Several years ago, I attended a customer service training that was conducted by Dennis Snow. Dennis is a former VP of Customer Service at Disney who is now a speaker and consultant. His website (http://www.snowassociates.com/) talks about "creating magical user experiences". He is a great speaker - if you ever get a chance to see him, jump at it! He just talks about customer services topics, and really gets some key messages across.
One of the things I remember most from Dennis's sessions was the concept of "a moment of wow". At Disney, Dennis says, they teach "cast members" to create moments of wow for their "guests". That's what sticks in people's minds; not the great attractions, or the shows. It's the little things. For example, if a cast member sees a family where one person is taking a photo of the rest of the family, they're trained to go up to them and ask "may I take that photo for you" so that everyone can be in the shot. It's the little things - the moments of wow. Dennis challenged us to try to create moments of wow for our customers every day.
At that time, I was in a high-level IT role at a university. A few weeks after that training, we had an email issue that resulted in email being unavailable to a fairly sizable group of users. Rather than communicate via voicemail or through a website (since we couldn't email them) I made a decision to get a list of the impacted people, divide it up amongst several people in the IT organization and actually call them. We each ended up making 10-15 calls. That's pretty easy. And people really appreciated it! When I called one person to let her know what was going on with her email account, she told me that I had given her a moment of wow by actually making a call instead of something less personal.
I decided to try this approach again more recently. In this situation, we have a project to encourage people to change their passwords. We've had a communication campaign with some success, but we still ended up with a set of people whose passwords didn't get changed. Some of my team suggested cutting off their access to network resources. That's so draconian. Not saying that we would *never* do that, I just don't think it's the first place to go. I suppose I'm more for diplomacy first and then war rather than the other way round.
So I decided to do what I had done in the past. We took the list of outstanding non-password changers and I started to make some calls. This time, though, it was less of a "moment of wow" feel for the people I called. After all, in the previous example, I was calling them to apologize and give them an update. In this example, I was calling them, well, sort of to nag them. Most of them felt the need to apologize. I could almost hear them turn to their coworker when they hung up saying "I can't believe the CIO had to call me to get me to change my password!".
So I guess the moral of the story is to consider the message or personal situation when you're using the personal touch. In the Disney example, if the cast member walked up to a guest right after they discard some trash and said "let me put that in the trash can for you", it wouldn't feel like such a wow moment. I don't think my example was quite that extreme, but it had a somewhat negative feeling for people. Live and learn!
