Our Five Minutes with… this month is with author and speaker, Geoff Ramm.
What is Celebrity Service?
It’s the gap in your customer service levels you didn’t realise existed. Most companies give their customer service a 7 or 8 out of 10, so there is always room for improvement. I ask audiences what happens if a celebrity becomes a client – how would you reply to an email from them, would it be the usual cut and paste or would you add a bit more character or personalisation? Would you take a little more time? Once you work out the answers, you’ve found the gap between what you’re delivering now and what you could be doing.
How and when did this all come about?
It happened live on stage in Carlisle about 20 years ago! I was speaking to the Chamber of Commerce about how to retain customers and asked the audience if they treated everybody the same. One woman with a shop in Penrith shouted out “Absolutely Geoff.” The conversation went off script and the question of what she would do if a celebrity came in popped into my head. She reeled off idea after idea, including polishing the wooden floor and changing instant coffee for filter. I started introducing this concept into my talks. It came about by chance, but all my bookings in the last five or six years have been about this – and the Chamber of Commerce is still booking me.
Why is Celebrity Service such a big deal?
It’s the one part of your brand that’s so easy to achieve. Its greatest strength is its simplicity – it resonates straight away with everyone, from chief executives to pilots to store managers. I’ll go on stage and actually tell you how to do it.
How has Celebrity Service evolved through the pandemic?
Some of my ideas were inspired by the pandemic and the great things people did during it. There have been quite a few conferences where the theme has almost been back to basics because of all the staff that left for new opportunities elsewhere, particularly in travel – nothing was hit as hard as travel. With existing staff, I’ve found we’ve really needed to lift them, with new staff, it’s back to basics.
Who have been your most interesting clients and what impact have you seen?
I was at a personal travel agents’ conference in Malta recently. I pretended to make a personalised video message and to send it to a client of one of the delegates saying how great the hotel was and how the client would love it. A dozen people actually did this, and everybody booked a holiday. It took a minute, but it was worth thousands. You don’t have to put your logo on it or use a professional camera – it comes out of the mouth but it’s via the heart. It’s not a sales message; you’re helping them find somewhere fab for their next holiday.
What’s your best personal experience of Celebrity Service?
When my son Elliot was four, he loved “big trains” (the sort used by LNER). I took him to Newcastle station and asked for two tickets on the next “big train”, which was to Berwick. The woman in the ticket office said that as Elliot was four, he didn’t need a ticket, adding: “But I think he’d like one.” As we walked to the train he was grinning from ear to ear; she’d written ‘Elliot’s Magic Ticket’ on it. It cost nothing; it meant the world. I put it on social media and it went crazy – it was liked, shared a retweeted more than two million times. The message is that your customers should be tagging you in their photos, if they’re not, you haven’t delivered.
Watch how it all began
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