Today’s customers demand an authentic, unscripted customer service style
Even if the level of customer service your company provides is excellent, if the style of your customer service delivery comes off as inauthentic–as scripted, stilted, or of the cookie-cutter variety–you’re not going to connect with today’s customers. Customers today, of all ages, including the important Millennial generation of customers. are looking for a genuine, authentic customer experience. And they’re quick to reject and rail against anything in the service experience that they perceive as insincere, stilted, or inauthentic.To illustrate this point, let me tell you a story that reaches back more than 30 years: The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, as a global brand, was created in the early 1980s. Very quickly, Ritz-Carlton became a major force in revolutionizing the hospitality industry by standardizing employment-selection criteria, facilities, and more. Now, as a luxury traveler, you could roam the world and be able to experience a consistent standard of service akin to what you had experienced at the last Ritz-Carlton where you stayed, thousands of miles previous.
At the same time, the leadership of The Ritz-Carlton standardized one more aspect of its operation: the language to be used by its employees. In retrospect, this may have been an overreach, though at the time and for two decades running, it seemed to be working. Here’s what I wrote some years back about the origin of the famous Ritz-Carlton brand language: