TRANSCRIPT 🔗
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Welcome to Shallow DeepDive, where we take
a deep-ish dive into the shallow world of
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branding, advertising and creative.
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I'm Joe Qualls.
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Today, we're covering the word Steve Jobs
wouldn't let Apple say, and why the most
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loyal customers are made on the day
something goes wrong.
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This week Ron Johnson, the man who built
the Apple Store, published a short piece
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Fast Company ahead of his new book, Shop
Different.
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Most of the attention will go to the
anecdote in the headline.
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We want to spend a minute on that, and
most of our time on a number buried
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down, because the number is the part that
should change how a business behaves.
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The anecdote first.
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Around 2001, Jobs asked Johnson to put the
stores' service philosophy in four words
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or fewer.
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Johnson came back with two: love
customers.
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He meant it in the old sense, love as
working for the good of another person.
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Jobs pushed back.
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Cupertino wasn't a place that said love.
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Could he use a different word?
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Johnson landed on "enrich lives," and
built a set of steps the staff could
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take: a warm welcome, questions to
understand what the person needed,
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the concern they hadn't said out loud, and
a fond farewell.
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There's a small brand lesson in that
already.
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Jobs didn't object to the idea.
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He objected to the word, because it had to
be said by thousands of people, every
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day, without anyone rolling their eyes.
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A service philosophy is a piece of writing
with a very hard job.
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It has to be short enough to remember,
plain enough to act on, and true enough
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people will say it without feeling
foolish.
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"Love customers" was right, and unsayable
in that building.
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"Enrich lives" was sayable, and still
pointed at the same thing.
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Most company values fail at least one of
those tests.
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They're too long to remember, too vague to
act on, or too grand for anyone to say
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with a straight face.
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Now the number.
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In 2007, Apple Retail was one of the first
retailers to adopt Net Promoter Score,
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the question that asks how likely you are
to recommend something.
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The early results were what you'd expect.
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Good experiences got recommended.
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Bad ones didn't.
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Then Johnson started doing something that
wasn't a strategy.
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It just felt right.
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When a customer reported a bad experience,
he'd write back to apologise and copy in
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the store leader.
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The store leaders followed up and fixed
the problem, and because the boss was on
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email, they did it straight away.
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The customers whose bad experience was
fixed quickly were, by Johnson's account,
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seven times as likely to recommend Apple
as customers who simply had a good one.
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Sit with that for a second.
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A fast fix beat a flawless visit, and not
by a little.
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Johnson's way of putting it is that a
great experience makes customers happy,
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resolved failure makes them loyal.
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Those are different outcomes, and most
businesses only budget for the first.
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We'd hold the exact figure loosely.
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It's one company's internal read, recalled
twenty years later in the run-up to a
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book launch, and the research on what's
called the service recovery paradox is
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mixed than a single number suggests.
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Recovery doesn't always beat getting it
right, and nobody should start breaking
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things on purpose.
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But the direction matches everything we've
seen, and the reason is simple enough to
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trust.
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A smooth experience tells a customer that
your process works.
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A problem fixed fast, by someone who
clearly had the authority to fix it, tells
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that you do.
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That's information they can't get any
other way.
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You only find out what a business is
actually like when something goes wrong.
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This is the part most brands skip.
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They spend real money on the good path:
the store, the website, the unboxing, the
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onboarding emails.
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They design the moment everything works.
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The moment something breaks gets handed to
a policy, a queue, a form, a script of
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approved phrases, and a staff member who
is allowed to apologise and not
Load full transcript
allowed to
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do anything.
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The complaint is the one moment a customer
is paying full attention to how you
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behave.
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It's the most carefully read page of your
brand, and most businesses have left it to
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whoever wrote the returns policy.
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I learned a version of this at my agency
back in New York.
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We built a full takeover campaign for a
residential development in New Jersey:
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digital, out-of-home, the lot.
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The whole thing was space-themed, and one
of the subway and NJ Transit car wraps
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carried a modified version of a line from
Star Trek.
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CBS, which owns Star Trek, sent a cease
and desist letter.
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Our legal advice was that we could fight
it, because the line had been changed
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enough.
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It was also that CBS was known for
dragging these things out, and had far
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pockets than we did.
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So we didn't fight it.
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We reprinted the posters at our own
expense with one of the alternate lines
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campaign, and swapped them out quietly.
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What the client remembered afterwards
wasn't the letter.
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It was how quickly it was handled, and
that it never turned into bad press.
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That's the seven-times effect, at the
scale of one client.
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Johnson names the condition underneath all
this, and it's the uncomfortable one.
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None of it works if your people are afraid
to make mistakes.
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His example is from Apple SoHo in 2003.
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An author came in with a broken Windows PC
and a book deadline.
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A specialist working from a sales script
would have sold her a new computer.
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This one asked whether it would be easier
to finish the book on one of the store's
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machines while hers was repaired.
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She came in every day for a month.
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There was no policy for that, and there
couldn't have been.
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It happened because the specialist
understood what the store was for well
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improvise.
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The same freedom produced Personal Setup,
which started with one store leader in
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Minnesota noticing that customers wanted
their new computers set up for them, and
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ended up in every store.
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Which puts this in a slightly awkward
conversation with our last episode.
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There, we argued Coca-Cola was right to
move its brand rules out of a PDF and into
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the design tools, so the rules get
followed without anyone having to remember
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We still think that.
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The two ideas fit together once you notice
what each one governs.
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The identity should be locked: the colour,
the type, the mark, the things that must
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look the same everywhere.
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The behaviour can't be locked, because the
moments that matter most are the ones no
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rule anticipated.
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Rules for the things that should never
change.
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Judgement, and permission to use it, for
everything that happens in front of a
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customer.
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So, for a business that isn't Apple, three
practical things.
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First, write your service idea in four
words or fewer, and test it by whether
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newest staff member would say it out loud.
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Second, look at what happens after a
complaint arrives.
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Count the hours before a person with the
authority to fix it is involved, and cut
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that number, because speed is most of what
the customer is judging.
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Third, give the people closest to the
customer something they can do without
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permission, whether that's a refund, a
replacement or an hour of their time, and
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make it clear that using it and getting it
slightly wrong is better than not using
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it at all.
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Johnson ends his piece by saying love
creates loyalty.
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We'd put it in plainer terms, which seems
fitting, given the story.
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Customers stay because they saw what you
did on the day it went wrong.
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Thank you for indulging us in today's
Shallow DeepDive.
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We hope you'll join us for the next one.
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Until then, take care.