Like a Virgin: Secrets They Won't Teach You at Business School

Q: At every company where I have worked, sooner or later there are always discussions about the value of customer service: what is the return on investment? Do we spend too much money responding to complaints? How do we measure whether our investments in service affect our business?

And while everyone in the company might agree that customer service is key, it is not seen as a very prestigious area in which to work. How can a company keep its staff motivated to provide great service?

—Christian Sojka, Austria

A: A successful business must never lose its focus on its customers and maintaining its standards. A service culture starts at the top so management must be constantly on guard and ready to respond quickly at the first hint of a problem. Thanks to the Internet, the fallout from a badly handled complaint in London can be a talking point in Australia within seconds. When a service issue rears up, the quality of a company’s response can have a huge impact on its reputation and long-term success.

Everyone on the team needs to be concerned about customer issues, and, in some situations, the effort might even be led by the chief executive. In 2010, extreme weather stranded a plane-load of Virgin America passengers on a snow-bound runway in upstate New York for several hours. The small regional airport’s lack of equipment and manpower was compounded by the abnormally high number of planes on the ground and there was simply no safe way to get the passengers off the plane. Immediately on learning about the situation CEO David Cush jumped into the fray and began calling many of the stranded passengers, offering apologies and vouchers for new flights. His personal intervention made a lasting impression on the unhappy customers and also became a big part of the story picked up by the press.

Great communication and customer service, of course, should not be reserved only for emergencies. Keep up a regular dialogue with your customers and front-end staff and it will serve as an early warning system to alert you if a business starts to go off track. I try to read as many letters, good/bad and indifferent, as I can, to get a sense of where our businesses can be improved. I also get a lot of feedback from my followers on Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook.

While some finance directors might not agree, rather than viewing good customer service as strictly a line cost item, it can in many ways be considered a pseudo-marketing expense. It is, after all, the key element in generating good word of mouth, and as everyone knows word of mouth is the best form of advertising – because not only is it highly believable but it is also free!

A good first step to ratcheting up your customer service would be to encourage everyone on your staff to take an active role in coming up with new ideas and solutions to improve the way your company delivers the goods to your customers. Ask your people to experiment and to offer suggestions, and make sure that they are able to do this without worrying about speaking out of turn or being embarrassed in front of their peers – they must be confident that managers will listen to what they have to say. In Virgin we like to say that there is no such thing as a stupid idea! There may be a lot that simply won’t work, but that’s only after they have been given due consideration. As a manager, I would much rather have the chance to weed through some off-the-wall ideas than fight to maintain the status quo.

Staff at Virgin Active in South Africa, our health club chain, have really taken this approach to heart. The team is challenged to think of ten improvements for every new club we build. One recent staff favourite was the installation in the swimming pools of ladders with six steps rather than the standard four, making it much easier and safer for swimmers to climb in and out of the water. This may seem like an insignificant tweak but the combined effect of many such small changes will make an enormous difference to a customer’s experience of your product or service.

In the long run, sustained attention to service can transform how staffers and customers see your business – not just as a place of work or somewhere to visit but as a community. I was told recently a story about David Liebenberg, who works at another of our South African clubs. It seems that as a regular member drove away from the club, David noticed that a brake light was out on his car. The next time that member arrived for a workout the appropriate replacement light bulb was waiting for him. Now that (pun intended) is what I’d call enlightened customer service!

To encourage and build this kind of corporate culture, managers must reward customer service heroes by celebrating their achievements. Soon afterward, David and his wife were given a free weekend stay at a vacation lodge, and the Virgin Active management team then highlighted David’s feat as an example in internal education programmes.

Customers shouldn’t just think of your business as a place to buy a product or use a service – it should be a fun place to be! Making customer service key to your organisation will keep your employees motivated and your customers happy, ensuring enduring loyalty, business success, and, most importantly, a more fulfilling and meaningful experience for all.