Leading Mad Scientists
James Cameron is a "Mad Scientist"—and director of the two highest grossing movies ever made—Titanic and Avatar. Apple CEO Steve Jobs is probably a "mad scientist." So were Ludwig Beethoven, Henry Ford and Amelia Earhart. Who could deny their gigantic contributions or incredible gifts? We use mad scientists not as a reference to some evil maladjusted type like Dr. Strangelove or Frankenstein, but rather as the catch-all phrase for the gifted eccentric and unconventional wild ducks that occasionally enter organizations. Some are nerdy, some are whiz kids without manners, and some are amazing talents marching to their own drum. For organizations they bring a mixed blessing.

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With Trumps For
How many times have you looked at a product and thought, "I wish I'd thought of that?" Today's winning organizations—the ones with the endearing and enduring products and services, design them with customers rather than for customers. The for group creates a product or service and then conducts market research, including focus groups to get customers' reactions for refinement; "I prefer the blue one over the green one" The customer is viewed as a judge not as a partner.

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Service Leaders Simplicity
"Good Morning! Welcome to our USAToday route. Now, if I should miss you, please call me at the number below. I'll personally re-deliver your paper as soon as possible. If you have a complaint that you and I can't solve, you may call my district manager directly. His name and number are also below. Thanks a lot. We really appreciate your business." This is the letter to the USAToday home delivery Chip received with his first paper. It was crafted, copied, and conveyed by the local delivery person, Hazel. Look at its tone and message! The top concern of newspaper customers is "not getting a paper."

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Growing Champions
What do Clint Eastwood in the movie Million Dollar Baby, Tom Cruise in Jerry McGuire, and Denzel Washington in Remember the Titans—have in common? They are characters who supported and sought the best in others, even in their darkest hours. Growing champions isn't necessarily about applause, cheers, or approval. Those actions may be present, but champion growers go above and beyond run-of-the-mill recognition. They use the philosophy: if you want something to grow, pour champagne on it.

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Imaginative Service
Delight your customer! Provide value-added service! These have been mantras of customer service gurus. How do utilities avoid sending a mixed message by telling the front line to "wow" their customers in the morning and announcing staff cutbacks and expense reductions in the afternoon? How do you add value when there are diminishing resources to fund the addition? In a phrase—imaginative service.

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Surprising Customers
If you've ever taken the shuttle bus between the Atlanta airport terminal and the Hertz car rental lot, you may have experienced Archie Bostick—a quirky but highly effective example of how today's business leaders must provide imaginative service to remain competitive—especially in tough economic times. The first thing you notice about Archie is the welcoming grin on his face. Instead of a tip jar (baited with a handful of bucks to encourage reluctant tippers), Archie paper-clips dollar bills across the front of his shirt.

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Imaginative Service: You Need it More in Tough Times
Take the Hertz Shuttle Bus at the Atlanta Airport, and you might meet Archie Bostick. Archie greets you with a welcoming grin. Instead of a tip jar, Archie paper-clips dollar bills across the front of his shirt. Nothing subtle about that ploy—it’s an attention-getter that announces this is a unique experience. Once on the bus, Archie delivers a comedy routine and uses any excuse to break into song. As Archie pulls up to the terminal, he announces, “Now, I may never see you again, so I want us all to say together, ‘I love Hertz!’” And everyone hollers, “I love Hertz!” You witness a service innovator at work—he takes your breath away.

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Spirit Leeches: Learn How to Remove Them
One Hazard of fishing Swampy rivers is the risk of getting a leech. Unlike many parasites, you cannot feel a leech attaching to your leg. A ritual among river anglers is to always check for the bloodsuckers after emerging from the water. And, the typical way to remove the slimy hitchhiker is with a lighted match or lighter.

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Accountability Payoffs Are Impressive
Accountability is both the sweet spot and Achilles heel of most leaders. Leaders learn early the importance of holding employees accountable for results. Despite its downbeat reputation, accountability, effectively executed, remains the keystone for trust between leaders and employees, employees and customers.

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Customer Intelligence: Connecting the Dots for Service Insight
A map confiscated from an enemy courier revealed the location of shallow caves, each containing a cache of weapons used to re-supply enemy troops. However, when a wise Army lieutenant sent the captured map to a friend he knew could provide a deeper assessment of the terrain covered by the map, he learned that each cave was located on a similar site—same type of soil, same typology and same elevation. Checking other areas comparable to the cave sites produced another major discovery: there were many more caves not marked on the map that contained even larger collections of weapons.

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Attracting Loyalty From All the New Customers
Today's customers get terrific service in pockets of their life, and use those experiences to judge everyone else. When the UPS or FedEx delivery person walks with a sense of urgency, we expect the mail carrier to do likewise. Customers also have choices. Shop for a loaf of bread, and you're confronted with 16 brands and 23 varieties packaged 12 different ways.

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Bridging the Customer Trust Gap
"I’ll be back to get you when school is out,” a parent promises as her youngster exits the car with book bag in tow. So begins an all-important matter of trust between child and parent. The level of trust that results depends on whether past experiences are more “Mom [or father] always comes” or “Sorry, I’m late again; traffic was terrible.”

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Competing With Service Air
Customer satisfaction has been the hallmark of customer evaluations. But if you look up the definition of “satisfactory,” you will find “good enough to fulfill a need or requirement.” The verb “to satisfy” comes from the Latin word satisfacere which means “enough.” It also means “adequate” or “sufficient.” Because we live in an era of too many choices, data over load and sensory excess, our taste for “sufficient” is…well, insufficient.

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Customer as Boss: Go from Leader- to Customer-Centric
When Organizations are Led by charismatic, demanding or memorable leaders, the focus often turns to compliance, obedience, or obsession with the leader’s way, style and vision. Centering on customers takes leaders who are more interested in excellence than ego. It takes a total alteration in agenda, attitude, and action. To make the shift, employ three strategies.

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Focusing on a Customer Experience Survey
"We need to survey our customers!" When these words are uttered by a senior leader it can prompt all manner of meeting, mania and macerations. It triggers a group of questions someone in marketing masterminds to send around to various departments for critique. This is where the fun begins.

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That’s Great Advice, Charlie Brown: New Rules for Mining Customer Intelligence
Best selling tomes tell us to “get to know your customers’ needs” while the board room is demanding we “get lean or get lost.” Yet the demands of the competitive arena to attract and retain customers are ever increasing. We think the lessons from simpler times can be instructive in how we balance competitive necessity for timely customer intelligence with the corporate constraint we do it fast, good and most importantly - cheap. We found new rules for mining customer intelligence in a 1975 Peanuts comic strip. We marveled at how timely it had remained and how insightful its counsel for today’s challenging business environment.

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Customer Intelligence Through New Eyes
Customer surveys are a potent tool for gathering customer intelligence. However, surveys are fraught with more inaccurate fiction and erroneous folklore than all other customer intelligence methods. Breaking free of these mythical restrictions can come through “new eyes” questions. These “out of left field” questions can yield valuable insights and refreshing “corner turners” for elevating the pursuit of what customers really think. Below are our top ten favorite themes. They may make you squirm, blush or feel a bit guilty; they may also help you learn.

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Don’t Skip Dessert
Dessert has gotten a bum rap. Customer service survey application has gotten a similar rap. In our hasty pursuit of the next initiative we fail to mine the intelligence nuggets gained. We too often fail to make the “application of data learning’s” as valued as the “acquisition of data.” Checking the box that we “did another survey” has won out over making the process meaningful. And, the richest part of the survey effort is overlooked and left behind.

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What Great Service Leaders Actually Do
"Sure, you’re supposed to be a role model. We know all about making service excellence a priority and how we need to communicate the service vision," they chided. "But, that’s just consultant-talk. What does ‘being a service leader’ look like up close on a Monday morning when the sh_t is hitting the fan?" We compared their list with what we have witnessed among leaders known for inspiring, instigating, and sustaining a culture famous for service. Some have names that identify their enterprise—Bruce Nordstrom, Debbi Fields, Bill Marriott, etc. Most are known only to their associates, stockholders, and customers. Their actions have similar themes.

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The Customer Service Dashboard
Dashboards are vital tools for direction, alteration, maintenance, early warning, and the setting in which the organization is operating. As such, they provide a critical part of the guidance system needed to traverse the marketplace. Like the odometer of our vehicles alert us to change the oil or the speedometer warns us to slow down, various components of the organization’s dashboard provide a myriad of information key to progress and success.

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Forget Customer Feedback, Try Customer Intelligence Instead
Focus on Learning, not Evaluation. Customer feedback is about evaluation; customer learning is about problem solving. Problem solving means learning for improvement. Problem solving requires more customer intelligence than customer evaluation; more ideas than critique. And, customers enjoy solving problems with you when they are invited. Shifting from a customer evaluation to a customer learning focus requires new tools, new methods and above all, new mindsets.

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Command Presence; Animate and Engage People
Great leaders are all about spirit…that is, being, not just doing. They focus on being there, everywhere, not in absentia. And, when they are there, they are all there…focused, attentive and engaged. Great leaders like the mail room air better than the atmosphere on mahogany row. They hunt for genuine encounters. They upset the pristine and proper by inviting vocal customers to boardroom meetings. They spend time in the field and on the floor where the action is lively, not in carefully contrived meetings where the action is limp. They thrive on keeping things genuine and vibrant.

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Happy Processes: Keeping High Spirits in Service Delivery
The Native Americans believed every creation was alive. A tree had a spirit in the same way as a horse or a bird. Organizations that create customer devotion look at their service processes in a similar way. While we rationally know the order entry process is not really alive, if we thought of it like that--a part of a living, organic system to achieve goals--we would ensure it was the appropriate process for our “tribe.” Caretaking “live” processes would ensure the service process always worked well and worked cooperatively with other processes. A “live” perspective would increase the chances the process received proper maintenance. It would guarantee custodians of the process oversaw it with great respect, not only for the process itself but for what it helped provide to customers. Service processes receiving this type of TLC would always have high morale.

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