Like a Virgin

INVEST IN YOUR PEOPLE

How a new company treats its customers is often the deciding factor in whether it will be successful. Great businesses – the ones who have got it right – are masters at turning customers into advocates for their companies. This means that their marketing efforts are supported by customer word-of-mouth and boosted by positive comments on review sites and social media channels – some of the most important influences on people’s buying habits today.

Many of the world’s most successful businesses provide terrific customer service. The adulation some of Apple’s established customers have for the brand and its products is not only a result of the company’s groundbreaking innovations; those products were backed by top-notch customer service. Apple’s front-line people are known to be energetic and knowledgeable, which ensures that few customers ever have a bad experience at an Apple store, and most return to buy the latest device.

The retention of customers is important to any company; after all, it makes more sense to keep the good customers you have than to continually chase new ones. In the travel sector, companies have to take customer service seriously if they hope to succeed, because a wonderful flight, train journey – or soon, we hope, space trip – begins and ends with great service. While a company may be able to find ways to improve the interiors of their planes or trains, perhaps installing more comfortable seats and serving better meals, that expensive technology and luxurious design will count for nothing if customer service is shoddy.

Consider how many times you have complained how badly you were treated by a major company when in reality you were talking about a bad experience you had with single employee of that business. I was recently reminded of how important customer service is for all businesses, whether new or long-established, when I visited Virgin America to officially open their training simulator in Burlingame, just outside San Francisco. At Virgin, where our brand is built on the promise of providing terrific service, our flight crews are our most important asset – without them we would be just another airline. The new $1 million simulator is crucial to our expansion plans.

Not every business needs to build a training facility; indeed, many do not need high-tech solutions. But after reconnecting with the team at Virgin America and seeing how they go about training their new people I came away with three key lessons.

All airlines must ensure that everyone, from pilots to ground workers, has rigorous operational, safety, security and even medical training, but at Virgin America that’s just the beginning. Our staff must also complete a broader immersion in brand values through a two-day annual ‘brand bath’, which the company calls Refresh. At those retreats, they focus on improving customer experience across the airline.

The flight crews are brought together with colleagues from different departments and trained in conflict resolution, hospitality and emotional intelligence training. The programme is designed to help employees truly to understand the customer’s perspective; to resolve issues and not push them up the chain.

As an entrepreneur, how can you bring your team together to solve problems and build their trust in each other? At a small business or start-up, this might be accomplished with a low-tech solution, like starting a tradition of having lunch together every Friday and reviewing how the week went.

At Refresh, David Cush, the CEO of Virgin America, often holds question and answer sessions with employees to ensure that he personally addresses their concerns. This is the first step in building bonds between front-line staff and senior managers, which helps to create easy and open communications.

Executives and managers who want to learn how to improve their operations must step away from their desks and get to know their staff. If your company is too big for regular meetings, spending a few hours handling customer complaints yourself or working on the factory floor will help you to understand what’s really going on.

The training at Refresh teaches Virgin America employees to learn how to solve problems on their own – a key to great customer service. This is an unusual approach; most businesses impose restrictions on their staff in terms of the types of problems employees can solve and the authority they have to do so. But our experience shows that the best solution is to provide people with the skills and confidence they need to deal with problems on their own, without sticking to a script or following a flow chart (aka ‘passing the buck’).

Most often, the missing ingredient is information. If, in your meetings with your staff or during your time on the factory floor, you notice that employees are groping for answers, it is time to take action. Remove limits on access to databases; invest in new information technology; do whatever it takes to make sure that they can seize the initiative on their own.

In tough times, when your competitors are cutting costs, it might be tempting to follow their lead and cut back on customer service. But remember that slashing prices is not the only solution. Every customer is valuable; in the long term, a thriving company is built on relationships, not just the bottom line.