If you’re in business, you probably want to jump on the service experience bandwagon.
If you do, you need to realize that being successful is not about declaring your intent; there’s hard work involved to make it happen.
These 5 factors helped me consistently deliver amazing customer service experiences on our journey to A BILLION IN SALES!
#1. Context — An amazing service experience is grounded in a business strategy that declares it as a strategic imperative. Memories are created consciously in an organization; they don’t happen through serendipity.
Leadership must demand there be a Strategic Game Plan citing the importance of building customer loyalty as critical to building long term growth of the organization.
Without this strategic context, dazzling service experiences will not occur consistently with every customer engagement; rather they will be hit-and-miss depending on the circumstances of the moment.
In a world without a strategic driver, the service experience will attract few scarce resources—time & money—of the business and memorable ones will therefore languish as a victim of randomness.
#2. Culture — Amazing service experiences happen in a Say YES! culture where the objective is to create a customer engagement process orchestrated to ENABLE the customer to do business with you.
When the organization “leans in” to the customer and looks for ways to satisfy them in any way possible, magic happens!
But when an organization is in the Say NO! mode, the customer engagement process is effectively disabled and amazing service experiences go missing in action.
#3.Caring — Magic Moments with customers occur when they are CARED for by the organization’s employees, they are genuinely interested in what the customer wants, and have empathy for their feelings.
Caring is much more than “satisfying customer needs”. The latter connotes merely supplying the customer with a product or service the organization provides; the former is a much more personal matter.
A caring attitude shouts out to the customer “How can I help?” and places THEM in control.
And to “care for” a customer is to have employees commit the necessary time, attention and energy to truly understand what customers need in the moment and to deliver solutions with warmth and “affection”.
Caring is delivered by employees who “love” humans. These are people who have the innate desire to serve others; to willingly respond to the idiosyncrasies and whims of people in a way that leaves them breathless.
People cannot be trained to love humans. You can train them to “have a smile in their voice” but you can’t teach them to have an honest concern for the customer’s feelings and desires.
Human Being Lovers must be recruited. Period. And Fingerprint Leaders must micromanage the recruitment process to ensure the organization is hiring individuals who give them GOOSEBUMPS!
#4. Clean — Amazing experiences require an efficient product and service delivery machine. You simply cannot create dazzling service experiences if your organization doesn’t supply products on time and as promised.
So the challenge organizations face is to architect their core product and service delivery systems to do their job flawlessly 24X7x365.
This means eliminating delivery systems friction points and increasing the viscosity of the production “machine”.
“Cleanse the Inside” tactics that worked for me :
- Engage your customers in identifying the rules, policies and procedures in your organization that don’t make any sense to them. Target the high value loyal customer group. Invite them to help you; they’ll return the “love”.
- Eradicate (or change] the policies and rules that customers say annoy them. They are real friction points that must be removed.
- Strike a “Grunge Elimination” team to eliminate unnecessary internal bureaucracy in the customer value chain. Coordination and checking activities should be considered for either simplification or complete removal.
- Assign a “CPO”—Chief Process Officer—the role of cross organization processes in core service delivery. This executive should own the ultimate point of responsibility to ensure customer core service requirements are consistently measured and met.
The CPO’s job is to create cross-functional processes that deliver products and services seamlessly to the customer.
Once your core service delivery systems are operating at peak efficiency you have earned the right to build on that base to cultivate dazzling service experiences.
#5. Communications — The way an organization communicates with its customers is extremely helpful to encourage amazing service experiences.
“Dumbing down” the business, eliminating the jargon, and explaining it in a clear simple tone can do wonders to humanize the organization and get customers receptive to it.
Using language like “Dumb Rules”, “Cut the CRAP”, “Gasp-worthy Moments” and “Yummy” all help to demystify a business and its priorities. It makes people view them as more of an advocate than a profit hungry animal who only cares about their bottom line.
The TELUS “let’s make the future friendly” campaign (https://www.telus.com/en/about/news-and-events/media-releases/telus-announces-new-brand-promise-lets-make-the-future-friendly#) is a good example of a communications strategy aimed at simplifying technological innovation and leveraging it to create “…positive experiences and meaningful social outcomes…” for their customers.
Action item: “Wash your mouth out with customers”. Audit the language your organization uses to explain itself to the outside world. Simplify your language and your words to be more inclusive of the customer in your business.
In sum, if you covet amazing service experiences for your business:
- Build a Service Strategy.
- Create a Say YES! culture.
- Have a caring attitude.
- Cleanse the Inside of your organization.
- Communicate in “customer-ese” language.