How Is YOUR Customer’s Experience?
Your customer’s experience is well worth your investment!
My wife and I are doing substantial renovations to our home. A couple of days ago, we were at a supplier’s showroom looking at fixtures. As we walked out the front doors, my wife and I looked at each other and expressed the same frustration. We both left unsettled by the lack of clarity in the options available to us and the features in each option.
Contrast that with the experience we had a few days earlier with the general contractors who met with us in our home to discuss the final details of our renovation. They brought four representatives of the subtrades with them so that we could communicate to all of them at the same time. Wow! Did that work for us! Every aspect of our renovation covered in one meeting, in our home. The experience was convenient, easy and left us feeling completely satisfied.
Every customer has different expectations and it can be challenging, to say the least, to create experiences for each that leave them feeling satisfied and maybe even wowed!
It takes conscious, daily planning and delivery to be one of those select few businesses who deliver excellent customer service, consistently.
Most organizations struggle to create customer experiences that will stand out amoungst a sea of ordinary. Our customer’s experience is important and well worth us investing in.
In Esteban Kolsky’s comprehensive annual survey, he found:
- It is 6 – 7 times more expensive to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one.
- 66% of customers that switched brands did so because of poor service.
- 85% of customer churn due to poor service was preventable.
If your customer’s experience isn’t healthy, you will fall prey to Kolsky’s statistics.
I have the opportunity to work with businesses to assist them in enhancing the people side of their customer service. We partner to build customized customer service development as well as leadership training programs to support application of those concepts and skills. Those two training programs and all the surrounding support, communication and follow-through have, at their core, a very important concept – Experience.
In our leadership development, the employee’s experience is our most important focus. Engaged employees will go the extra mile to serve internal and external customers. To ensure depth and effectiveness of customer service development, the customer’s experience is at the centre of our training.
Customer experience expert Bruce Temkin defines customer experience as “The perception that customers have of their interactions with an organization.”
Can you afford to have negative perceptions of your service?
There is no question that customers will tend to be loyal to organizations that cause them to feel valued. Customers want to deal with businesses that make “getting what they want” easy. They especially want to talk to people who make their experience comfortable and who they can trust.
As customers ourselves, we’ve experienced the broad range of experiences customer service can bring. When asked to give great or poor examples of how they’ve been treated as a customer, my training participants almost always remember the difficult experiences more easily than great ones.
Creating a great experience for your customers requires a planned, well executed response to your customers’ most important needs.
What kind of mindset and approach do people delivering customer service need to create great customer experiences?
As customers, we want to deal with organizations and their employees who build trust and rapport with us.
To build these healthy, long lasting relationships with customers, invest in these three actions:
- Build the intention to value your customer and create value for them.
- In every moment and in every mode, ensure clear, respectful communication.
- Take 100% accountability for delivering what you promise to your customer.
TRUST AND RAPPORT WITH CUSTOMERS
Watch for more details about these important actions in my future blogs.