

Service recovery requires remaining with your customer, through follow-up, and through unexpected contact well after the issue.

All customers deserve our best service … but the ones that have a negative experience represent an opportunity to define a business.

Such an opportunity represents an opportunity to turn customers into enthusiasts and maybe even advocates. And that requires going beyond the ‘break-even’ point for that customer.

Research has shown time and time again that customers who reported a problem and were delighted with the outcome have higher satisfaction with the business than the ones who never experienced a problem.

So these results show the importance of turning customer failure into full customer recovery.

Why should any company not want to seize such an opportunity?

Try it … the next time you have a customer who has had a back experience with your business. You will be amazed at the results.

Here another great example …

of how Zappos employees are empowered to use the element of surprise with customers so effectively. Note this story is told by a customer:

When I came home this last time, I had an email from Zappos asking about the (returned) shoes, since they hadn’t received them.

I was just back and not ready to deal with that, so I replied that my mom had died but that I’d send the shoes as soon as I could. They emailed back that they had arranged with UPS to pick up the shoes, so I wouldn’t have to take the time to do it myself.

I was so touched. That’s going against corporate policy.

Yesterday, when I came home from town, a florist delivery man was just leaving. It was a beautiful arrangement in a basket with white lilies and roses and carnations.

Big and lush and fragrant, I opened the card, and it was from Zappos. I burst into tears. I’m a sucker for kindness, and if that isn’t one of the nicest things I’ve ever had to happen to me, I don’t know what is.

Those kinds of examples are justified by almost any cost, and the cost hit Zappos takes by doing this is paid back multiple times over by the customer loyalty they generate from making people happy.

Here is the deal …

… a company’s brand communicates every time an empowered employee takes the initiative on behalf of a customer.

JetBlue

Now … this is a story of JetBlue’s customer experience strategy built on its employee empowerment culture. I experienced it first hand and was duly impressed.

The story started a while back while I was sitting on the runway in Orlando as my homeward-bound Jet Blue flight was about to taxi toward takeoff.

Like just about every other flight that hadn’t already been canceled that day on the Eastern seaboard, ours was a couple of hours late departing. The lead flight attendant gets on the P.A. system and says something very close to:

Ladies and Gentlemen, we know we’re late taking off, and even though it’s the weather and not something we caused, we’re going to comp everybody movies for this flight.

We know you’ve all had a long day and we want it to end with something nice and relaxing.

And for those of you who were supposed to be on the Continental flight and ended up here, we don’t ever want you to go back.

The mood on the flight which could have been a rather dreary late evening affair took an immediate upswing.

People joked and smiled and made eye contact. They were noticeably brighter and calmer as the flight progressed.

What enabled this relatively small act of kindness and allowed it to become a major brand statement?

Midflight, I went to the back of the plane and asked. I wanted to know the policy that allowed a flight attendant to make such a call.

We’re allowed to make almost any decision, the flight attendant explained, as long as we can justify it by one of the airline’s five core values: Safety, Caring, Integrity, Fun or Passion.

If we can tie doing something back to one of these principles, the decision is going to be supported by the company.

What JetBlue is saying to its employees … if you act in support of the values that matter to our business, we want you to take risks to care for our customers.

This is a very simple concept, eh? But how many of us put such a thing into practice with our people?

Here is the bottom line …

Sit down today with your employees and do what Jet Blue did. Start building your employee empowerment culture today.

Create a culture of empowerment based on the values that YOUR business is built on.

We must revive the feeling of empowerment and trust in our employees. When we can empower them to act in the best interest of customers, reflecting the goals of the business, and trust them, then they are accountable and act responsibly.

When this happens – we create an environment that propels a sense of community that is trustworthy and where employees thrive and love their jobs all the more.

So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.

It’s up to you to keep improving your customer attention and focus. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.

When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.

Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?

Do you have a lesson about making your customer focus better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add to the section below?

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.

More reading on learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:

9 Things to Know About Creative Visual Design Content

8 Presenter Mistakes That Are Rarely Made Twice

Know These Great Secrets of Collaboration and Co-Creation

How Good Is Your Learning from Failure?

Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

The lead flight attendant gets on the P.A. system and says something very close to:

Check out our thoughts on customer focus.

What enabled this relatively small act of kindness and allowed it to become a major brand statement? Midflight, I went to the back of the plane and asked. I wanted to know the policy that allowed a flight attendant to make such a call.

What JetBlue is saying to its employees … “If you act in support of the values that really matter to our business, we want you to take risks in order to care for our customers.”

This is a very simple concept, eh? But how many of us put such a thing into practice with our own people. Sit down today with your employees and do what Jet Blue did.

Create a culture of empowerment based on the values that your business is built on.

Need some help in building better customer trust from your customer experiences? Creative ideas to help grow your customer relationships?

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas to make your customer experiences better.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find him on Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

And for those of you who were supposed to be on the Continental flight and ended up here, we don’t ever want you to go back.

What JetBlue is saying to its employees … if you act in support of the values that matter to our business, we want you to take risks to care for our customers.