Creating the Greatest Customer Experience Ever
Here are five simple starting points for creating the greatest customer experience ever..
Do you run a small service center that's struggling
to differentiate itself? Is your service acceptable, but still well short of
even your own expectations? Maybe you're the uneasy captain of a giant
corporate function where growth has stalled and your "loyal" customers keep
looking for other options.
Many elements can make a business fail, but one piece of every wildly
successful business you should grab is the "customer experience." It's just
too easy to be great at this to let it be a reason for failure. And, as you
may already know, so many of your competitors are miserable at creating a
fantastic customer experience that this creates a huge competitive
opportunity for you.
Creating a great customer experience is both incredibly simple and the
hardest thing you'll ever do. There is nothing magic or mysterious about an
incredible customer experience, but you have to turn your mind inside out.
You already spend 100 hours a week focused internally on staffing, sales,
inventory, production, billing, shipping, and fixing. Carve out a few hours
every week to focus on delivering the greatest customer experience ever.
Here are Five Simple Starting Points--these initial ideas should be free or
pay back within 1 month. If your ideas don't pass this test then keep
thinking. If you're new to this then there should be 2 to 3 years of free
ideas before you have to make any significant investments.
1) Focus inside out and look at your business the way a customer does.
You can't do this yourself because you know too much about how it's supposed
to work. Ask friends, family, relatives, acquaintances and strangers to buy
or use your company's products and services. Get brutally honest feedback
about how it really works from a customer's perspective. Don't focus on the
routine, everyone does the ordinary well enough. It's the exceptions and the
crises that make businesses rise or fall. Have a friend return a broken item
or call with an emergency request. 99 times out of 100 your staff will not
be treating the exceptions the same way you-as the owner-would have treated
that customer. Why? Because you've issued a policy that they are naive
enough to follow to the letter. Anyone can train their staff, you have to
train your staff to think.
2) Listen actively to everything and anything that can help you see what
the customer sees.
Very few people give you direct feedback. "How was the salmon tonight?"
"Very good, thank you for asking, I'm just a little full." (Translation: I'm
never eating here again.) Active listening means taking in all the verbal
and non-verbal clues. Wipe a white glove around your bathrooms-yes, the
customers are just as grossed out. When you walk in the door does it smell
like fresh flowers or new leather or hot cinnamon buns-or whatever your
product is-or does it smell like failure?
3) Measure everything from the customer's perspective.
How fast does your website load in Tacoma? On a dial-up line? Ship a few
boxes of your product to yourself the next time you're on vacation. Does
that crate of "farm fresh vegetables" arrive at your vacation cottage a
sodden mess of decayed matter? You may change the oil in 15 minutes, but how
long does the customer wait in line to get to that 15 minutes?
4) "Maximum joy" is your new goal, not order fulfillment.
Those teenage mutant automatons you hired to jerk your sodas-do they ever
say "Welcome!" or "Thank you!" to your precious customers? If you paid an
extra $1.50 an hour could you get some counter help that came without a cell
phone attached to their ear or a snarl planted on their lips? Is your
packaging fun? When a customer opens a box of your product are they
surprised and pleased, rushing to the phone to call their friends about
their prized possession or is it just another return they can't wait to
throw in the mail.
5) Improve constantly.
If you haven't fixed something in the last 48 hours you've just fallen 2
days behind your best competitor. Focus on the smallest improvements that
you can find. Your packing tape is ugly-fix it. Your staff treat customers
like an interruption to their busy conversations-fix it. Your logo is
boring-fix it. The last time anyone other than you had an idea was never-fix
it, you're not that smart and they're not that dumb-you are making them feel
unimportant.
There are a thousand ways to turn your mindset inside out and start running
your service center the way your customers would like-instead of the way
that's most convenient for you. Remember, you're trying to create maximum
joy and maximum customer loyalty that leads to maximum returns. If you start
from maximum returns and expect that to turn into the greatest customer
experience ever you'll be sadly mistaken, as will your saddened
ex-customers.
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