There is one other item I would like to include from the class "Delivering A Great Experience" - the online class I took through my job at the Y. It has to do with Ron Kaufman's 'Six Levels of Service.' Apparently this comes from Kaufman's book 'Uplifting Service: The Proven Path to Delighting Your Customers, Colleagues, and Everyone Else.'
The Six Levels of Service - shown above - are: Criminal (not necessarily illegal, but really bad service), Basic, Expected, Desired, Surprising, and Unbelievable. The term "service" is defined as: "Taking action that creates value for someone else."
The idea is for your company and employees to strive to offer service moving UP the steps. Basic is fine, but it's better if you can offer Surprisingly good service! The problem, though, is that this is a 'down' escalator. What was surprising today, will eventually be desired, then expected, and finally just basic. So we need to continually be working toward offering better and better service.
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When I went through the class I really bought into these levels of service. I love hearing stories about customer service that is over-the-top. For several days it really inspired me to go out of my way to try to offer the best customer service I could at my job.
Things started drifting downward, then, when my boss said and did a couple very 'un-inspiring' things. Then, today, I started to think, "You know, maybe this is what's wrong with everybody... or at least America/Capitalism/our consumerist society. Everything always has to be better, bigger, newer and more exciting..." Pretty soon I was ready to just give up.
I don't know, maybe this is discussed in the book, but it's kind of left me wondering why it has to be better, and bigger, and newer, and so on? Why can't we learn, as a society, to be satisfied with simple good customer service? Does anyone even know what good customer service is anymore? Are we so used to bad service that is seems pointless to expect anything else?
So... yeah... whatever. I really want to be inspired. It's hard though... isn't it? Maybe it's just me.
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