Summary: Synopsis This week, Dr. Misner provides an example of how great customer service leads to referrals. During his recent trip to the BNI National Conference in Nashville, he stayed at the Omni hotel and had many meals sent up by room service. The employee who delivered most of these meals was named Leslie. She was courteous, friendly, helpful, and attentive--but without calling attention to herself. Dr. Misner didn't really notice how good the service was until the day he had ten BNI directors in his suite preparing for a group photo. Not only did Leslie offer to take the picture, but she took a photo with every single person's camera or phone, with no sign of impatience, taking the time to make sure everyone had a record of the occasion. Great service like that gets noticed--even by harried conference organizers. Dr. Misner took the time to write a blog post containing a public testimonial for Leslie. Tell us about your great customer service experience, especially with BNI members, and why you think it's important for referral marketing. Read the original post on Dr. Misner's Business Networking Blog. Brought to you by Networking Now. Complete Transcript of BNI Podcast Episode 364 - Priscilla: Hello everyone and welcome back to The Official BNI Podcast brought to you by NetworkingNow.com, which is the leading site on the net for networking downloadables. I am Priscilla Rice, and I am coming to you from Live Oak Recording Studio in Berkeley, CA. I am joined on the phone today by the Founder and Chairman of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner. Hello Ivan. How are you and where are you? Ivan: Hey, I am doing great and I am literally leaving Portugal for BNI. I did some events here and spoke to members. I am on my way to Spain, my first visit to Spain, so I am very excited to meet BNI members. BNI members are so similar all around the world. They are so hungry for networking and referrdelival marketing. It has been a great visit to Europe. A few more weeks. I am headed to Croatia next. Priscilla: Oh, great. That sounds so great. Well, what do you want to share with us today? Ivan: Well, a few months ago, I was at the US national conference for BNI in Nashville, Tennessee, and everyday, room service would come up and deliver my meals. So what I want to talk about with”May I Take Your Photo?” is a lesson in great customer service. I think one of the ways that you really get referrals is you give good customer service with your products or services. I want to give an example of someone who just kind of went out of her way to give good customer service. It was so simple and so tactful that I just didn't quite see it at first, but it was very consistent. Room service would come up, and often, it was as a meeting in my suite was wrapping up. There was this young lady by the name of Leslie. I am going to see if we can put her photo here in this podcast. She was an employee who most often made the deliveries during the last part of my stay for this conference. One of these days, I had a group of about 10 BNI directors in my suite. They were kind enough to give me a Givers Gain plaque, which was made by local members out of automobile license plates. It had all the letters cut out. A three was turned backwards as an “E”. It was really a cute idea. They gave this to me and they started to gather around to get a photo, and Leslie said, “Would you like me to take a picture for you?” Now, that is not a big surprise. Employees at hotels and restaurants have become accustomed to taking pictures of lots of people going through their venues, right? You see this all the time. Here is the unusual part. She then said to everyone- there was like 10 people- “Okay, everybody give me all your cameras. I will take a photo with each and every one of them.” And then she dutifully accepted each camera and each phone and then, one by one, took photographs, making sure that everyone got their own picture.
