NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder CLICKs With Its Fans

I attended last night’s Oklahoma City Thunder game to participate in a ceremony awarding the NBA team’s partners with a CX Innovation Award from the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA.org).

Actually, the Thunder won the award for its fan experience efforts. But the NBA organization feels so strongly about the role that its partners play in the overall experience that it shares these types of awards with partners.

In addition to the Thunder’s Pete Winemiller, Senior Vice President, Guest Relations and Danny Barth, Executive Vice President, Chief Administrative Officer, I was joined on the court by Gary Desjardins from SMG, Steven Tamborello from SAVOR, Joe Guthrie from Levy Restaurants, Brandi Plumlee from Force Personnel, Aaron Blum from Gameday Merchandising, and Major Brian Jennings from the Oklahoma City Police Department.

There are actually dozens of partners that create the OKC Thunder fan experience. They collectively help the Thunder achieve its mission to be “the most FAN-centric organization in professional sports.” The Thunder does a great job, it even won a 2012 Temkin Group CX Excellence Award.

The Thunder’s approach to fan experience includes having all front-line team members, from parking to concessions (including police officers assigned to the game), participate in its CLICK™ With Your Guests training program. This is part of the Thunder’s three-step customer experience improvement process: Educate, Evaluate, and Congratulate.

The acronym CLICK! represents the Thunder’s five service principles:

• Communicate courteously
• Listen to learn
• Initiate immediately
• Create connections
• Know your stuff

I really enjoyed touring the “on stage” and “off stage” areas of the game with Winemiller. The signage clearly reinforced the team’s message with employees.

Everywhere we went, we met happy, engaged employees (who worked for many different organizations). Most of them were wearing lanyards around their necks with FAQ’s to answer customer questions, key information for their jobs, and the CLICK! Principles. On the back of their CLICK! With Your Guests cards was a note or picture that each person had created for themselves, which identified something that they wanted to do above and beyond the “non-negotiable” CLICK! principles.

I witnessed one team member receiving a CLICK! Chip, which recognizes employees for doing a little thing that makes a big difference for fans. Winemiller called these “employee of the moment awards.” Once employees receive four chips, they can redeem them for an “I CLICK! With My Guests” pin and select one of many unique gifts not available to the general public (a few employees were sporting a very sharp-looking Thunder scarf). Here’s one of those employees, Tori, who had just selected a set of headphones for her prize (notice the branding on the bag).

Thunder employees can also win monthly Fan Favorite and employee of the year awards.

Winemiller calls complaints free consulting. That’s why the Thunder collects feedback in many ways including intercept surveys at the game, post-game surveys, secret shoppers, text messages, comment/complaint cards, and several visible guest relations booths. And they act on what they learn. After every game, the Thunder meet with leaders from their partner organizations on the floor to discuss any issues or lessons learned that they can use to improve the next game’s experience.

I really enjoyed the game, and need to give a special shout out to Kaylee Lonsinger, Guest Communication Coordinator, who helped make this fan’s experience so wonderful. I even had a special visitor come to my seat.

The bottom line: Do your employees CLICK! with customers?

OKC Thunder Achieves CX Excellence with Partners

Last year, NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder was one of the winners of Temkin Group’s Customer Experience Excellence Award. When Pete Winemiller, Senior Vice President, Guest Relations of the OKC Thunder heard of the victory, the first thing he asked was if they could get separate awards for each of their partners who help the team provide a wonderful fan experience.

Here’s a picture from the halftime ceremony at a recent game where the Thunder presented those awards to its partners:

Winemiller shared his perspective:

“Following-up as promised concerning the recent halftime presentation where the Thunder presented Temkin Group Customer Experience Excellence Awards to leadership from our Business Alliance Partners. This leadership group represents hundreds and hundreds of talented and skilled front-line team members who do A+ work caring for their Guests throughout the NBA season. Thank you again for recognizing the magnificent role our front-line team plays in making our organization successful.”

My take: First of all, it’s pretty cool seeing our Customer Experience Excellence Award in the hands of people on the Thunder’s court. I’m a huge Boston Celtics fan, but I’m rooting for the Thunder this year! More importantly, it was great to see the Thunder committed to its partners. What are you doing to embrace your partners in building a great experience for your customers?

The bottom line: Congratulations OKC Thunder… and your partners!

50 CX Tips: eBook and Infographic

I recently completed a series of 50 customer experience (CX) tips. To make it easier for people to read and download all of the tips, I assembled them into a free eBook: 50 CX Tips: Simple Ideas, Powerful Results.

Each of the 50 CX Tips is aligned with one or more of Temkin Group’s four customer experience core competencies: Purposeful Leadership, Compelling Brand Values, Employee Engagement, and Customer Connectedness.

The CX Tips include examples from a wide variety of companies including Adobe, Amazon.com, Apple, BCBS of Michigan, Becker and Poliakoff, Big Lots, BMO Financial Group, Bombardier Aerospace, CDW, Charles Schwab, Citrix, Disney, EMC, Fidelity Investments, Hampton Inn, Hilton, IBM, Intersil, Intuit, JetBlue, Microsoft, Oklahoma City Thunder, Oracle, Safelite AutoGlass, Salesforce.com, SanDIsk, SimplexGrinnell, Southwest Airlines, Sovereign Assurance of NZ, Sprint, Starbucks, Stream Global Services, Sam’s Club, USAA, VMware, and ZocDoc.

While you may have a hard time applying all 50 CX TIps, you should be able to identify several that will work for your organization. I challenge you to select three or more of the CX Tips to implement. Here’s an idea: Have each of your team members pick the five CX Tips that they think would be the most powerful for your organization. Use a team meeting to discuss everyone’s selections and pick the ones you want to implement.

We also created an infographic with the 50 CX tips. Here’s a version with the top 10 CX tips (click on the graphic to get a .pdf of the full infographic).

The bottom line: A handful of CX Tips can propel your customer experience.