FROM THE BLOG

Get Real.

Posted by Tarah Carlow on April 23, 2014

Is your kindness an act or the real deal?  In the world of financial advice, or any business for that matter, everyone is touting that one of their values is providing exceptional customer service.  What really is exceptional customer service?  Is it meeting all of your deadlines as promised or keeping clients happy?  Nope.  Not in my rose-colored world.  In my mind’s eye, it is about keeping our clients engaged- happiness is fleeting.  I’m loving life right now but in about 10 seconds flat, I can get pretty angry and not so happy.  One little thing in an overall client experience can color my view of happiness.  What one little thing won’t do is make me dis-engaged.  It would take a lot of little things to truly turn me from an engaged client to a dis-engaged client.  I am an understanding person- we are all human.  I make mistakes, you make mistakes, we are all at some point a big mess of mistakes.  Heck, that’s the beauty of humanity.  Otherwise, can you say boring?

Authentic thoughtfulness is the number 1 item in my book when it comes to an exceptional service experience.  It doesn’t necessarily mean being perfect; in fact many times when I have witnessed an exceptional experience has been in the aftermath of a faux-pas.  But for now, service recovery will be another topic, another time.

How many of us as parents have loved the messy pottery bowl made by the hands of our child more than any birthday present money could ever buy?  I venture to say all of us- and why?  Because it comes from authentic thoughtfulness.  I am a firm believer that it is the little things in business that really sets apart the “talkers” about great service from the “do-ers” in providing great service.  It all comes down to this: is your service an act or from the heart and the real deal?

An eloquently put Golden Nugget that I captured from my time at the Ritz Leadership Center:  “Memorable service is not scripted and robotic.  It is spontaneous and from the heart.”

A plainly spoken Tarah’ism:  “No one likes fake.  No one. It’s just- FAKE.”

I love the stories that the Ritz captured in this blog post entitled, “Genuine Customer Care”.  Although we are not in the hotel industry, it is very easy to substitute our world for theirs.  I hope you enjoyed reading.

Take care,

Posted by Tarah Carlow Senior Vice President, Marketing & Advisor Loyalty