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Service excellence is a cornerstone of thriving organizations. Join Dr. Janet Pilcher as she revisits past episodes with Donna Kirby, Vice President of Experience at the Pensacola Blue Wahoos, to hear how she’s created a culture of service excellence within her team. Hear how Donna transforms customers into loyal fans and learn the three tactics she employs to apply consistent and exceptional service delivery.

This episode addresses questions such as:

  • How can practicing reward and recognition for employees positively impact the customer experience?
  • How can customer survey results be used to deliver real-time solutions?
  • How can leaders empower their employees to tackle challenges and find innovative solutions?

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Episode Transcript

Introduction

[Intro music plays in the background.]

Janet Pilcher: Hello everyone, welcome to today’s Accelerate Your Performance podcast. I’m your host, Janet Pilcher. Thank you for tuning in as we talk about how to put great leadership into action so we can achieve growth in our organizations.

Today we’re going to review the topic of service excellence. Service excellence is always relevant because it’s a key factor that sets organizations apart within their industries.

Think about your own experience as a customer of a business or as a stakeholder in an organization. It’s easy to remember the times when you’ve been a recipient of exceptional service. Whether it’s an extra attentive wait staff, being greeted by name, or feeling supported, it feels good to get good service. And because we know how it feels to be the recipient of good service, as leaders we must take initiative to provide it for our stakeholders, and our students, parents, teachers, and communities deserve it, and the relationships we build with them depend on it.

To revisit service excellence, we’re going to jump back to episodes 40, 41, and 42 featuring Donna Kirby, the Vice President of Experience at the Pensacola Blue Wahoos, a double-A baseball team. I first invited Donna onto the podcast back in 2019 to share how she’s created a culture of service excellence within her team and empowered them to practice it with customers.

Since service excellence never goes out of style, we’ll weave through those past episodes as Donna describes how she transforms customers into loyal fans and shares tactics on how to exceed their expectations. She’ll also touch on the important interplay between employee experience and customer satisfaction.

As Donna manages an award-winning staff and has helped earn the Wahoo’s the title of the Number One Fan Experience in Minor League Baseball, you can see she is uniquely qualified to speak on providing excellent service and her insights are applicable to anyone serving within an organization or community. In fact, whenever I find myself in a situation where I need to work on customer service or service excellence, I ask myself, “what would Donna Kirby do?” Let’s jump into part one of the interview.

Interview Part 1

Janet Pilcher: Tell us a little bit about, you know, what your job means to you. You often talk about how passionate you are about your work and you just did, Donna. So, you know, why is this?

Donna Kirby: It’s not just one answer, you know, but if I had to sum it up into one answer, it’s because I’m part of something that is much bigger than myself, right? We are, our mission statement is to improve the quality of life for people in Pensacola, right? Well, when we’re going through orientation or when I’m talking to my staff during pre-game meetings, I always try to connect that back for them, right? So, we are at the Blue Wahoos part of the bigger picture where we are improving the quality of life. And I explain that to my staff by we have a safe place for families to come, for example, right?

They’ll come down for a night, enjoy the baseball game, maybe have some food. We’re creating a product that people are seeking out, right? On the good side, we’re making money. But, do you know, every single penny that is made by the ownership of our baseball club goes right back into the community. So the better job that we do by having more fans come and have a product that is sought after, that improves the community, right? So it feels good to be able to be a bigger part of that, you know? Creating memories is another really cool thing to be able to do.

Janet Pilcher: That’s nice.

Donna Kirby: There aren’t a lot of jobs, right, that afford you the opportunity to be able to be out there and changing somebody’s life. And, you know, we’ve had it where sad moments and happy moments and reunions, all of that’s taken place at the ballpark. And oftentimes we’ve got a part in it. So it’s neat to be able to be in a position where you can impact people’s lives in a positive way and make a difference.

Janet Pilcher: You know, I saw an example the first night, one of the first, either first or second night of the season this year. You know, we sit right behind Rod and Kathy.

Donna Kirby: Mmmhmm.

Janet Pilcher: And they were such great Pensacola Pelican fans, you know?

Donna Kirby: Yes.

Janet Pilcher: And they’re unable to come to most of the games now. And I just recognized that night that you went down and spoke to them.

Donna Kirby: Right.

Janet Pilcher: And, you know, just, and I thought, you know what, this is a job for you, but it’s really much more about the people that you know and the way that you interact with them.

Donna Kirby: Well, and thank you for saying that. And it’s not, it’s a pleasure to be able to do that stuff, right?

Janet Pilcher: Mmmhmm.

Donna Kirby: And so to be a part of people’s lives. And it’s not exclusive to me, my staff as well, right? I think it’s very telling that our staff goes to weddings of, you know, fans who come to the game or their kids’ graduations or unfortunately the funerals that come by, you know? And our staff becomes much more than just the usher of their section, you know? They become a member of the family—

Janet Pilcher: They do.

Donna Kirby: —and somebody who’s very involved. We have ushers where if that usher happens to take a night off, just for whatever reason they’ve got family visiting, they take a night off, they will have season ticket members text them and say, “is everything okay? Are you okay? Why aren’t you here tonight?” You know? And I think that that’s very telling as well.

Janet Pilcher: It is.

Donna Kirby: That people really, you know, gravitate towards our staff.

Janet Pilcher: It is. And I have, you know, one of the podcast episodes. I have a story where we didn’t have Bob that night, you know?

Donna Kirby: [laughs] Yup.

Janet Pilcher: And I said, we had some email exchanges. And my story is how you matured me through my bad email exchanges to get to a positive outcome. And I said, by the time that I finished, we finished corresponding with the emails, I wanted to coach the new person that was in our stands, right?

Donna Kirby: [laughs] Right, right, exactly. Exactly.

Janet Pilcher: Who was helping us with the usher. So, you know, just appreciate, just to, that says a lot about what you all do, you know, that we have those close connections with the employees and we’re pulling for them and care about them as well.

Donna Kirby: It shows. We love it. Yeah.

Janet Pilcher: So tell us, you know, what you find as, you know, just one of the best, you’ve talked a little bit about the Blue Wahoos organization and that, and the community impact, which I really love. It’s, I think you can see it in the stands too.

I was watching a game, or watching the news last night and I saw the stands of a baseball park. It was empty. And I thought, you know what, we’re not empty.

Donna Kirby: Right.

Janet Pilcher: I mean, even in a night where you don’t expect that many people, you’re always going to have fans there.

Donna Kirby: Right, right.

Janet Pilcher: You know, so what makes this organization, you know, just a great organization?

Donna Kirby: You know, we’re proud of the fact that we’re sought after from major league baseball teams and minor league baseball teams for our customer service experience, our fan experience. We put such a heavy emphasis on that, that it’s making the thought process for other teams change as well. We are hosting the Southern League meetings where all of the other nine teams in the, there are 10 teams in the Southern League. The other nine teams are coming to us in October and we did kind of a pre-survey and said, “we’re creating these two days of meetings for you guys. What would you like to learn during your time down here in Pensacola?”

And I thought it was very telling that they wanted to learn about how do you improve fan experience and talk about surveys, right? And surveys are such a large component of what we do. So the fact that, that we have this platform to be able to share what we’re doing is absolutely wonderful. You know, we feel like their reach is great here in Pensacola, but it’s actually beyond Pensacola and we’re changing minor league baseball, which is great.

Janet Pilcher: You can hear how passionate Donna is about creating a fan experience where all customers and their feedback are valued. Up next, Donna discusses how we can be the best service providers and how she maximizes survey results in real time. Listen for ideas on how you might be able to do something similar.

Interview Part 2

Janet Pilcher: So why do you think service excellence is important to any organization just in general?

Donna Kirby: It differentiates you from your competition. So having that excellence, having that corner on the market that is just, even if it’s just a slight notch above your competition, the consumers that are out there are choosing where they want to spend their time and their money.

Janet Pilcher: Mmmhmm.

Donna Kirby: So if you’re providing a product that outshines anybody else who is in the running, then they’re going to choose you, and that’s going to lead you to success. Word of mouth spreads.

Janet Pilcher: Yeah.

Donna Kirby: So people that go to a great organization are going to talk about that. I think the ratio is for every positive interaction, they’ll tell six friends about their positive interaction, and those six friends will have another and tell their six friends so it kind of, you know, exponentially increases from there, so.

Janet Pilcher: Yeah, and you know I think it’s, we’re finding that more and more. I’m becoming much- more passionate about when we do work with organizations, it’s really trying to focus on customers or the service they provide. You know, one of the things that, and I don’t know, maybe not as much in the Wahoos, but I noticed last week you talked about “customer” and then you said “fan experience.”

Donna Kirby: Mmmhmm.

Janet Pilcher: So you moved out of the word “customer.” I get caught up sometimes with people saying, you know, in education or healthcare or work that we do, they’re not, we’re not serving customers. And so I’m like, “well, then what word do we use?” Do you ever get that at all?

Donna Kirby: We do get that, and we get that a lot from newer staff members. It truly is the fan experience, right? So a good example of this is I’ll have somebody come up to say, come up to me after a baseball game the next morning and say, “what were our survey results from last night?” And I’ll say, “you want to know about our fan experience? We’ll talk about that. Let’s go over the numbers, right?” So survey results are numbers on a paper, but the fan experience is really taking those numbers and putting them into 3D.

Janet Pilcher: Aw, yeah.

Donna Kirby: What are the people telling us? That’s our report card, right?

Janet Pilcher: Yeah.

Donna Kirby: And if we start thinking of it in any other way than “it’s the fan experience,” then we’re going to start backsliding a little bit because numbers can become very static and very uninteresting. And the fan experience really drives the memories that we were talking about last episode.

Janet Pilcher: I love that. You know, it’s interesting. For us, we- we use surveys in the work that we do, and um, and they’re hard. They’re hard for people to look at sometimes, the results.

Donna Kirby: Sure.

Janet Pilcher: But I just love, you just gave me something to really think about in our own practice, because we tend to look at a survey results rollout process.

Donna Kirby: Mmmhmm.

Janet Pilcher: But I’m going to really think through, how do we use better words?

Donna Kirby: Right.

Janet Pilcher: Because we want people to use those surveys to improve because we’re interested in the fans.

Donna Kirby: Right.

Janet Pilcher: That’s what I hear you say. Is that right, Donna?

Donna Kirby: It’s absolutely right. Yeah, and it’s from a few different angles, right? Your survey results are a reflection of what that fan’s experience was, right? But then also, when I’m sharing those numbers with my Game Day staff in our pre-game meetings that we have, I’ll talk about that fan experience based on what the numbers were that were coming in last night, because I want them thinking about, “it’s not just survey results, it is a fan experience, and I’m in control of that. I’m in the front lines doing that, right?” So we talk about it in very specific ways, and fan experience is one of those.

Janet Pilcher: Oh, that’s great. And so do you look at those survey results on a daily basis? Do you all?

Donna Kirby: Around the clock. [laughs]

Janet Pilcher: Around the clock. [laughs]

Donna Kirby: Literally, there’s an app on my phone. I’m probably sharing too much information here, but the very last thing I’ll do before I go to bed is look at our survey results from the night that we just played the baseball game. We send them out in the seventh inning very intentionally for that. I’ll go back and I’ll pull the emails of the fans who have scanned in and who have come to the games, send it out during the seventh inning, and then immediately begin monitoring the feedback that we get.

If there’s any mission-critical information that we get back in real time, I will look up where that fan is seated and go to them right then.

Janet Pilcher: Oh wow.

Donna Kirby: Because you want to take care of it. I don’t want anybody leaving our games angry. I want them to be able to voice their frustration or whatever the incident was with me so I can recover it at that point.

Janet Pilcher: Yeah.

Donna Kirby: Better than having them leave. Even when they leave, we do have a standard that the fans are replied to within 24 hours, and it’s much quicker than that. My staff really gets on it very, very quickly.

Janet Pilcher: Yeah.

Donna Kirby: But if we can do it in real time and have a face-to-face conversation with the fan, I’d much prefer that.

Janet Pilcher: Yes, absolutely. And then they come back the next day happy.

Donna Kirby: Right.

Janet Pilcher: And they’re not grouchy. [laughs]

Donna Kirby: Right, not grouchy. It’s really, it’s really even more than that. It’s more than just winning them over. They’re actually advocates for you at that point because they see the level of service that was offered to them and “wow, they really do read those things.” We get that comment all the time. “You guys really read these surveys.” We absolutely thrive on that.

Janet Pilcher: Yeah, that’s great, Donna. That’s great.

Donna Kirby: Thank you.

Janet Pilcher: Thanks for sharing that information.

Donna Kirby: Absolutely.

Janet Pilcher: You’ve given me something to think about.

Donna Kirby: Oh, good.

Janet Pilcher: It’s clear that Donna understands the value of service excellence and practices to strategies to deliver high quality interactions and experiences. In our last segment, Donna shares three specific tactics on how to apply service excellence to our organizations and empower our employees to do the same.

Interview Part 3

Janet Pilcher: If you were talking about one tactic that you would recommend for us to apply to create a great service to our customers, to people that we work with, you know, what, what would that be?

Donna Kirby: Right. Number one, with a bullet, hire the right people. Hire the right people, hire for success, right? We go through, at the Blue Wahoos, every year we go through our job fairs, and we see an awful lot of faces that come through, but very, very few are going to live the standards and going to live what we need them to. We look for that X factor in that employee who really believes and will live the customer service excellence that we put out there.

So we’ll ask them behaviorally based questions. “Tell us about a time when you didn’t get along with a coworker. How did you handle that situation? What was the outcome?” We’ll ask them, you know, “what’s the big challenge that you feel that you have in your life and how are you working to improve that?” And things like that. So you’re finding the right people. We have very few spots that come open—

Janet Pilcher: Yeah.

Donna Kirby: —during the off season, which is, you know, good for us. That’s great because we have a lot of institutional knowledge that comes back to us, but we want to make sure that the people that we’re hiring will also serve those returning employees well.

We’ll buddy them up. The new folks that come on board who are selected will be paired with a returning person to show them what right looks like.

Janet Pilcher: Yeah, that’s great.

Donna Kirby: It’s, you know, one thing to talk through it, you know, during a job interview or anything like that. But when you’re actually at the game and you’ve got a question about, “hey, how do I answer this fan who had this question?” or “what’s the answer to this?” They have a person they can go to. If I’m not available, they’ve got their buddy that they can go to.

Janet Pilcher: Yeah. You know, so just as I’m thinking through, so if you are asking one of your questions and, you know, can you give us an example of like what a good answer would be and maybe one that’s not such a good answer?

Donna Kirby: Right, absolutely. So a good answer, and I’ve heard this recently, was the question about “can you tell me a time when you didn’t get along with a co-worker, right?” And the good answer was that, you know, “we just weren’t getting along. There wasn’t anything wrong with her. I didn’t feel like I was doing anything wrong, but we just felt that tension together. We actually sat down, talked through it, realized that it was a communication issue, resolved that, ‘okay, I’m going to let you know when we’ve got this shipment of pallets coming in,’ because I was falling down and not letting her know. That was causing frustration on her part. From that moment on, we began working together really well and still learning and developing, but at least we came to some sort of resolution.” That was an actual interview answer. I thought, “wow, that’s a great answer.”

Janet Pilcher: It really is.

Donna Kirby: We need you teaching people how to do that, right? Because nine times out of ten, it’s communication anyway. So she hit the nail on the head when she said that, right? An example of a bad answer, and unfortunately we’ve heard this too, is tell us about a time when you haven’t gotten along with somebody: “I just quit. I didn’t want to be there, right?”

So that, I mean, that’s not the person that you want kind of diving in. It’s not all wine and roses at the games, but we want to have somebody who’s going to work through that and get it back to wine and roses for the fan experience so that we’re promoting, you know, that we’re the best in customer service, so we want that always to be the forefront of our staff.

Janet Pilcher: Yeah, and, you know, we think about customer service as fan experience, which we’ve talked about. And also, it’s working with their teammates, right?

Donna Kirby: Right, right, absolutely.

Janet Pilcher: You know, and having that ability, because they work very closely with each other sometimes under some stressful situations.

Donna Kirby: Very stressful, right? And we’re here long hours, right? We’ll come in at maybe 8.30 and then not leave until 11 o’clock at night on a game day, right?

Janet Pilcher: Mmmhmm.

Donna Kirby: So you’re there a lot. Oftentimes during the season, we see our co-workers more than we see our actual family members. Game day staff will come in later, of course, but they’re also working very closely together. We just ended a 10 game stretch—

Janet Pilcher: Yeah.

Donna Kirby: —of games, right? And then followed by a nine game stretch. So that’s a lot of time together. If they’re not communicating, they’re not working together, things can start becoming tense and nobody wins from that. No—

Janet Pilcher: That’s rght.

Donna Kirby: —the fans aren’t winning, you know, the employees aren’t enjoying themselves. And we want that. We want everybody to come to work and want to be there.

Janet Pilcher: Absolutely.

Donna Kirby: Mmmhmm.

Janet Pilcher: So hiring the right person, hiring the right people.

Donna Kirby: Right?

Donna Kirby: So the second tactic, and we talked about this on the last episode, was that reward and recognition, right? So you’ve got your staff. This is the staff we want. This is the staff that we believe in. We want to keep them motivated, and so we set goals for them. So kind of a neat thing is midway through the year, if they’ve hit a certain criteria for the fan experience, we’ll give them a gift card at the All-Star break, right? And say, “thank you so much for a successful first half of the season.”

We haven’t, we have not not hit it yet, right? So because everybody is so dedicated to providing that experience. So the reward and recognition comes into play through things like that, a gift card when, you know, a certain criteria are met. But every single game will take employees up onto the dugout and celebrate great things that they’ve done.

Either we’ve had a fan write in on a survey and said, “oh my gosh, you have to know what Trinicia did for me. My husband spilled his entire meal and she ran up and replaced it and made sure he was okay and didn’t scrape his knee,” you know, so they’ll give us specifics. And so I’ll celebrate that in front of everybody so that they know, number one, what Trinicia did, she should be, you know, applauded for that. But number two, how easy it is to do, you know, to be able to be recognized for doing the right thing.

And that is really truly taking care of the guests to our living room. We talk about that and I try to present that to the staff that “think of this as your living room.” Our stadium is your living room and you’re having friends over, right? And I always tell them, too, that the stadium is concrete and steel and once they show up for work, it becomes life, right? And they take it very seriously, right? And that reward and recognition is all part of that. They are bought in. They’re owners of the team.

Janet Pilcher: So you have some organizational goals, like when you were talking about you give the gift card if we hit a certain target.

Donna Kirby: Right.

Janet Pilcher: So that’s a target for your whole team, right?

Donna Kirby: The whole team, right. Yeah, it’s individual, well it’s actually organizationally driven, but then also departmentally driven. So there are two metrics that we use to make sure that we are driving the fan experience the way that we want to. The first is the net promoter score. The net promoter score is a simple equation of what percentage of fans are promoting you minus what percentage of fans are detractors of you. So the promoters are out there saying “when you go to Pensacola, if you do nothing else, make sure you go to a Blue Wahoos game, right? “ Those are the people who really truly believe in you, right?

The detractors are the people who are saying don’t waste your time, don’t waste your money, it’s not worth it, go find something else to do or just stay home, right? So to put it into kind of benchmark it for our conversation here, Disney, the Ritz Carlton, Amazon, all trend right around the mid-60s, maybe up to 68 or something like for their net promoter score. We closed last season in an 87.6.

Janet Pilcher: Wow.

Donna Kirby: So that is one way to tell us that what we’re doing is driving that fan experience, right?

Janet Pilcher: Yeah.

Donna Kirby: I remember like we talked about in a previous episode was that it’s much more than just survey results. It is truly the fan experience when you bring it to life, right?

Janet Pilcher: Yeah.

Donna Kirby: So that net promoter score is one metric that we use. The second is the fan satisfaction score, and that’s by department. So on a scale of one to ten, tell us how was your ticket taker’s friendliness? How was your usher’s greeting? How about the food? Did you enjoy the variety on the menu? How about the wait time at the concession stand?

So each of the departmental leaders will get the feedback the next day when we come back in and review the results and figure out where do we need to tweak. Now we’ll reply back to anybody who has given us an above average or lower. And then it sounds counterintuitive to say above average, you would think that’s good, right? But we’re presenting ourselves as a world-class experience. So above average is still average, right?

Janet Pilcher: Yeah yeah.

Donna Kirby: So that’s not good enough. So we’ll reach out to those fans and say, “Glad that you had an above average experience, you know, that things were okay, but we want it to be more than okay. What can we do to ‘wow’ you?” And we get that feedback and we’ll implement it wherever we can and however we can to drive them.

Janet Pilcher: That’s great. So it’s just total attention to,

Donna Kirby: Absolutely.

Janet Pilcher: I mean, and really with the individuals you just talked about, like they’re almost at the place of really totally enjoying their experience.

Donna Kirby: Right.

Janet Pilcher: So we just want to get them to that next level.

Donna Kirby: They’re, you know, and I’m glad to say this, there are very few detractors. We get them, we’re going to get them all the time. I think the percentage is 8% of any grouping is never going to be satisfied. And that’s, we kind of take that with a little pin in it and that’s good to know. But we always keep an eye on that, right? So we’ll get, I think on the last survey results, I think it was 4% of the people rated us a 6 or a lower on a scale of 1 to 10. And those are the detractors, right? It’s really the 7s and the 8s where we feel like we’ve got a lot of opportunity. There are a lot of potential to convert a 7 or an 8 just to a 9.

Janet Pilcher: Just a 9, yeah.

Donna Kirby: You know, a 9 is somebody who’s going to really believe in our product and that’s what we truly want.

Janet Pilcher: Yeah, that’s great. Great strategy.

Donna Kirby: Thank you. Yeah, it’s not us just saying let’s get a better grade, you know, it’s not that. It’s truly taking that feedback and saying, “hey, they’re telling us we’re not doing something right or we’re missing the ball somewhere. What can we learn from this fan to drive them to a better place?”

Janet Pilcher: And it’s changing our behavior to get to that.

Donna Kirby: Right.

Janet Pilcher: That’s great. So what’s a last tactic for us? The third tactic?

Donna Kirby: The third tactic, almost, you know, it seems funny to say this, but we empower the employees, right? And the example I’m going to use is what I’m talking about is funny, but we empower the employees, like I said, it’s their living room. They’re having guests over. They’re empowered to do whatever it takes to make sure that that fan is having a great time. Are there going to be situations that come up sometimes where they need to step out and we need to bring in, you know, escalated, I’ll go talk to the fan or, you know, we do have situations where we have to have the police involved, unfortunately, sometimes, but we try to avoid that. But it starts with the employee, they are empowered to make any decisions.

And what I was laughing about, Janet, is we instituted a policy back, I want to say it was five years ago by now, where every employee has access to a petty cash bag, right? The fan’s upset about something, their ice cream, this is a story that happened. He came to the game with his grandson, right? Got the food, the ice cream cone that they ordered just kept melting, right?

Janet Pilcher: [laughs]

Donna Kirby: And whatever reason it was, that pushed him over the edge. He was not having it, not hearing anything about it, didn’t want anything to do with the Blue Wahoos. “I’m leaving, I’m never coming back again,” because it was a Sunday afternoon game, it was just one of these things I think it—

Janet Pilcher: He just had it.

Donna Kirby: —hit that point, right? And so the usher over that gentleman’s section came to me and I said, “absolutely, you know what, let’s go talk to him. And what we want to do is pay him for all of his trouble for being here.” We bought his ticket, his food, even gave him gas money for his trouble with coming down to the to the stadium, right? And that all came out of this, you know, allotment that we put out there that’s available to every single employee to have that service recovery, right?

Well, the reason I was laughing is when we first instituted this policy, I thought, oh boy, we’re going to be, you know, you know, replenishing this every other game and what the heck, the first four seasons we never touched it once—

Janet Pilcher: Wow.

Donna Kirby: —not once. That’s testimony to our staff, our game day staff, for taking care of situations in real time and recovering those fans and still driving a wonderful fan experience.

Janet Pilcher: Great story.

Donna Kirby: So empowering the staff and knowing that they feel that they have the ability to fix something is truly important.

Janet Pilcher: Well, and you trusted them to do that and so therefore they’re giving back tenfold, right?

Donna Kirby: Right.

Janet Pilcher: And they’re going to make sure they protect that.

Donna Kirby: Right, absolutely.

Janet Pilcher: That resource that you have trusted them with.

Donna Kirby: Right. Well, and it’s, I think it also speaks to their taking care of the situation. The very last resort is going into that and, you know, we don’t want to give the cash away, not because of the cash—

Janet Pilcher: Right.

Donna Kirby: —but because that person is still upset. We don’t want anybody leaving upset, right? And so that’s the only deterrent is because we don’t want to dip into that bag because it’s a thing we haven’t been able to handle.

Janet Pilcher: Yeah, it’s the message—

Donna Kirby: Yes.

Janet Pilcher: —that you’re sending that they’re going to really try to do everything they possibly can.

Donna Kirby: Absolutely. So we’ll give them a card, a business card and say, “please come back again and give us another shot to show you what right looks like. We’d love it if you gave us that opportunity,” and you know what? They always do.

Conclusion

[Outro music plays in the background.]

Janet Pilcher: I’d like to again thank Donna Kirby for sharing the value of service excellence with us. I got a lot out of this conversation back in 2019, and I got a lot out of it again revisiting it. I hope you did, too. As you go into the next week, consider what she shared with us and think about one way you can continue to implement service excellence in your own organization.

If you’re enjoying our show, as I hope you did today, please give us a subscribe. We would love to have you come back and listen to us as we release a new episode every Monday. If you’re really enjoying the show, consider giving us a five star review so more listeners can find us.

I love connecting with others and having these connections with you. I look forward to connecting with you next time as we continue to focus on the Nine Principles Framework so that we can be our best at work. Have a great week, everyone.

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If you enjoy the podcast, explore Janet’s latest book, Hardwiring Excellence in Education. Each chapter focuses on the Nine Principles® Framework offering tools and tactics to enhance leadership skills and elevate organizational performance.

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