Today’s interview is with Micah Solomon, a renowned expert on customer service, hospitality, and customer experience. Micah joins me today to talk about his new book: Can Your Customer Service Do This?: Create an Anticipatory Customer Experience that Builds Loyalty Forever, why he spends a lot of time wearing a disguise and using a fake name, what Gold Touch Customer Service is, why we should keep technology in customer service/experience “Below Eye Level” and how to innovate in customer service amongst a host of other things.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – How to safely realise the enormous potential of Al – Interview with Juliette Powell and Art Kleiner – and is number 485 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my conversation with Micah:

• You want to invest in creating exemplary, iconic and legendary customer service because okay customer service isn’t memorable.
• There is a picture in the book of me in a Groucho Marx disguise because, for businesses that are customers of mine, I will start out an engagement by trying to figure out their current state of customer service. That means going undercover.
• Gold touch customer service is where all of the little snags that you would normally spot are just eliminated because the culture and the systems and the processes are all pointed towards identifying and eliminating them.
• Gold touch or plus one customer service is striving to always add something extra. Unless the customer’s in a big hurry, of course. That’s the caveat.
• By and large, your customer doesn’t want to know about your technology, believe it or not.
• Always be intentional about the service you want to offer. Ask yourself: What is the experience that you want to design and deliver? Then, think about how you want to use technology to deliver that. The technology is not the star of the show, the service is the actual focus and the star of the show. The experience is the focus and star of the show.
• I went to a hotel in London and they were so proud they had given all the employees tablets. The theory back at headquarters was the guest doesn’t have to go to a specific place to get checked in. That was the theory because every one of these employees has this tablet, and they can go to you. But what happened was the employees hadn’t learned how to use it very well and the software was clunky so the entire time they’re checking the guest in, they’re staring down at the tablet and it wasn’t an improvement to the experience.
• Micah shares a couple of examples of what exceptional service looks like:
  • One involves a personal shopper at Nordstrom that sends Micah a box of Girl Scout cookies, filled with the thin mints he likes accompanied by a handwritten note.
  • Another involves a cruise line called Seaborn, where a couple of newlyweds disembarking for a day excursion lose a heirloom wedding ring in the water and the crew organise a dive crew to recover the ring and present it back to them at dinner at the Captain’s table that evening.
• The great moments are a combination of the right sort of people, but also the right sort of culture.
• Micah’s best advice: You need to build a purpose-driven environment so employees and bosses know what their purpose is. When you have your purpose, then you can look at and gauge whether what you’re doing fits that purpose. And, in the moment, you can decide what would fit the purpose. Once you get clear on this, your hiring will improve, your training will improve, and a wonderful thing that I call positive peer pressure will happen.
• Micah’s Punk CX word(s): Informal. Flexible.
• Micah’s Punk XL brand: Amazon.

About Micah

Micah Solomon is a renowned expert on customer service, hospitality, and the customer experience. He’s a bestselling author, consultant, trainer, eLearning training producer, and keynote speaker.

As an author, Micah has written five of the top books on the subjects of customer service and hospitality. His books have been translated in more than a half-dozen languages and are the recipients of multiple awards.

Micah’s expertise has also been featured in Inc. Magazine, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, CNBC, and the Harvard Business Review.

A business leader and entrepreneur himself, Micah built his own company into a market leader in the manufacturing and independent entertainment field and was also an early investor in the technology behind Apple’s Siri.

Check out Micah’s new book: Can Your Customer Service Do This?: Create an Anticipatory Customer Experience that Builds Loyalty Forever, find out more about the work he does at www.micahsolomon.com, say Hi to him on X (Twitter) @micahsolomon and feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Photo by Mark Fletcher-Brown on Unsplash