By F Kamaruddin

We say it’s about delivering service excellence at every touch point. And now we’ve said it on radio too.

That’s right – we get asked this question a lot:

Q: What does Branding from the Inside Out mean?
A: It’s about delivering the promise of the brand experience, every time.

It’s about examining how your organization meets your customers and analysing all the processes, standards and the behaviour that goes into making each interaction a great experience for the customer. When we talk to our clients we ask them many questions. Some of the examples of questions we ask are:

And that’s just some of them.
We put the answers together into a map where we can show what the customer experiences, from start to finish. A customer lifecycle, so to speak.

We’ll put more meat in this discussion. In the meantime, listen to Mary talking about Branding from the Inside Out on BFM 89.9

By F Kamaruddin

How long does it take to solve YOUR problem?

We like to highlight personal experiences of customer service, brilliant or otherwise, here on our blog. This is what we found on one of our favorite radio stations, BFM 89.9.

Malek Ali wrote about the service from Bloomberg when their terminal keyboard had a problem. Pay attention to what he said about how long it took from “Hi, I have a problem with your keyboard” to resolution.

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Exemplary Customer Service – New York to KL in 20 hours
by Malek Ali on 12-Feb-10 20:43 (Read the original post here.)

On Thursday, I found a bunch of Bloomberg colour print-outs lying around the office and wondered why we were printing so much. Noelle, our morning run presenter, explained that the print key on the Bloomberg terminal keyboard was faulty, often getting stuck, and ended up printing 50 colour copies at a time sometimes (at 50 sen per colour copy, that would have cost us RM25!)

When I had a spare moment that afternoon, I sat down at the Bloomberg terminal and started looking for the help line to get a replacement keyboard. I was initially looking for a phone number, but the the help menu did not have one, instead it had a help “chat” icon, a Messenger help-line if you like.

“Hmm, let’s try this…”, I thought. I had seen some of these Messenger-type help lines before and had once contacted Salesforce.com on one of their products using this method. So I typed in “Hi, I have a problem with your keyboard” and explained the problem briefly. After an 8-10 seconds interval, an acknowledgment blinked on the terminal :”Bloomberg Helpdesk: We’ll be with you in a moment…”.The moment lasted a minute or so, and then the next question was, is this your address (they got it on file), followed by, is this the serial number of your keyboard (I looked underneath the keyboard and yes, it was), and then, “one moment please….”. another couple of minutes passed, and then it was “we’ll be sending you a replacement keyboard”. I asked when and the helpdesk replied “by tomorrow”.

Friday came and less than 20 hours after our first contact, a Bloomberg technician turned up to replace the keyboard.

If I’m not mistaken, Bloomberg operates a centralised helpdesk out of New York. So here was an example of superb customer service for you, served from 10,000 miles away, to our humble doorstep here in suburban Petaling Jaya.

Has any Malaysian company done that for you lately?

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That sounds like a happy customer who was impressed with the service delivered. If you are a service provider, what are you doing to continuously deliver what you promised to your clients? And as a customer, do you think that Malek’s experience is a rare one or is representative of the standards of customer service today?

*Image from pressingdigressions.com