Chip R. Bell > Quotes

“In the world of innovation, wacky wins; logical loses.”
― Chip R. Bell, Inside Your Customer's Imagination: 5 Secrets for Creating Breakthrough Products, Services, and Solutions

“Curiosity is the secret map to accessing and mining your customer’s imagination.”
― Chip R. Bell, Inside Your Customer's Imagination: 5 Secrets for Creating Breakthrough Products, Services, and Solutions

“Access to inside your customer’s imagination comes with learning and discovering together, out loud.”
― Chip R. Bell, Inside Your Customer's Imagination: 5 Secrets for Creating Breakthrough Products, Services, and Solutions

“The opportunity to co-create is a gift you give your customer as a way to summon their imagination.”
― Chip R. Bell, Inside Your Customer's Imagination: 5 Secrets for Creating Breakthrough Products, Services, and Solutions

“Be absorbed in what your customer is saying; be inspired by what your customer is meaning.”
― Chip R. Bell, Inside Your Customer's Imagination: 5 Secrets for Creating Breakthrough Products, Services, and Solutions

“Remember, a great conversation with a customer is not debate practice. Be a learner, not an interrogator.”
― Chip R. Bell, Inside Your Customer's Imagination: 5 Secrets for Creating Breakthrough Products, Services, and Solutions

“Partnership elasticity stretches the relationship so it can breathe, grow, and expand.”
― Chip R. Bell, Inside Your Customer's Imagination: 5 Secrets for Creating Breakthrough Products, Services, and Solutions

“Deep inside every customer is a treasure trove of half-baked ideas, creative capacity, and ingenuity-in-the-raw.”
― Chip R. Bell, Inside Your Customer's Imagination: 5 Secrets for Creating Breakthrough Products, Services, and Solutions

“Never assume you know what your customers value or that their preferences will remain static.”
― Chip R. Bell, Inside Your Customer's Imagination: 5 Secrets for Creating Breakthrough Products, Services, and Solutions

“Your being in the middle of your imagination turned on is not like a boardroom; it’s like a candy shop.”
― Chip R. Bell, Inside Your Customer's Imagination: 5 Secrets for Creating Breakthrough Products, Services, and Solutions

“• Ask front liners to use it to evaluate your unit’s policies, procedures, and general “ways of doing things.” Are they consistent with the vision? Do they really help get things done for the customers? If not, where do they interfere with giving good service? And how can they be changed? • Hold “what’s stupid around here?” meetings. Use the vision statement to help identify outmoded practices, timewasters, repeated trouble spots, and customer-vexing aspects of your business that make you look dumb to your customers—and each other. • Set “stop, start, and measure” objectives. Perhaps once a quarter, ask every employee to come with a list of items under three headings: 1. Things we should stop doing around here 2. Things we should start doing around here 3. Things we don’t track or measure—but should”
― Chip R. Bell, Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service

“There’s an important middle piece to the puzzle: Listening means actively seeking to understand another person. That’s why we say it’s a contact sport. Listening without contact, listening without a dramatic connection, is like looking without seeing.”
― Chip R. Bell, Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service

“Co-creation partnerships that prosper reject selfishness; they are all about “How can I serve you?”
― Chip R. Bell, Inside Your Customer's Imagination: 5 Secrets for Creating Breakthrough Products, Services, and Solutions

“and “What can we do to help keep you fresh and renewed so you can better handle the challenge of dealing with customers all day?” Remember that focus groups can be virtual online, not just face to face.”
― Chip R. Bell, Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service

“Envision what the path would be if the best answer lay inside the imagination of the customer.”
― Chip R. Bell, Inside Your Customer's Imagination: 5 Secrets for Creating Breakthrough Products, Services, and Solutions

“Let your co-creation partnership run free in the wild meadow of originality; it will be fenced in the stable of practicality soon enough.”
― Chip R. Bell, Inside Your Customer's Imagination: 5 Secrets for Creating Breakthrough Products, Services, and Solutions

“Invite your customer to take risks in the pursuit of inspired innovation, and be your customer’s net when they step onto that high wire.”
― Chip R. Bell, Inside Your Customer's Imagination: 5 Secrets for Creating Breakthrough Products, Services, and Solutions

“you unpack and settle in.” The program proved a major source of learning about the small, irritating “workarounds” that hotel customers faced, such as having to place the suitcase of a traveling companion on the floor because the hotel only provided one luggage rack, having to unplug and find a place for hotel-provided hair dryers when guests bring their own, and much more. By “listening with their eyes,” hotel employees found ways to enhance the customer experience that guests may never have suggested on comment cards.”
― Chip R. Bell, Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service

“unanswered! 7. Don’t take sides. If you find yourself in the line of fire between the customer and your employee, take the high ground. Instead of choosing sides, your best approach will be to try to collect facts and make a decision based on the performance, not the people involved. Remember that win/lose situations leave losers (and negative”
― Chip R. Bell, Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service

“• In some cases, we simply haven’t figured out how to effectively ask for complaints without sounding almost masochistic: “Please, tell us how bad we are.” • When customers do take the time to complain, but jaded or indifferent frontline employees discount the complaint by saying “we hear a lot of that” or “that tends to happen quite a bit here toward the end of the quarter,” customers feel their complaints aren’t taken seriously and are hesitant to speak up again. If it happens enough, they’ll simply pull up stakes for greener pastures.”
― Chip R. Bell, Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service

“In a judgment-free arena, there is an evident invitation to surface imaginative ideas, perspectives, and insights.”
― Chip R. Bell, Inside Your Customer's Imagination: 5 Secrets for Creating Breakthrough Products, Services, and Solutions

“Wise organizations realize that by crafting processes, practices, and policies that play fair with customers, allow people to feel heard and respected when there are problems, and create the feeling that customers’ best interests are being looked after, they build the ultimate competitive weapon: the fervently loyal customer who evangelizes to all within earshot (or Internet connection) about their organization. More leaders are also being won over by”
― Chip R. Bell, Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service

“tactics to help you get the most from those encounters. 1. When you have an opportunity to address a complainant face to face, listen. Work consciously at graciousness and control. Avoid becoming defensive or acting stern, cold, or judgmental. Especially avoid attempting to explain why the problem occurred. When they are levying complaints, customers are not particularly interested in your explanations for poor service, let alone what they should have done differently. They want to know (1) that they are being heard, and (2) that their comments are valued. Your explanations of why things work the way they do (“I’m just stating our policy”) will be seen as defensive and will only aggravate and irritate.”
― Chip R. Bell, Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service

“Co-creation partnerships are free-idea zones because they are neighborhoods of acceptance and goodness.”
― Chip R. Bell, Inside Your Customer's Imagination: 5 Secrets for Creating Breakthrough Products, Services, and Solutions

“again. It’s an adjunct of the Rule of Psychological Reciprocity: If you don’t show interest in your customers, they won’t show interest in you. If you don’t trust them, they won’t trust you. And if you don’t care passionately, sincerely, and constantly about not just meeting but exceeding their needs, they won’t see you as being any better or any worse than any other organization they have done business with. They most certainly won’t fall in love with your organization. In short, “ya gotta love that customer”
― Chip R. Bell, Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service

“Innovation dances to the sweet sound of a banjo. Banjo behavior makes people want to jump up and join in.”
― Chip R. Bell, Inside Your Customer's Imagination: 5 Secrets for Creating Breakthrough Products, Services, and Solutions

“5. Processes must be regularly updated to ensure they reflect customers’ ever-changing expectations for service. The top ten most important processes—those deemed to have the biggest impact on driving and sustaining customer loyalty—must be singled out annually for an “alignment check” and tune up. Today, customer expectations change at supersonic speed as customers are influenced by their service experiences with organizations of every type and effectiveness. Staying in touch with these ever-changing customer service expectations is crucial to an organization’s success. Just as you would expect a complete checkup from your doctor during an annual physical, so too should your most important processes undergo the rigors of an annual evaluation of their effectiveness at delivering or enabling service to customers in an appropriate fashion.”
― Chip R. Bell, Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service

“One of the surest signs of a bad or declining relationship with a customer is the absence of complaints. Nobody is ever that satisfied, especially not over an extended period of time. The customer is either not being candid or not being contacted. —Theodore Levitt Business School Professor, Harvard University”
― Chip R. Bell, Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service

“When people know what to expect each and every time they do business with you—caring, knowledgeable, and competent employees that won’t let them walk away unhappy—they are more likely to return again with their funds and friends in tow. But if you’re seen as erratic and unpredictable—some days delivering on the service promise, and other days treating standards as “nice to” but not “need to” performance goals—it creates a sense of unease and distrust that has a corrosive effect on loyalty.”
― Chip R. Bell, Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service

“A partnership is the paramount confederation for creating and nurturing innovation.”
― Chip R. Bell, Inside Your Customer's Imagination: 5 Secrets for Creating Breakthrough Products, Services, and Solutions