Business Sustainability is all about Customer Experience

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Imagine a relationship where whatever you need was already thought and actually done.

Imagine a relationship where things absolutely not expected happen to your comfort and to easy your life.

Imagine a relationship where the other side perfectly understands your needs and go outside the box and clear the situation even not being his or her responsibility.

Imagine a relationship which the most important is to see you absolutely comfortable and feeling great.

This extra touch will make a difference. 

Simple but great, unforgettable. 

Customer feeling unique, important. 

The finesse, education, treatment, understanding of the situation. All playing important roles, no matter what kind of product or service, expensive or not.

Do we agree that they all make a huge difference in the relationship and naturally in its longevity?

Can we also agree that serving well the customer is becoming ordinary, common, and if you want to prevail you must go above the ordinary?

Can we agree that the experience is more important than the product?

Are these things difficult to make it happens?

It is not complicated and not more expensive. In fact you may increase your revenues.

It is all based in policies, processes and people and remember, be sophisticated means be as simple as possible.

Off course it is expected that a company which wants to delight the customers has already the basic concepts of how to support and serve the customers established.

If it is not the case, I recommend to develop the Customer Support & Services organization and processes with this approach right at the beginning.

You will find out that most of these moments are triggered by details, simple things, but very smart and specially sensible. This is the part where you want to touch the persons’ “heart”, or make him (her) feel special. Details that can change the way your customers perceive you, details which can establish a lifetime relationship.

To make them your promoter, you need to do more than only getting the job done. You must go the extra mile.

Customer obsession creates obsessed customers!!

Create an environment / culture which everyone is obsessed about Customers and naturally you will create obsessed customers.

Your policies, procedures and people training are the key and where you should focus. Identify each moment of truth on the customer journey. Once you have that done, do the “extra mile exercise”, put yourself on customer shoes and imagine the relationship happening. That’s all you need to brainstorm.

The more you have experience going beyond, the more you know what to do, when, how far, how open your policy can be allowing customer support and service personnel to work with flexibility and focused on the entire business and relationship and not only in one specific case.

Your customer obsessed focus will make you:

· Listen, change your product or service and let the customer know you did it because of his input…

· Follow the customer on his/her entire journey with you. Let your knowledge and willingness to support / serve him or her make the rest.

· Have your policies allow some waivers, some extra care based on your teams discretion. (have them trained and policy well explained)

· Although it sounds obvious, be faster, be more caring, be more effective, go outside the box, and you will be in their preference list.

· Sometimes be the friend shoulder, the psychologist. 

· Never argue and point the finger to the customer, instead, understand the situation and get it resolved with care, comprehension and compassion, not judgement.

· Act proactively, should a failure to the service or product happen compensate the customer before he asks for. 

· Don’t limit the time your call / contact center spends with your customers… or don’t establish any target to a minimum number of calls per day, the contact center agent has to attend or maximum time per call. As said, the emotional moments have their own timing and pace and the agent shall not push to finish and to expedite, instead he/she should follow gladly customer timing.

Every company in every industry has the potential to create customer moments of wow. They don’t require huge IT investments or years-long program implementations. They only require a willingness throughout the company to have a customer-first mindset and replace the traditional cost-focused approach to customer service and sales to one where humanity shines through. Costs are important, but so are relationship strength and loyalty. 

Service, at the end of the day, is all about making emotional connections, and there’s no way to make a connection faster than through a powerful story.

Where there is a complain, there is an opportunity…

Let’s finish this article by recommending some implementation steps should you be interested.

Important assumptions for the implementation:

· “Wowing” a customer must be in company’s culture. It crosses different departments, different hierarchy levels, different functions.

· Employees taking spontaneous and self-directed action without asking for permission from management.

· Predict and be proactive.

· Monitor your performance and look for excellence continuously.

Recommended Implementation Steps:

1. Mindset change phase – have open discussions about your intentions to go extra mile, demonstrate how important this is for you. Bring examples to make crystal clear what is your target

2. Review your processes, the customer journey, the moments of truth and identify opportunities based on mindset change phase

3. Create cases and examples for each opportunity

4. Define the boundaries and write the basic procedures

5. Prepare a training package to cover the procedures, cases, examples but also each one’s attitude towards customers.

6. Train everyone

7. Create lessons learned panel where new situations shall be logged

8. Have lessons learned analysis process to feedback everyone in the system (PDCA)

Jan/2020