Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

James: You’re talking about care. So when you’re talking with that CFO or that CEO or that chairperson of a board, how do you show the value of this to someone that’s maybe a little bit more numbers, hard focused? 

Ron:   So first of all James I’m gonna answer your question by applying it to what I focus on. Because let’s just use service as traditionally as you said “soft”. The traditional listening, when you say to somebody customer service, in their mind pops up a waiter who shows up with a menu, and a nice smile and a glass of water and welcomes you and you know that’s traditional service. And they’re not wrong because service attitude, eye contact, body language, tone of voice, all of that is action that does create a certain kind of value. But if we stay in the restaurant environment, for example, let’s talk about the quality of the goods that are actually being purchased and acquired and the way that they’re handled in the kitchen and the way that the chef puts them together to create the meal that goes on to the custom design menu that then has certain pricing associated with it and the portions as well as you know the dietary orientation if they want to go that way- Does that create a value? Of course, it does. What about making the reservations and dudes online for that or being able to quickly know how much longer do I need to wait for a table or be able to specifically reserve a certain type of table or for a special event, does the ability to make that reservation easily and conveniently- Does that create value? Sure does! But it’s not about the food and it’s certainly not about the friendly warm eye contact and body language. And what about this one, when you come back in and they say “welcome back” “we’re so happy to see you again” or they know when the anniversary was last year and now they’re already inviting you back for this year’s anniversary and you didn’t reach out to them, that cultivation of relationship- Does that create value? Sure does. Then I can ask you if, service is taking action that creates value. Is service a soft skill? Or is it actually what every single person is doing when they understand that the action they’re taking is the purpose is to create value and that’s what service is. So I’ve reframed service from being soft to being the most quantifiable phenomenon of all.

James: So do we need it because we often hear things like service Net Promoter Score, NPS do we need Net Care Score do we need to change the metric that we’re measuring?

Ron: Okay, so you’re way out in front, with me which is great. I’ve actually designed something called the Service Partnership Score. And where, you’re asking the client not something like “what’s the likelihood that you’ll recommend us or a colleague or a friend?”. I mean that’s the reason that’s been so successful is because it’s so simple. But it’s not a great metric to use and you know in certain cases that’s a separate conversation we could have. 

But why aren’t we asking to what extent do you consider us a trusted advisor for the future. What’s the likelihood that you would like to do more business with us in the future? If we develop some new services would you be interested in actually hearing about what else it is that we’re developing on a scale of one to ten? If we come to ask you for certain ideas about what you think we should do in the future, how likely would you be to be interested in having that conversation with us? These are partnership questions that come from two people being mutually committed to future well-being. 

James: Yeah, because I also had a Net Promoter Score, which felt kind of weird. I felt like you had to be a salesperson for the other person’s brand. But what you’re talking about is genuine care, and I’m going to use the L-word, the love word, that sounds maybe to woo some people. But there’s a genuine care kind of going on there, so it’s not about selling. It’s in that traditional way we think of selling. It’s about just having the care for that customer, that client, and also we’re going to be talking about this afterwards, care coming back the other way the customer caring for that employee, whether they’re front stage or backstage.

Ron: Or the client or the customer caring about the well-being of the service providing organization.