Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.
-Peter Drucker
The end state quality of what the customer received was what counted. Including the experience, the customer had while he purchased the item. Often that is what was remembered the most.
Before I go on, let me tell you a story.
A while back I was sitting on the runway in Orlando as my homeward-bound Jet Blue flight was about to taxi toward takeoff. Like just about every other flight that hadn’t already been canceled that day on the Eastern seaboard, ours was a couple of hours late departing. The lead flight attendant gets on the P.A. system and says something very close to:
“Ladies and Gentlemen, we know we’re late taking off, and even though it’s the weather and not something we caused, we’re going to comp everybody’s movies for this flight. We know you’ve all had a long day and we want it to end with something nice and relaxing. And for those of you who were supposed to be on the Continental flight and ended up here, we don’t ever want you to go back.”
The mood on the flight — which could have been a rather dreary late evening affair — took an immediate upswing. People joked and smiled and made eye contact. They were noticeably brighter and calmer as the flight progressed. And I’m writing about the experience today, and several thousand business travelers are reading about it.
What enabled this relatively small act of kindness and allowed it to become a major brand statement? Midflight, I went to the back of the plane and asked. I wanted to know the policy that allowed a flight attendant to make such a call.
“We’re allowed to make almost any decision,” the flight attendant explained, “as long as we can justify it by one of the airline’s five core values: Safety, Caring, Integrity, Fun, or Passion. If we can tie doing something back to one of these principles, the decision is going to be supported by the company.”
What JetBlue is saying to its employees … “If you act in support of the values that matter to our business, we want you to take risks to care for our customers.”
This is a very simple concept, eh? But how many of us put such a thing into practice with our people? Sit down today with your employees and do what Jet Blue did.
And now back to sins of customer experience design.
So what constitutes a great customer experience?
The quality of your company’s customer experience is ultimately determined by the way customers feel after their last interaction. If the client is unhappy, your business’s customer experience is bad. If the customer doesn’t have a feeling one way or the other, your company’s customer experience is mediocre.
If the client feels good, your business’s customer experience is satisfactory. But if the customer feels delighted, your company’s customer experience is a substantial competitive advantage. That is the only one that matters to success.
One other thing to consider. One bad customer experience usually negates ten satisfactory and delightful customer experiences. So you need to pay attention to the cardinal sins which create these bad experiences. Here are the ten most destructive cardinal sins of customer experience:
Customer experience design sins … employees don’t care
If you hire people that are not delighted to be social and servicing people, you’ll likely end up with employees that don’t care. Nothing is worse for a customer’s experience.
Seven sins of serving.
Limited employee expertise
Putting new hires on the firing line with no or limited training results in employees who have to hand customers off or plead no knowledge. Both are equally wrong. Employees that are not motivated to learn rapidly are also in a bad situation waiting to happen.
Limited employee authority
No empowerment for employees to do the right things? You might as well build a robot to respond to customers. Nothing worse than having an employee that knows what needs to do, but is empowered to do it.
No Consistency
As we stated in the introduction, you need to have all real and delighted customer experiences. Satisfactory and bad experiences will negate all the happy customers talk about, only because negative results usually get talked about more. Need a lot of focus on consistency of the real and delighted experiences.
No interest in customer feedback
Many customers are itching to tell you how to improve. If they are not given an opportunity, it degrades the experience. Likewise, customers always feel good when they see positive improvements.
Employees who rarely smile and engage socially at one on one engagement are at a severe disadvantage in being able to create a delightful customer experience. In the longer term business needs to build relationships, particularly with its best customers. Hard to do with no personalized engagement.
Pushy sales techniques
All selling should be off limits in any situation. Hard selling is a definite no-no for any good customer experience. Very little turns off customers much faster than pushy sales techniques.
Poor listeners
Two-way conversations begin with employees listening carefully before responding. Being stuck on transmit mode in a two-way conversation won’t go anywhere fast.
Poor follow through
If a customer is told X will be done, they should feel that it will happen. Hopefully quicker and better than promised. If something unexpected happens, a good experience demands the customer be notified and kept informed.
Don’t meet expectations
If promises are not kept, expectations by the client are not achieved, and negative experiences result. Too negative and your business will lose the customer forever. The absolute last thing you want.
The bottom line
Here’s the deal, social isn’t just a new way of marketing, it’s a new way of running a business. Many companies certainly have figured this out and are using social marketing and improved customer experience to grow their business rapidly.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is entirely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of a delightful customer experience. And put it to good use.
It’s up to you to keep improving your creative, social marketing, and customer experience efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that struggle gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your customer experience?
Do you have a lesson about making your customer experience better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on customer engagement from our library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of a small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
