March 14, 2019 – Customer Experience Strategist Jill Raff and Brand Positive Sean Pillot de Chenecey

March 14, 2019 – Customer Experience Strategist Jill Raff and Brand Positive Sean Pillot de Chenecey

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Jill Raff – Customer Experience Strategist – Read interview highlights here

Create a culture in your company that shows that your employees
are important to you. They are as important as the customers. If you
take care of the employees, they in turn will take care of the customers.

Jill Raff is famous for her 7 Step Process to a Customer Experience Transformation. She knows how delivering outstanding CX is a Winning Trifecta: win for the owner, employee and the customer. And also for the communities we live in and experience daily. She developed her customer-first philosophy while growing up in the “McDonald’s family.” In 1959, her parents opened store #150 in Ocala, Florida. While her first job there was answering the phone at the age of 7, Jill worked her way through every station in the restaurant. She had the opportunity to experience first-hand the results of founder Ray Kroc’s philosophy of QSC & V (Quality, Service, Cleanliness & Value. Jill has worked in several different industries globally, including real estate, where she developed thriving businesses.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey – Founder of Brand Positive and author of The Post-Truth Business: How to Rebuild Brand Authenticity in a Distrusting World

Digital advertising has to clean up its act. P&G reduced their ad spend
by $100 million and it didn’t have the slightest negative impact.
Something serious is awry. 

Sean Pilot de Chenecey is an independent consultant, author, and public speaker. He specializes in trend, innovation and strategy projects; combining cultural/social and brand/product research about the ‘Real Now & Potential Next.’ He’s interested in the problems facing brands, particularly when they find themselves disconnected from either their authentic roots, emerging trend issues or next-generation innovation. Sean has conducted a mixture of sector-expert interviews alongside ethnographic fieldwork in the EU, Asia, Middle East, Africa, Russia, and America; for clients ranging from multi-nationals to NGO’s. His best-selling book ‘The Post-Truth Business’ was published before the US Mid-term Elections and was the first business title to connect vital issues such as trust, disinformation, transparency, privacy, empathy, ethics and reputation capital. He has given speeches at marketing conferences & cutting-edge events for over a decade.

Jill Raff Highlights
How to have great customer service

I was raised on McDonald’s. My father was one of the first franchisees. I love it. Something in the smell satisfies my soul.

I lost my dad 24 years ago. Now, I’ll go into a store and I’ll see garbage strewn about. Every time I see that stuff, I think, ‘Oh my Lord, Dad would be having a fit right now.’ So it saddens me to see the way a lot of McDonalds’s are run now.

I was at a Chick-fil-A-a in Austin, Texas and the line was all the way out the door. It was lunchtime, and I saw the owner at the counter with two women managers and I went up and said to him, ‘You know, it makes me happy to see you here, because…’ and I told him the story about my dad. I said, ‘You know if this were my dad’s store, he would be you right now. He would be behind the counter or at the cash register. He’d be on the fries station.’

I’ve been reaching out to a lot of McDonald’s owner operators, because it breaks my heart. I know the values, the philosophy that Ray Kroc taught. I remember hearing what the company was built on. So I’ve been trying to find people to bring McDonald’s back to what it should be.

Seven Steps to Great Customer Service

The first and most important ingredient is to have the company’s core values and mission statement clearly defined.

It’s critical to have a concise, specific mission statement, and to convey it regularly. On a daily basis, managers should be referring to that statement. More importantly, the mission statement should drive every decision the company makes. Only decisions in alignment with the company’s mission should be made.

The second step is asset aligned hiring, where you hire people who are aligned with your values, who have the character to be invested in your company for their growth and their success.

Look at who potential hires are, what their goals are, and make sure to create the culture within your company that demonstrates they are important to you. They are as important as your customers because when you take care of your employees, they’re going to take care of your customers.

Number two is asset aligned hiring.

It’s important to hire people who can embrace your core values, so that they can be exhibited to your customers. This boosts employee retention and improves your customers’ experience.

It’s very important that when you bring someone on you don’t just hire a warm body to fill the spot, because that’d do more harm than good. Before you put them on the floor or the phone, interfacing with your customers, you make your expectations very clear, and train them by being a good example.

People want to be part of something bigger, and they want to perform. Sure, on some level they’d like a new Xbox, but if you make people feel good about the job they’re doing, you’ll be surprised at how well they’ll perform.

Number three, strategic assessment.

Look at your whole employment line, from your management to your dishwasher to your customers, and look for a delivery gap. According to Forbes, 88% of executives feel that they’re delivering an outstanding experience to the customers while only 80% of customers feel the same.

We need to look at what’s going on in reality, not just from our perception as an owner. We need a thorough review of the business from everyone involved’s perspective, then, after interviewing everyone, we can make an assessment and an action plan to close that delivery gap.

I feel that it always starts at the top.

My dad was involved in the stores. It’s been 24 years since my dad passed and I’ve been reaching out by Facebook to a lot of people who used to work with my parents. It’s amazing to hear their experiences of working for my dad, how he would smile, that he would look at them and ask about them, and how he would get in there and work with them. Nobody at the company was treated differently. I think it’s really important that the all of these expectations are set from the top.

Number four is effective onboarding and ongoing training.

I had the privilege of working at a pastry kitchen, Harrod’s of London, and even though I wasn’t actually interfacing with the customers, I went through the same onboarding process with watching the video and reading the booklet for the course. Everything that I had to go through was super, super impressive.

Then I found out through one of the McDonald’s employees I mentioned a minute ago that my dad had videos and a little bit of homework, too.

I think it’s important that we have truly effective onboarding, so that people buy into the commitment and the expectations from day one. I think it will uplift morale and everybody’s contribution.

But it’s not enough to have just a boot camp style onboarding, then throw them out there and expect them to do well. It’s really important that you continue to invest in your customers and your employees with ongoing training.

One of the people who wrote me through Facebook said, ‘I’ll never forget that your dad said not to walk across the lot without picking up any garbage we see along the way. To this day, when I’m in any store, if I see a wrapper or paper on the floor, I pick it up.’

That says a lot about their core values, it tells you about their character, about their work ethic, about how they think. Are they the best fit and doing what’s right for the company, or are they just after a paycheck?

Number five, essential evaluation and implementation.

Okay, we’ve stepped forward. We’ve done great onboarding, we’ve got training happening, we put them on the floor and the phones, and then after a while, you need to check in and see whether this training is working with this person.

Here we evaluate what’s going on. And you remember to mess up its human. And that’s great, because it creates an opportunity to correct the mistake and to offer positive feedback as well.

It’s what we do after mistakes that matters. If something’s not working, assess it, talk about it, figure out what changes to make, then forge ahead and re-implement.

Number six is your compelling call to action.

This connects customers to the organization by motivating them to take action. If you’ve done a great job with the previous steps, a lot of customers are going to want to help you, but won’t know how. It’s human nature, that universal law of reciprocity. If we tell them what we want from them, they’ll do it.

The call to action creates a reciprocal relationship and increases rapport between the staff and the customer.

Number seven, follow through, don’t just follow up.

Because it’s a relationship, it’s going to provide the organization with the metrics and data needed to make ongoing sales and to keep your customers of a mind to help you. Communication helps you break through the white noise and the attention economy that we’re in.

Go in there and say, “I’m not like everyone else in marketing. You mean something to me.” It challenges the company to be creative, make that personal contact, and then follow through.

You can reach me at Jill.Raff.com.

You can get a copy of my book on Amazon.com under my name or the title Transforming Transactions into Interactions. Soon there’ll be an E-book available on my website. Go there and sign up as well.

Amazon is a perfect example. Whenever I have a problem I call Amazon support. They’re amazing, thorough, and follow through on their promises.

I have no problem buying again because if I have another problem, someone will be  there to solve it. It’s a great experience.