Micah Solomon is a customer service consultant, bestselling author, trainer and eLearning producer, and keynote speaker. Many companies turned to Solomon for improving customer service, company culture, customer experience, innovation, entrepreneurship, and intrapreneurship. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Micah Solomon about his book Ignore Your Customers And They’ll Go Away to learn more.
Amit Chowdhry (Pulse 2.0): Question about Chapter 1 – Automatic Positivity – Coming off the pandemic and considering this tougher climate, how would you recommend building automatic positivity in an organization experiencing turbulence?
Micah Solomon: “Automatic positivity,” as I’m using the term, is an environment where, when we encounter customers, a “yes” is already on the tip of our tongue, waiting to come out. The answer, in other words, will be yes; we need to find out what the question is.
Of course, there will be cases where you can’t give the customer the particular “yes” they are hoping for. But the principle is to remember that “No is a dead end. ‘Here’s what we CAN do’” keeps the conversation going. It’s a requirement in the Forbes Five Star hotel certification to “never give a guest a ‘no’ without suggesting one or two reasonable alternatives.” Certainly, with nearly endless supply chain and staffing issues some industries have been facing, there has been a lot of inability to give customers the “yes” they’re hoping for. So this is certainly a strain on everyone involved, as you’re hinting at. But “yes” is the way to aim, so you give all your creativity toward getting there.
Amit Chowdhry (Pulse 2.0): Question about Chapter 2 – The Secrets Of Building The World’s Best Customer Service Culture – Yours- In Chapter 2, you suggested companies establish a repeating ritual for cultural reinforcement. Do you know of an organization that has implemented this well?
Micah Solomon: The reinforcement ritual that I call “the customer service minute” has been used every single day and every single shift since 1983 by the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. They call it their “lineup,” and everyone there considers it a key to sustaining their success with guests. The lineup, which is to last no longer than ten minutes, is where a single principle of guest (customer) service excellence is spotlighted, with supporting true-life anecdotes and praise for employees (“ladies and gentlemen”) who have been exemplars of living that particular principle.
Amit Chowdhry (Pulse 2.0): Question about Chapter 4 – “The Power Of Wow: Creating Stories That Customers Will Remember-And Spread” – This was one of my favorite chapters as it contains several stories where company employees went above and beyond to help their customers. Do you have any other recent examples of the “Power of Wow” in your personal life or an organization you know of?
Micah Solomon: Thank you! The examples in the book are some of my favorites as well. Here’s one from my personal life that I’ve spoken and written about in my work on hospitality: The Palmetto Bluff, a resort near Savannah on the banks of the May River, is one of the loveliest examples of anticipatory customer service and “wow” that I’ve ever encountered personally when traveling with my family.
There is an employee there, Tonya, who works as a house attendant, the housekeeping department position formerly known as “houseman.” Tonya pulled up outside our cottage on the sprawling Palmetto Bluff campus in her golf cart, bringing supplies such as bottled water, towels, and sheets for the housekeepers working inside. Three Solomons—my young son and his young-at-heart parents—were out front of the cottage as our son struggled to stay vertical on the bicycle we had borrowed from the Inn. Tonya saw my son teetering atop a bike that he wasn’t ready to handle and instantly tuned in to the trouble we were having. She announced, “Your boy needs a bike with WHEELS,” by which she meant training wheels, and returned in five minutes bringing us a bike newly equipped with training wheels, accompanied by Angella, a manager from Palmetto Bluff’s recreation department, whom Tonya had brought with her to ensure that our son got off to a successful start.
This act of service enhanced the remainder of our time at Palmetto Bluff by allowing our son, on his now-appropriately equipped bicycle, to range all over the trails of the property. It was, if not life-changing, at least vacation-changing. Tonya didn’t just make an extra effort. She made the right extra effort. She saw beyond her House Attendant function, making use of her innate knowledge of guests and of kids to address what our son needed that we hadn’t even recognized ourselves. She also stepped outside of her reporting area (housekeeping) to bring in help from another department (Angella from recreation) to make sure we got on track.
It’s important to note that in a lesser organization than Montage, which manages Palmetto Bluff, Tonya wouldn’t have been able to do this at all. She would be too worried about getting all of her House Attendant work done and of stepping away from our cottage for the time it took to bring back recreational help of Angella. But in her organizational setting, she was both empowered and encouraged to do so.
Amit Chowdhry (Pulse 2.0): Question about Chapter 9 – Going Social: How “Word Of Thumb” Is Changing Your World – In this chapter, you discuss things that should not be done on social media in terms of customer service. Do you have any examples of positive customer service that you have noticed?
Micah Solomon: I’m fond of this positive example of social customer service, also featured in the book:
Here’s how far Nextiva (an Arizona-based communications and software company) will go to provide support even to those who aren’t yet customers: When a tweet appeared in Nextiva’s Twitter feed asking about a service Nextiva didn’t even offer (VoIP service in a particular country overseas), within minutes a response appeared back from Nextiva—and it wasn’t simply a reply tweet, like, “Thanks for asking. But no!” Rather, an employee took it upon himself to fire up a video camera and send, as his response, an engaging, brief video explaining why the company doesn’t offer this at present in their service area and thanking them for their inquiry. The original tweeter was floored, as, I expect, was every Twitter user who noticed the exchange.
Amit Chowdhry (Pulse 2.0):
Could you tell me more about your background?
Micah Solomon: I’m a customer service turnaround expert, consultant, trainer, and training designer. Inc. Magazine called me “The World’s #1 customer service turnaround expert.” I help companies improve—transform—their level of customer service excellence to be at the pinnacle. This involves assessing their current state (often with some delightful mystery shopping involved on the part of myself and my team), deciding on and deploying customer service behavioral standards for almost every situation that is likely to come up, putting in some tools for reinforcement (as we’ve already discussed), reworking surveys, and much more. I also work as an event keynote speaker and author, and content creator.
My first book on customer service (Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit) was published in 2010, co-authored with Leonardo Inghilleri, and with a foreword by the legendary creator of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, Horst Schulze. Ignore Your Customers (and They’ll Go Away) is my latest.
Another recent one, “The Heart of Hospitality,” is specifically on the hospitality industry and again had involvement and support from The Ritz-Carlton and other great institutions.
My upcoming book will be published in October by McGraw Hill.
