Random acts of kindness ideas? You can make great strides in customer service and customer experience improvement through seemingly small but very thoughtful actions. Remember that customer experiences are the new marketing tactics.
Feelings have a critical role in the way customers are influenced.
- David Freemantle
Check out this video on a memorable customer service experience from popular customer service speaker Ross Shafer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T54rQrMleA
Quite an impact for a simple can of Coca-Cola, isn’t it?
Let’s take another example, this one coming from Fred Reichheld, a Fellow at the management consultancy firm Bain & Company:
One of my favorite examples of this happened at Rackspace, the managed hosting and cloud computing company. An employee on the phone with a customer during a marathon troubleshooting session heard the customer tell someone in the background that they were getting hungry.
As the employee tells it:
“So I put them on hold, and I ordered them a pizza. About 30 minutes later, we were still on the phone, and there was a knock on their door. I told them to go answer it because it was pizza! They were so excited.”
Our takeaway
While the cost of the gifts/actions is quite small, the human mind simply cannot refuse the construct of simple reciprocity. Reciprocity can be summed up as our natural inclination to feel grateful for favors and our desire to “pay them back,” no matter how small they are.
The other thing that we consider about reciprocity is that research has shown us that the intentions of the ‘giver’ can affect the perceived value of the gift. This is why random acts of kindness ideas work so well:
Customers perceive the service as a genuine act of kindness rather than as you trying to buy their affection with costly gifts.
So remember, it doesn’t take huge expenses to win customers over!
You can’t over-prepare to continually improve your customers’ experiences.
Remember, customers create the most value for you … when you create the most value for them.
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