One example of how we acted upon direct feedback from our customers was the changes we made in scheduling our service calls. Every week, particularly in the warmer months, we get hundreds of bikes dropped off for a variety of servicing—everything from tune-ups to wheel alignments and other repairs. Because of all that volume, we had adopted a policy where customers could expect to get back their bikes within two weeks after they had dropped them off with us.

It soon became clear, however, that the policy simply wasn’t good enough. Understandably, many customers didn’t want to wait that long before their next ride. Listening to that feedback led us to modify the policy dramatically: any bike that was dropped off by the close of business on Monday (6:30 P.M.) could be picked back up on Friday of that week. Any bike received on Tuesday or later would then be ready on Sunday or the following Monday. In listening to our customers, we realized that most of them ride their bikes on the weekends and that as long as we had their bike ready before Saturday, they’d be happy as clams.

Of course, acknowledging the feedback was easy; doing something about it was obviously more difficult. Once we made the commitment to turning our repairs around in a week, that meant we needed to stand by it. As a result, we began paying our mechanics overtime wages whenever we had to in order to make good on the promises we had made to our customers. At the same time, we also learned from talking to some customers during particularly busy weeks that they did not, in fact, need their bike that week: they were headed out of town for the weekend or simply weren’t in a rush to get it back. These customers understood our policy and, rather than taking the whole bowl of quarters we were offering them, they were willing to work with us to help us meet our other commitments. By creating a triage of sorts using the information about who really needed their bikes earlier, we could then shift around our service calls, prioritizing those repairs we needed to get done first, which not only kept us on schedule but also cut down on the overtime we needed to rack up to get it done.

Another example of how we turned customer feedback into action was when we began offering free installation for any roof rack system our customers purchased. Roof rack systems, which sell for three hundred to four hundred complete, are among our best-selling items. But, even as our customers are ringing up their purchase, you can tell they’re already a little bit apprehensive about taking it out of the box and installing it on the roof of their car. If you aren’t familiar with putting one of these racks together, which are sold by vendors like Yakima or Thule, the installation can be somewhat tricky because of the number of small and intricate parts involved. Although the instructions that come with the racks are typically excellent, you need to be willing to follow the instructions carefully step by step. Just like if you’re putting together a piece of furniture you bought at Ikea, if you miss a step or skip anything, you’ll have to start all over again.

As we listened to our customers asking for help in putting these racks together, we decided we’d offer an optional free installation. “Throw the rack in your trunk and try to put it together at home if you want,” we tell our customers as they are checking out. “And if you run into any problems, leave all the parts in the trunk, call us up to schedule an appointment, and we’ll get it ready for you in under an hour. Or, if you want to avoid the hassle altogether, let’s find a time when we can install it for you right now.”

The amazing thing about this program is that it had two huge benefits. One, it gave customers a comfort level in buying the racks because they didn’t have to worry about installing them anymore. Two, by offering the free installation service, we never have to discount our racks to move them—our customers are willing to pay the full price in order to get access to the service. That adds up to a win-win scenario for everyone. Let’s say the installation might take a half hour for one of my mechanics to complete. Given that I pay him twenty dollars an hour, the cost of that service to us is about ten dollars. But, we come out ahead anyway because I don’t have to knock 10 percent off the price tag, which would have cost us thirty to forty dollars, to sell the rack. In other words, it pays to talk to your customers so that you can learn the things they truly value about what you’re offering them. Our goal is to sweep our customers off their feet so that they end up thanking us for giving them more than they expected to receive.

Each and every customer who walks in the door of one of our shops has the potential to give us a piece of feedback that will help us boost the quality of our service an extra notch or so, with the goal of doing something else to keep our offering unique in the marketplace. That’s why the thing we prioritize most with anyone who works at Zane’s is that he or she will need to engage our customers on a personal level as quickly as possible. We want customers to get an immediate and genuine sense that they matter to us.

One of the advantages of working in the retail business is that you as the retailer have countless opportunities to engage your customers on a one-to-one basis. This is where our customer database proves so helpful. Rather than allowing each customer to remain nameless, we ask customers to remind us of their last names and look up their shopping history with us. Then, we can steer our conversations toward the kinds of bikes or merchandise our customers really want to learn about rather than wasting time hashing over things they already have or know about.

For instance, if a customer who walks in hasn’t been to one of our stores in months, we can begin by asking her if her bike happens to be hanging on her car rack out in the parking lot. If so, we can suggest that she bring it in so we can tune it up. Or, we might ask how the bike is working out and whether there might be something we could adjust to make it more comfortable for that customer to get out riding more regularly. On the other hand, if the customer you’re working with happens to be a regular who stops in to the shop every week or two, she is clearly an enthusiast and may either want to talk about buying something for an upcoming ride or even about the choices for upgrading her bike.

We’re also enhancing our database technology to create a seamless nationwide network as part of our national rollout. Then, simply by using a last name and a phone number, we can access each customer’s history, regardless of what store or corporate rewards program she received her bike from. We’ll also be giving our people on the sales floor mobile PDAs, which are essentially 7-inch laptops, that they can use to access all that information to help speed the introduction between themselves and the customers. Again, the point is to find ways to make the most of those twenty-five minutes we have to find a connection with that customer.

Think about the classic example of what not to do, a story starring Radio Shack. For years, every time you bought something from a Radio Shack, the first thing the clerk ringing up your purchase would say was, “Phone number, please.” The amazing thing was that even if you asked that clerk why they needed a phone number, you only received a blank look in return, along with a lame excuse such as, “I can’t do anything on the computer until I put the number in.” It was worse than talking to a parrot.

I might have understood why they wanted the number if I ever received any coupons in the mail or an alert to an upcoming sale, but it seems that Radio Shack never truly did anything with that phone number. So why make your customer uncomfortable by even asking for it? Radio Shack clearly came to understand this as well because its staff no longer asks for a number. (Unfortunately, sales clerks seem to have replaced it with “Do you want to buy a cell phone?”—a question I’ve been asked far too many times—even though I’m typing out a text message or leaving a message via the phone in my hand while they’re asking it. Talk about employees on autopilot.)

At Zane’s, we proactively engage our customers in a conversation where we explain how giving us their contact information has less to do with benefiting us but far more to do with benefiting them. By creating a customer account with us, he or she will never have to worry about saving a receipt in case they want to return something because we’ll have it all in our computer. We’ll also use that information to keep track of product recalls. What we’ll never do is sell that information or put it at risk. In fact, if the fire alarm in our store goes off, I’m leaving the safe and grabbing the computer because our customer database is the most valuable asset we have.

The key, though, is not to let that information die on the vine—you have to do something with it. Quite frankly, we consider it a benefit for our customers that we’re not going to waste their time talking about things or services they have already bought. We’d rather spend our face-to-face time talking about what they want to discuss. Knowing what our customers have bought from us in the past always gives us the chance to ask questions like, “How’s that new pump working out?” Or, “Everything riding better after that last tune-up we did for you?” It’s by asking these questions that we usually get our most valuable feedback because it’s often specific to a product or service we’re offering—and that’s information we can turn into action.

The ultimate goal of conducting these surveys is, of course, to find out how to further cement our relationships with our customers, either by implementing new ideas or modifying existing practices that might be ineffective or unpopular. We get thousands of responses every month, from both our customers at the retail shop and those that we service on behalf of our corporate clients like Tropicana and American Express.

For every bike we deliver, we ask customers to rank our service on a scale of one to ten on questions like: “Did the bike show up when we said it would?” or, “Was your bike in the condition we said it would be in?” (And, just to give those customers an extra incentive to respond, we raffle off a bike to one lucky respondent every month.)

Although many companies claim to survey their customers, I believe that most fail to deliver on a key element: actually doing something with the feedback they receive. We don’t just send out these surveys for show; we use the results to let our customers point the way in how we can service them better than we did the day before. It is unbelievably more powerful to make additions or changes to any business’s offering if that charge is being led by the voices of customers rather than just some bright ideas dreamed up by the MBAs with management titles.

For example, we have made fourteen procedural changes in how we deliver our bikes on behalf of our corporate clients based solely on information we picked up from surveys completed by the recipients of our bikes. Many of these changes were driven by complaints we received that revolved around damages that occurred to the bikes from the time we put them into a truck until they arrived at the recipient’s home. So, we reexamined every aspect of how we packed our bikes and changed everything from the kind of packing material we used to wrap around the frames to the kinds of zip ties and elastic bands we used to keep the bike’s parts from shifting during transit.

Although we assemble 100 percent of the bike in our shops, we’re forced to take a few things apart, like the pedals, so that the bike will fit into a uniform shipping box. We just used to stuff the assembly instructions into one of the bags containing loose parts like the pedals. But, as an extra precaution in case those bags were lost during shipping or mistakenly left out of the box, we began stapling the assembly instructions to the packaging padding the frame of the bike. Because the instructions also included a checklist of what should be included in the box, customers wouldn’t have to beat on their heads wondering if we had left some crucial part or tool out.

One of the most common complaints we heard, something we would get hundreds of phone calls on each month, was customers telling us they were confused about how to screw the pedals back onto their bikes. The problem was that, even though we included instructions with photos that showed how to reassemble the bike, we still hadn’t done enough when it came to explaining how the pedals worked. With different thread directions for left and right pedals, and it can be confusing for anyone who isn’t a bike mechanic to know which is which. We’d get calls to our service center that went something like, “The pedals you shipped me are stripped.” That wasn’t the case. The solution was that it was necessary to twist the left-hand side pedal in the opposite direction of the right-hand side pedal to tighten it. We pondered how to solve this problem for a while before we came up with an answer. The solution was stickers that showed which direction the pedal needed to be turned to screw it in. After we stuck color-coded left and right arrows on the pedals and cranks, all the customers had to do was match them up and turn them in the appropriate direction. Problem solved. Total cost: about a penny apiece.

Not only did we help our customers get out riding sooner than they could before we brought out the stickers, we accomplished a bit of cost- and time-saving for ourselves. If you consider that when we receive a customer call to discuss this very problem, one of my mechanics might spend at least fifteen minutes a pop: five minutes to let the customer detail the problem, five minutes to explain the solution, and then another five minutes to wait on the line to make sure the customer successfully completes the assembly. No more—we eliminated thousands of hours of phone time for a mere $100 worth of stickers—all thanks to listening and acting upon the direct input from our customers.

As technology like the Internet has become more widespread and accessible to everyone, we have also recently expanded our use of these new high-tech tools to help head off or solve problems brought to us by our customers. Whenever someone orders one of our bikes from their corporate rewards program, for instance, we send them an e-mail directing them to our Web site, where they can enter their height, inseam, and other measurements so that we can custom-fit their bike perfectly. We used to have customers fax their information in, but as technology privacy issues have become more prevalent, we now use a secure server to collect that information quickly and securely online.

After the order has been placed, recipients receive a reply e-mail acknowledging that we have successfully processed their entry (which eliminated another couple hundred phone calls a month from folks wondering if we had received their information), and also containing a tracking number they could use to follow the progress of their bikes from our shop to their home. Most recently, we also added a link back to our Web site within the body of that e-mail so our customers can now access a nine-minute-long online video where I walk them through each step in the assembly of their bike after they receive it. We spent two days on a sound stage in New Hampshire recording the video, which was then spruced up and edited into its current form. Because each of our bikes, regardless of the model, needs the same kind of assembly to get it out on the road or trail, the video, which customers can access anytime and as many times as they want or need to, has proven to be helpful in heading off customer problems. Perhaps more important, it has also given us yet another unique way to connect on an emotional level with our customers.

Even though the material is incredibly helpful in alleviating the insecurity of a nonmechanically inclined recipient, we get the most feedback on the blooper segments we include—who doesn’t love bloopers, right? Well, apparently our customers like them more than the regular videos themselves, which is fine by me because it clearly shows that we have yet another way to cement that emotional connection with our customers.

The results of our surveys also play a critical role in building better relationships with our corporate clients as well. The fact that we survey our customers at all, in fact, helps differentiate us from our competition. Whenever I meet up with clients like Marriott or American Express, I bring along a stack of about 500 printed survey results, which stands about three inches tall. In fact, whenever we land a new corporate partner, I get a kick out of thumping that huge stack of paper down on my liaison’s desk. The reaction I usually get, though, is: “What the heck am I supposed to do with these?” My standard answer is, “I’m giving you these results to prove that we’re representing your brand, as well as Zane’s, as well as we can. And I’m not just saying that—the proof is in these results.” I remind my clients that Zane’s is, after all, working on their behalf to deliver an award, a brand-new bike, to one of their own prized customers. I want my client to know how well we are doing in that regard. And, unlike my competition, I want to document how well we’re doing with stories and information delivered directly from our mutual customers.

“My goal,” I tell my clients, “is to make sure that your phone doesn’t ring with a complaint from a recipient regarding anything about their bike—like that it might be the wrong size or they don’t know how to attach the pedals. We’re creating an emotional bond between you and your customers by doing our job as well as we possibly can.” To say this another way, by using surveys to back our word, we uncovered yet another way to energize the relationship with our clients. Finding these points of differentiation is absolutely critical if you want to ensure that you’re the only one your clients think of when it comes time to renew your contract with them.

That HBR article attacked the logic that companies should focus their marketing and retention efforts on those customers who reported scores in the one to six range; the customers you really need to be focused on are the sevens and eights, the researchers found. Although those customers say they are currently satisfied by the services they are receiving, their scores also indicate that if someone better came along, they’d switch in a minute.

This was an eye-opening thought for me. I started thinking about how I might rate some of the businesses I used regularly, such as my dry cleaner, coffee shop, or even my accountant and lawyer. I knew I would give my lawyer and accountants solid tens—there was no way I would switch to someone else. But there is some wiggle room when it comes to some of the other businesses I frequent. For example, even though I would give my dry cleaner an eight because he always does a decent enough job (except for the one expensive tie he lost), if someone better came along, someone offering a unique or interesting service, I would definitely switch things up. The same goes for the coffee shop where I stop in on my way to the office.

When I translated these thoughts into what they meant for Zane’s, I knew we had to make some changes in how we dealt with our survey results. The customers who were giving us a seven or an eight, folks who I used to consider solidly in our camp, might, in fact, be vulnerable to our competition. That meant we needed to spend just as much and perhaps more effort in turning our sevens and eights into nines and tens as we did on moving our twos and threes up the ladder.

I also came across another interesting study that was discussed at one of our industry trade shows a few years back. The study’s results found that the primary reason customers switched between offerings was not because of price, selection, or even the quality of the service they had received—it was because they felt the business they were leaving was indifferent to them. In other words, there was simply no emotional connection between that person and the business. Whenever customers walk into a store and are ignored by the sales staff or made to feel insignificant, they will automatically be at risk for looking for someone else who will make them feel as if they matter.

That’s why store managers like Tom are constantly combing through our database to track down customers that we haven’t heard from in a while. Tom will actually call up these customers and ask them to stop by the shop and bring in their bikes for a free tune-up so we can make sure everything is still working well on the bike. We want to remind the customer that we truly value him or her and we’re willing to go the extra mile to prove it. It is also why we spend so much effort on training our sales staff to interact with our customers on as deep a level as possible. One example is that part of the job requirement for each of our sales team members is to send a handwritten thank-you note to any customer who buys a bike from us. Purchasing a bike isn’t like buying a DVD player at Walmart. We want to find a personalized way to acknowledge that to our customers—to thank them for choosing us.

I remember one time when a woman who had just bought a bike from me said, “You don’t have to send me a thank-you card; I already have two.” I ended up sending her another two: one to her home and another to work. No, I wasn’t trying to be annoying, just proving a point: this is simply what we do at Zane’s. Any time we can show how we’re delivering extra value to our customers, the better chance we have of making that emotional connection with them that will turn them from sevens and eights into tens.

But, as important as it is to invest in our at-risk customers, I also recognize that my competitors probably have no idea which of their customers are actually at risk of leaving. As they spend their resources trying to win back their really unhappy customers, we actually have the opportunity to win their sevens and eights away from them. Recognizing that there is a large pool of customers out there just waiting to be plucked has been an “A-ha!” moment for us at Zane’s. These are the folks that ride their bikes enough to frequent their neighborhood bike shop, a place they feel does a pretty good job for them. But, if we got the chance to invite these same riders into our shop, we would simply blow them away with all the extra advantages we offer our customers.

Simply put, our competitors have helped us by setting low expectation levels for these customers. All we have to do is show them all the aspects that make our service stand out and we can instantly acquire an army of newly loyal customers in a heartbeat at a far lower cost than trying to attract customers new to the sport. The fact that my competitors fail to understand this and continue to sleep soundly, blowing their limited resources on acquiring new customers while thinking their sevens and eights are loyal customers, makes the equation all the sweeter for us.

The key balance we’ve found is that by working with scholars with their feet on the ground like Martin Mende and Len Berry, and all the great folks at ASU’s Center for Service Leadership (too many to name), we can put textbook theories to the test by letting our frontline people experiment with them and amplify them by applying their own out-of-the-big-box skills. I have to admit that in my younger days, I was skeptical about any academic—you know the old saying, “Those who cannot do, teach.” Well, today I can admit how helpful it is to get input about new ideas from people who can think objectively because they remain above the daily fray. The key for us has been to take the theories and transform them into actions that not only validate the theories but empower everyone in our organization to do our jobs—delivering unique experiences— better than we ever have before. The acid test for me has always been—if my people believe in it, it can work.

When I tell people outside the company about this philosophy, I often receive a chuckle or a smirk in return, along with a snide comment like, “Sure, Chris, whatever you say. Every big company says the same thing these days.” I let those comments roll right off me because I know that Zane’s is unique in what we do and that we don’t have the same kinds of barriers to overcome that other bigger companies that claim to be customer-centric are forced to deal with. We have built Zane’s from the ground up on the sole premise that our success is 100 percent tied to our ability to listen and then act upon what our customers are asking us to do. This fact also lends itself as a kind of segue into the topic we’ll talk about in the next chapter—how you can tailor your hiring decisions to make your organization even more effective at listening and responding to the needs of your customers.