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Service
According to Kaufman
By Michael Alan Hamlin
November 29, 1999
Ron Kaufman was back in town at his
storytelling best last week, this time by invitation of the Young
Entrepreneurs Organization and, yes, TeamAsia (Full disclosure:
I am the managing director of TeamAsia, but Ron’s performance
was last Tuesday, so I have little to gain from writing about him
today — unless you decide to join the meeting next year. Which
would be nice.). The last time Mr. Kaufman was here he was conducting
an in-house series of meetings for one of the Philippines’
most prominent companies (See Dr. John’s Customers in the March
1, 1999 issue of Business Agenda.). This time around, he was speaking
to anyone willing to invest around P3,500. A little over 500 folks
were, and did.
I’ve known Mr. Kaufman for about
three years now, and watched him present his unique approach to
learning while having fun in three different countries to public
audiences and in in-house presentations for organizations ranging
for high technology firms to fast food franchisors. His message
travels across corporate and industry boundaries because it is universal:
providing superior service, increasing share of customer, achieving
the unbelievable, and building partnerships.
Mr. Kaufman has lived in Asia for
about eight years now, and was first invited here by Singapore Airlines.
For SIA he helped create and launch its famous Service Quality Center.
Mr. Kaufman also designed for Asia’s leading airline the active
elements of a service curriculum that now features more than 100,000
graduates from over 800 different companies and organizations. In
the course of my own research I learned from SIA executives that
the airlines preoccupation with customer service followed the conduct
of a survey that revealed customer service on the ground —
where first impressions are made — was the airline’s weakest
link. Mr. Kaufman helped strengthen it.
And he’s done that for hundreds
of firms across Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States.
I’m so confident in Ron that we’re taking him up to what
I consider Asia’s toughest public management education market
next year: Hong Kong. And in fact, a number of Philippine-based
executives that attended his presentation here last week told me
they were so impressed that they will invest the funds required
to send their people to the Hong Kong event. Really. Now, that’s
satisfaction.
Some pretty weird things can happen
during Mr. Kaufman’s presentations — last week’s
was entitled "Ron Kaufman in Unbelievable: Serving, Sizzling,
and Succeeding your way to the Top!" — like finding yourself
without warning throwing a Frisbee back and forth — in a suit
— with the speaker in front of 500 people in a fancy ballroom.
That happened to me, and goes down in my history book as among the
most bizarre happenings to occur over the seven years we’ve
been doing these presentations. Mr. Kaufman solved the problem of
dealing with people who refuse to turn off their mobile phones and
pagers: He fined them. After two folks offered up a hundred bucks
a piece, the phones fell silent.
During the workshop phase of the
presentation, Mr. Kaufman went around the room spanking the bottoms
of participants who didn’t have their behinds firmly rooted
into their chairs. The exercise required that people keep their
derrières firmly planted. Participants found a way around
that restriction, however, and were shortly seen waddling around
with their chairs held firmly to their bottoms. Pretty cute, that.
But, is this any way to learn about
managing and selling? Absolutely, it is. Not so much because what
Mr. Kaufman says is unique — although much of his presentation
is uniquely thoughtful — but because of the way he burns the
principles of excellence into the participants minds through a combination
of laughter, self-deprecation, playful insults directed at participants,
and a good dose of cajoling.
For instance, when Mr. Kaufman talks
about service standards, much of his presentation he spends imitating
a waiter in a French restaurant whose concept of service was very
Brahman. There on a date-to-die-for — this is a true story
— Mr. Kaufman recounts the experience prancing across the stage,
his left thumb and forefinger pressed together, raised to eye level;
and, his right hand on his waist with elbow cocked at a 90 degree
angle. He feigns, " Oh, ze restarant, eet wass so Freench,
ze atmosphere so romantic, ze service, oh ze service was… CRIMINAL.
The snooty waiter’s transgressions,
aside from ignoring Mr. Kaufman when it suited him, were looking
down his date’s dress and hanging around the table when the
intimate conversation started up.
Criminal service standards naturally
fall at the bottom of Mr. Kaufman’s service hierarchy. Above
that is basic service, which he likens to a boorish taxi driver
with body odor and a beat up car but who gets his customer from
point A to point B. The customer got what he wanted, so there’s
no excuse for not paying up. Of course, there’s no excuse for
a tip either, unless the taxi driver tries to scare it out of the
customer, which is not infrequently, I must say.
Then comes service the customer expects:
a decent automobile, a polite driver, and safe driving habits. But
still, there’s little reason in fulfilling a transaction to
present a tip as a reward for delivery. Desired customer service
ratchets up the stakes though. Taxi passengers in Singapore, for
instance, desire that the driver will help them with their heavy
luggage when they walk out to the taxi stand and arrive home. If
they do, well, now we have a reason to tip, at least in Singapore.
Surprising service is when, Mr. Kaufman
says, the taxi driver not only helps you with your luggage, but
actually carries some of it to your door so that you don’t
have to make two trips back and forth from the taxi. Now, that’s
nice, and customers begin to smile. But what makes them break into
a grin is when you oversleep. When you fail to emerge at the appointed
time, the taxi driver radios his dispatcher to call you, but the
dispatcher radios back that the phone must be off the hook. So the
taxi driver gets out his car, goes to the door, bangs on it until
you wake up and then carries your bags and still gets you to the
airport on time. For Mr. Kaufman, that’s unbelievable service,
and the taxi driver has a big-tipping customer for life.
But the point is, I remember this
story.
Copyright © 1999 The Events
& Awards Managers of Asia and
Hamlin-Iturralde Corporation. All rights reserved.
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