Category Archives: Multi-channel

customer experience, customer service, customer strategy, cycle time, Implementation, Lean, Multi-channel, Strategy, Trust

54 ways to make the customer experience better

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Happy customer

We were snowbound at a corporate retreat in Princeton, New Jersey.  We had exhausted the formal agenda and were waiting to hear if the snowploughs had freed the I-95 so that we could get to the airport and go home.

So we were having a few beers and having a general discussion about what works for us in business when Kevin, an experienced colleague who worked in our manufacturing practice, said something so true and so simple that it has stuck with me at every step of my career since.

We were talking about creating and keeping customer relationships, and he said: “Every time I’m going to meet someone for business, before I go in,  I ask myself, ‘how can I create value for them in this meeting?’  If I can do this, I know they’ll want to meet me again.  They’ll learn to trust me.  And, when the time is right, they’ll buy from me.”

The snowploughs came and we put down our beers and caught our planes home, but his simple mantra – ‘how can I create value for my customers each time we meet?’ – has served me well since then.

Because this is the secret of customer experience.

If we want to make the customer experience better, it’s simple. We make every customer encounter something that our customer values. Then we repeat for every step of the encounter.

Find this value and maximise it. If the encounter doesn’t add value, don’t do it.  That’s all.

What’s value?  It’s whatever the customer thinks it is. Things like:

Treating them like a person

  1. Displaying courtesy and good manners
  2. Smiling when we see them
  3. Pitching things in their  terms, not ours
  4. Treating the customer as someone who  is valued and not a potential thief or fraudster (Banks, are you listening?)
  5. Recognising them when we see them again
  6. Recognising them and rewarding them for coming back
  7. Apologising (and not with the weaselly “I’m sorry you feel that way”)
  8. Understanding their problem before offering a solution
  9. Making the customer look good (always a good thing to do)
  10. Showing we are thinking about them, and what matters to them,  even when they aren’t there
  11. Being respectful – of the customer, of our colleagues, of the competition
  12. Being kind.

Making it easy

  1. Taking away something that is inconvenient for them
  2. Simplifying the transaction (or better, simplifying the customer’s situation)
  3. Offering control to our customer (of the conversation, of the transaction)
  4. Making it so that there is only one way for the customer to do something – and it’s always good
  5. Being patient
  6. Making it easy to pay
  7. Making it easy to get money back
  8. Pricing fairly
  9. Being consistent
  10. Making it easy to talk to a person (if that is what our customer wants)
  11. Making it easy not to have to talk to a person (if that is what our customer wants)
  12. Making it easy for the customer to change their mind
  13. Welcoming returns with a smile
  14. Improvising if the customer needs it
  15. Anticipating their questions (nicely)
  16. Listening to them. REALLY listening.  (Note: this one is hard).

Being honest

  1. If we can’t do it, saying so
  2. If someone else can do it better or cheaper, saying so
  3. Pricing things in ways that are clear and easy to understand
  4. No surprises – being up front with bad news and what we are doing to fix it
  5. If there is a quick or cheap fix for their problem, solving it for them
  6. Refusing to sell them the wrong thing
  7. Keeping our promises, no matter how small (especially the small ones)

Being interesting

  1. Being funny (but not offensive)
  2. Speak about their problems more than our solutions

Helping

  1. Explaining what is happening and what will happen next
  2. Putting ourselves in their shoes
  3. Giving them meaningful choices
  4. Tailoring what we do to what they want
  5. Keeping their anonymity (if that is what they want)
  6. Reassuring them
  7. Taking responsibility for sorting things out, even if it is not our fault
  8. Solving their problems quickly and consistently

 Giving them something

  1. Offering something extra (a lagniappe, for example)
  2. Giving away  insight or knowledge because the customer needs help
  3. Letting them take the credit
  4. Giving them things because we think they might like them
  5. Making it cheaper because they’ve come back
  6. Accepting that if they have got things wrong, it’s our fault for allowing it to happen

Speed

  1. Being fast
  2. Being instant
  3. Letting them be slow. Waiting for them. Patiently. And with a smile.
  4. Being convenient in ways that matter to them
  5. Asking them how quickly they want it and getting it to them whenever they say

Each of these will make the customer experience better.  Better, customers will value dealing with us. And if there’s value, they’ll be willing to buy from us.  And they’ll want to do it again. And this is the bottom-line reason why customer experience matters.

(Photo credit: adapted from ‘Happy Customer’ by Dan Taylor, https://www.flickr.com/photos/dantaylor/, modified under Creative Commons license) 

customer experience, Marketing, Multi-channel, Stuff I like, Trust

Say it with deeds.

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Chicken rhyme

The Language of Love

Words need to match expectations if we want our relationships to succeed.

Valentine’s Day reminds me how much the language of love corresponds to the business of engaging with customers.

Love is about building enduring relationships, where both parties feel like equals, where they each give and get something from the relationship. It is about two-way communication.  It is about trust. It is about wanting to invest our time in the relationship, because doing so rewards us now and because we want it to do so in the future.

For most organisations, this also describes the relationship we would like to have with our customers (and more importantly, the relationship we would like them to have with us).

But, as many of us have learned to the cost of our broken hearts, this isn’t easy.

Chores vs Candlelight

While people can say the right things, what we say through the candlelight over dinner with a nice wine can be very different to what we do on a wet Wednesday evening when the chores need doing and we’re both tired after a long day at work.

And if we can take out the rubbish without being asked, or do the dishes and still smile because we want to cheer our partner up and maybe feel a little better ourselves, then – while candlelit dinners are all very nice – it is when we stand in the rain by the bin or at the sink up to our elbows in dishwater that we don’t just talk about love, we show it.

And showing our love is what counts.

Caring is Doing

We can love our customers during the sale, as we smile and show them our brochures and we give them the pitch and they get excited that maybe the thing we are offering might be the one, the thing that they are seeking.

But are we ready to work at this relationship? To show our love rather than just talk about it?

We do so when we let them call us for help and we answer in person, not with a computer; when we design our website to make it easy for them to do what they want, rather than just get what we want to tell them; when we remember their name and know what they have bought from us and recognise that even the smallest thing can cause frustration; and when we say “don’t worry about it” and give them their money back with a smile when they tell us they aren’t happy.

The experience we offer our customers shows how we care about them much more than any words we use.

Real relationships don’t happen just because we dress up nice and say we care, they happen because the things we do in the weeks and months and years after that first date show we care.

It’s true for our partners.  It’s true for our customers.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

(Image credit: Quickmeme.com at http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3pf2)

customer experience, customer strategy, Multi-channel, Strategy

Your competitors are not who you think they are

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bad_spellers_untie_postage_stamp-p172016310883664861uuftb_216Customers don’t compare the online experience they get from us with that from our competitors. They benchmark instead against the best they have seen, regardless of sector. We have to understand this if we are to use customer experience to help us sell and keep customers.

Don Peppers is one of the pioneers of the customer experience industry. In a recent LinkedIn post, he  tells the story of a bad customer experience a colleague had with Stamps.com when trying to unsubscribe from their service.

The customer horror story, however, was less interesting to me than that he (like we all do) compared this experience with Stamps.com with that offered by another company – and found Stamps.com wanting.

That company was Amazon.

Amazon does not sell anything which Stamps.com sells.  Amazon is not seeking to take customers away from Stamps.com. I would be astonished to find that Amazon features in any strategy document which Stamps.com use to understand their competitive landscape.

In the traditional sense, they are not a competitor.

But when you think in terms of the customer experience, are they a competitor?

Damn right.

Customers do not compare the online experience they get with one company with the experience offered by competitors in the same sector. Instead, they compare their experience with the best experience they have had online, regardless of sector.

If we do not offer an experience  which measures up to the best experience which our customers have had elsewhere, then we will have unhappy customers.

It’s not fair, I know.  Customers are not even comparing apples with pears; they are comparing stamps with books.

This really matters.  Because if we aren’t aiming to be cheapest (and very few of us can, in the long-term) and if our market is crowded with me-too products with pretty much the same features (as in almost every consumer market sector), then how do we compete?

The experience we offer our customers, that’s how. When we make it easier, faster and more pleasant to buy and use our products, we win and keep customers.

If this is how we choose to compete, we need to understand that our ‘competitors’ aren’t our competitors.  As far as our customers are concerned, our competitors are everyone who is offering a service, or a sale, or an experience which follows the same grammar of customer engagement that we do. And if we aren’t competitive when compared with these, we won’t get or keep the customer.

Worse, as Don Peppers is showing, they will tell the World about how unhappy we have made them.

But, as Amazon demonstrates, if we choose to compete in this space, with the right attention and commitment, then maybe we could become the benchmark: and that is a very powerful place to be.

(Picture courtesy of Zazzle.com).

customer experience, innovation, Multi-channel, Stuff I like

The Case of the Cashless Customer

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ImageAs some of you may know, I have spent a little time in the arcane world of mobile payments.  Dave Birch is one of the good guys in this space (an excellent mix of enthusiasm and scepticism in equal parts).  In this piece, he shows (with tongue firmly in cheek) what happens when new technologies hit the market but the preferred customer experience is still being worked out.

All you need to know is that he doesn’t want to pay with cash. If you like this kind of thing, read on…

 

customer experience, innovation, Multi-channel, sales

What’s the difference between sales and service? Nothing.

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Call centreWhen a customer expresses a need, then a failure to sell to that need is a failure of service. Thinking about sales as a service opens the door to genuine alignment of customer experience.

A long time ago, I spoke to someone who helped set up the contact centre for a new retail bank.  He explained that the philosophy of this bank was different from any other than in operation in the UK. Its aim was to help customers and give them a good experience.

I was intrigued when he explained that for the contact centre this meant not distinguishing between sales and service. The same agents handled all customer queries, including selling new products to the customer .

“Surely,” I said, “this has to compromise the customer experience?  When I, as a customer, need help, if agents try to sell me stuff when I call I will get annoyed very quickly.”

“Not at all,” he said. “Our agents are bonused on customer retention and advocacy, not sales.”

I said, “So won’t that mean, instead, that your agents won’t sell to customers for fear of hacking them off? Won’t that damage your revenues?”

He smiled. “Just the opposite. We train our agents to understand that their role is to help customers with their needs as much as they can. Each customer who calls us needs help – or else they wouldn’t pick up the phone. Most of these needs we can help directly: make a payment, check a transaction and so forth. But sometimes a customer’s need can only be helped with a new product.

“For example,” he continued, “a customer might want a better return on the surplus money sitting in their zero-interest current account. The best way we can help them is to explain the kinds of additional services we can offer such as savings accounts, bonds or ISAs. We then give them a chance to buy.

“If we don’t have this sales conversation, we will have had a customer with a need and we have not helped. That failure to sell is a failure of service.”

This philosophy seems to have worked. From its founding, this bank has balanced solid customer and revenue growth with a reputation as the UK bank with the most satisfied customers.

This principle seems to me to lie at the heart of the term ‘customer-centric’.  It connects sales and service with the same goal: helping the customer.

It means that agents have to believe that what they are selling is of genuine value to the customer: as they have to service the customer afterwards, there is no incentive to sell them a pup. And it properly positions sales as part of a positive customer experience – which is as it should be.

For those of us who are striving in our organisations to make things better for customers, this story poses two challenges.

First, how is the way we sell genuinely part of a joined-up philosophy of customer service – or are sales ‘pushed’ on customers regardless of value?

As for the second challenge? Customers now have many more channels for service. These include email, chat, forums, web sites, mobile or social media.

This challenge, it seems to me, is not the technology. Nor is it the need to design for the interactions we might have with customers (and which customers might have with us) (and with each other).

It is instead to do with how well, when trying to give customers a consistent, seamless, multi-channel experience, we apply a key principle:

How do we make sure that every customer touch point adds value to the customer, helps them with their needs and, yes, sells to them as part of the service?

As my friend with his contact centre showed, if we can meet this challenge and begin with this principle, the results, for our customers, and for our business, can be phenomenal.