What’s Excellence Wins by Horst Schulze about? What happens when businesses don’t deliver excellent customer service?
In Excellence Wins, Horst Schulze teaches readers how to build a world-class organization obsessed with customer service. He also discusses how to motivate employees by providing a clear vision of success to work toward.
Read below for a brief overview of Excellence Wins.
Overview of Excellence Wins
In today’s fiercely competitive marketplace, businesses that fail to deliver exceptional service are destined for irrelevance. According to Excellence Wins, this is because exceptional service can earn you loyal customers for life—while lackluster service can drive away even your most diehard fans. In Excellence Wins, Horst Schulze offers a business philosophy and strategies that can help business leaders, entrepreneurs, and anyone else elevate their organization’s standards.
Schulze is the former President and COO of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. Under his leadership, The Ritz-Carlton became renowned for its unwavering commitment to customer service, winning two Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Awards—an award given by the President of the United States to recognize extraordinary work done by public and private organizations. He wrote Excellence Wins in 2019, 18 years after stepping down as leader of the Ritz-Carlton.
Why Customer Service Is Important
According to Schulze, any business that wants to be successful must prioritize retaining its existing customers. Loyal customers are valuable—they’ll consistently choose your brand over your competitors and recommend it to their friends and family.
The key to retaining loyal customers is consistently providing them with a better experience than they can get anywhere else. Learn what they want most from your company, and make it your top priority to give them the best possible version of it.
Schulze notes that most businesses don’t focus enough on retaining loyal customers. Often, when companies become successful, they start skimping on product quality or service standards to reduce costs. Doing so spoils their core brand experience, causing them to lose their customers’ loyalty.
Even minor mistakes can drive away loyal customers, contends Schulze. Small oversights or lapses in cleanliness, professionalism, and attention to detail are enough to make customers question a company’s overall quality and trustworthiness. For example, if a worker at a restaurant fails to adequately clean the bathrooms, customers may start questioning the restaurant’s overall quality standards.
How to Provide Exceptional Customer Service
Now that we’ve covered why exceptional customer service is so crucial for business success, let’s examine some specific tips that all employees can follow to deliver world-class service experiences.
Tip #1: Fulfill Basic Customer Desires
As we’ve discussed, building customer loyalty is all about going above and beyond to create the ideal customer experience. But how? According to Schulze, there are three things that all customers desire, and employees should focus on fulfilling these desires.
1) Customers want your product or service to be free of functional flaws; it should do everything they need it to do. For instance, if you run a massage parlor, your customers should feel completely relaxed and pain-free by the end of their massage.
2) Customers want to be served as quickly as possible. Slow service is enough to ruin a customer’s experience even if it’s otherwise positive.
3) Customers want to receive your product or service from someone who seems like they genuinely care about their feelings, argues Schulze. He stresses that this third factor—personal care—often matters most of all in creating customer loyalty. If your employees make the customer feel valued and welcomed, it sets a positive tone that can make up for potential mistakes or flaws. For example, if workers at a hardware store remember a customer’s name and the products they usually buy, the customer will have an exceptional experience even if the store doesn’t have everything they need in stock.
Tip #2: Discover Your Customers’ Unique Desires
Schulze notes that beyond the three basic desires, each customer has a unique set of wants and needs. Employees should ask customers what they can do to help, then listen carefully to try and understand what they want, even if the customers struggle to communicate it. Their true desires may not be exactly what they say they are. For example, imagine a customer comes into an electronics store asking about a specific TV model. After talking to them, the employee realizes that what they really want is a large screen with great picture quality for their living room home theater setup. The employee guesses that a projector would better suit their needs and recommends that the customer buy one of those instead.
To please your average customer as much as possible, you’ll have to conduct research. Schulze advises gathering extensive customer feedback through recurring surveys. Then, use this data to tailor your product or service accordingly.
Tip #3: Earn Trust by Handling Complaints Well
Schulze views customer complaints as opportunities to build loyalty and trust. When you successfully resolve an issue and demonstrate a commitment to customer satisfaction, you can transform a customer’s negative experience into a positive one. This can result in stronger customer loyalty than if the problem had never occurred.
Schulze says that when a customer has a complaint about your product or service, what they want more than anything else is to see that your company cares about the problems they’re facing. Employees should actively listen to the customer’s complaint and validate their emotions. Conversely, they should avoid using dismissive body language, speaking in an unsympathetic tone of voice, or downplaying the issue.
On a broader scale, Schulze notes that employees should analyze customer problems to uncover their true, often multi-layered root causes—even if the initial cause seems obvious on the surface. For example, imagine a restaurant customer complains that their food took too long to arrive. Instead of just blaming the cooks for taking too long, employees should investigate deeper—was it an issue with the kitchen being understaffed or undertrained? Or, perhaps the kitchen is organized in a suboptimal way, forcing the cooks to spend time moving from station to station?
How to Build an Exceptional Organization
Going above and beyond in fulfilling customer desires is vital for any organization striving to provide exceptional service. But savvy leadership also plays a key role in steering the company in a positive direction. Here are some strategies managers and executives can use to build an organization fully committed to delighting customers.
Strategy #1: Motivate Your Team
Schulze believes that too many managers view their employees as reluctant workers who need to be pushed or coerced into action. Instead, he argues that leaders get better results if they inspire their employees to want to work hard and provide high-quality service.
It’s possible to motivate employees to achieve company goals because humans have an innate desire for purpose and meaningful relationships, according to Schulze. The opportunity to provide world-class service to customers is a chance for them to attain both of these desires: Employees feel like they’re accomplishing a worthy purpose by working at an elite level, and they build meaningful relationships by working together and serving customers.
Schulze argues that to effectively motivate your employees, you need to do two things: Grant them the authority to improve the business and establish a clear vision.
Strategy #2: Reinforce a Purpose-Driven Culture
We’ve discussed two requirements that you need to motivate your employees. Next, to put these motivating forces into action, Schulze contends that you need to establish a purpose-driven culture.
To do this, condense your vision into a concise vision statement that’s easy to remember. Then, weave this vision statement into your communication at work as much as you can: in meetings as well as in personal conversations. In doing so, you ingrain the vision statement in your organization’s culture, nudging employees to think more about how to align their work with the vision.
For example, imagine you manage an art gallery and have developed the vision statement, “We want to build connections in our community through art.” Mentioning this vision statement to your marketing coordinator may encourage them to spend less time building an online presence for the gallery and more time organizing local events.
Schulze recommends reinforcing your purpose-driven culture in two types of meetings: first-time employee orientation meetings and daily refresher meetings.
Strategy #3: Measure Your Progress Toward Success
Schulze contends that, in addition to motivating your team and reinforcing a purpose-driven culture to sustain that motivation, leaders need to continually measure their progress toward success and adjust their strategies accordingly.
Rigorous, ongoing measurement helps leaders identify areas in which they think the business is performing well but it isn’t. These blind spots can easily arise if leaders assess their business using anecdotal evidence or gut feelings alone. Instead, if they consistently measure the right evidence, identify issues, and adjust their processes in response, companies can continually elevate the quality of their products or services.
Schulze recommends measuring three vital metrics in particular.
Metric #1: Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty
First, Schulze recommends measuring customer satisfaction and loyalty. After serving customers, survey them to discover whether they’d want to buy from you again and whether they’d recommend your product or service to someone else. This provides clear data on whether customers are truly having a positive experience that will lead to more business.
Metric #2: Employee Satisfaction
Second, measure your employees’ job satisfaction. According to Schulze, every dip in employee satisfaction signals a greater likelihood of employee turnover—which loses you valuable expertise and forces you to spend on replacements. Staying up-to-date on how engaged and motivated your employees feel will show you when you must take action to keep them satisfied.
Metric #3: Lead Measures
Third, measure lead measures: metrics that accurately predict your business’s future performance. Schulze contends that studying these metrics allows the company to be proactive rather than reactive to worrisome patterns before they become larger problems that impact the core business. For example, if you run a barbershop, one of your lead measures might be the number of fully booked-in-advance days on your calendar. If you notice that you have far fewer reservations than usual, you could respond by increasing your social media presence before taking a major financial hit.
