The secret of success is to do the common things uncommonly well. A secret? No, not really. Small things? Yes, certainly. Sometimes small actions or even inactions by a business can have the ability to improve customer service. And it is usually due to a lack of an explicit consumer experience strategy.
Companies lose customers for a variety of reasons, some of which they never discover. Sometimes customers walk away after a single unpleasant experience.
Other times they’re frustrated by a series of small perceived problems. Is a lack of a customer experience strategy costing your company customers? Do you know the answer? It is not rocket science, is it? It is a key secret to your success, however.
Before we continue, let me ask you a question.
What works best for customer experience design in your business? We would love to hear what it was. Would you do us a favor and post it in the comments section below? It would be greatly appreciated by our readers and us.
The truth is, it usually takes significantly more time and energy to find new customers than it does to lose them. So you can be sure a strategy to build a positive customer experience can pay off when done well. All the marketing in the world cannot make up the damage when it is done poorly or ignored.
Customers today interact with businesses in many different ways, leading to numerous touch points and tremendous opportunities for positively influencing their customer experience.
If one considers the hundreds of interactions each client has throughout his/her life cycle with a company, how do you define a client experience to focus their limited resources? Here are some priorities to consider:
Set Customer Segment Targets
Always start by asking: For which segments? Although this may sound obvious, when striving to improve customer experience, it is critical to define the segments in the marketplace that you want your business to focus on.
Map the Consumer Experience Steps
Define the steps of the consumer journey. Remember to think of the entire trip, not just the steps your company is involved in. For example, for the home movie entertainment businesses, these steps would be: define the occasion, select a title, get, watch, and return the film. Mapping these steps for each of your priority segments is important.
Also necessary for each step of the journey is to understand the time spent, the activities performed, the criteria used to make a decision and move to the next phase of the journey. And finally defining how to make each step as short and easy as possible.
Define the categories of influencers at each step of the journey. Touchpoints are opportunities to intersect with and influence the customer experience. In the home entertainment example, the influencers would be self, retailers, external resources, friends, family members, and movie studios.
Remember that the activities performed by a consumer fit at the intersection of an influencer with each step of the journey. For example, a customer may go to Netflix and view recommendations and retailers would be the influencer.
In this example, providing online recommendations that are trusted would be the touch-point. For each priority segment, understanding the relative importance of various influencers by steps of the consumer journey is the key to success.
Customer service tips … experiment with collaboration
An efficient way of ensuring that experiences meet customers’ needs is to bring customers and frontline employees into the design process through collaboration. And yes, in our opinion many customers would welcome this approach.
When they are face-to-face with a design team, customers can provide valuable input, including firsthand accounts of what they want seeds of ideas to build upon, and feedback for real-time prototyping.
In a single-day workshop, the Fidelity Charitable team gave employees just one hour to create pen-and-paper prototypes for ideas that they thought would fill a particular donor need. Customers then joined the group for a mocked-up fundraising cocktail party that enabled them to test out the prototypes in a realistic setting.
Through this process, the Fidelity Charitable team got multiple rounds of feedback that focused its work on the most valuable solutions. Intuit has likewise embraced a hybrid of design thinking and “lean startup” to do rapid experimentation and prototyping across the organization
Types of customer service … align customer-facing employees
The quality of customer experience depends on a complex interdependent set of employees, partners, processes, policies, and technology. Firms like USAA, Apple, Zappos, and Starwood Hotels are companies that do an excellent job of orchestrating across their enterprise.
USAA has identified approximately 100 important experiences associated with customer business engagements like buying a car or preparing to deploy abroad, all of which have owners and cross-functional teams responsible for detailed customer processes.
For one of those car buying experiences, the company manages auto dealership relationships on behalf of clients, understanding that customer hesitation haggling with dealers for pricing slows its ability to provide loans and sell insurance.
Customer signals are critical.
Act on customer signals
Your client insights are essential to this effort. We’re not talking just satisfaction surveys—good customer understanding doesn’t come just from spreadsheets and data crunching.
Instead, we’re talking about consumer sentiments and needs through detailed customer observation, listening and relationship building. Social skills that identify and shares unspoken or latent needs. A process of gaining useful insights and then acting on them.
Experimenting at first and then full ahead. Having a governance mechanism to work on ideas is critical…otherwise, there will be no positive change.
Improve customer service … activate improvements
Now for the most important touch points, you could generate ideas for improvement. In the example above, an activation idea could be to develop a studio agnostic website that incents consumers to state their preferences, tracks their viewership, and accordingly makes highly relevant recommendations for what to watch next.
After you have implemented this framework for the first time, it will yield recommendations for what data to collect and at which critical touch points, and what types of analyses and metrics are needed to improve the customer experience.
Improve customer service … final customer experience example
Want to know one of the most efficient ways Zappos has found to create reciprocity with their clients? And create customer experience differentiation at the same time?
Surprise them!
People like getting things for free and like them, even more, when they are viewed as “favors,” but they love receiving these favors as surprises.
For instance, did you know that Zappos automatically upgrades all purchases to priority shipping … without so much as even a mention of the sales or checkout page?
Why offer this sort of benefit without mentioning it?
Pure: A company like Zappos, a business leader in customer service, recognizes the benefits of surprising people with a next day delivery. That’s not even mentioning the fact that this shipping creates immense goodwill between Zappos and their first-time buyers.
That kind of reciprocity is justified by almost any cost, and the hit Zappos takes by doing this is paid back multiple times over by the customer loyalty they generate from making people happy.
Companies that are proactively managing all elements of their customer experiences are most successful in achieving customer loyalty.
Remember, customers create the most value for you … when you create the most value for them.
The bottom line
What’s missing is the concept of service. The desire to help clients achieve their goals rather than to assume you know what their goals should be. Talk about direct response metrics won’t help a client whose brand awareness is trailing by ten points.
Interestingly, top digital players like Yahoo! and Google do understand this. However, many in the industry are still the same arrogant bunch that went down in the first dotcom boom and will surely go down again, screaming “nobody gets it!” along the way.
Like this story? Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.
More reading on customer experience from our Library:
Random Acts of Kindness for Customer Experience Improvements
We recently posted a blog on the meaning of customer experience and the value of its improvement. We elaborated on learning to view the design from ‘inside out’ and ‘outside in’ simultaneously. Today we examine the ten laws of consumer experience design.
Learn more specifics: Doctor Customer Experience: Clever Techiques Staff Should Employ
Our team at Digital Spark Marketing often gets asked why to emphasize customer experience design. The answer we believe is pretty simple.
Customers remember and value great experiences that demonstrate deep understanding and respect for their needs.
Many will argue that convenience is part of customer service or the customer experience.
I’ll agree with that, but it is becoming so important, that I’m willing to separate it out. There are businesses that use convenience as their sole differentiator.
What is the best customer experience design you have ever put to work for your business? We would love to hear about it. Would you do us a favor and tell us in the comments section? It would be greatly appreciated by our readers and us.
Businesses learn how to deliver and evolve differentiated experiences. As such, they can build robust and enduring customer relationships that enable business growth.
We have defined ten laws of customer experience design that we use in the process of improving the design of our clients’ customer experience. We give a short discussion of these laws here:
Good customer experience … consistency
The idea is to make things more user-friendly by an aesthetic consistency of style and appearance. We recommend defining and implementing a set of standards here.
Consumer experience.
Co-creation of value
Customer experience innovation is a bottom-up process we believe. Employ your clients in the ideation and design process.
Consumer experience … observations
Frame the experience design in the context of their customers’ actual use. You will receive more ideas by asking what they want.
Customer experience strategy … storytelling
Create better imageries, emotions, and understanding through sharing of stories with your customer communities.
Customer experience features must serve the lower level human needs before the high-level needs can begin to be addressed.
Customer experience design … expectation effect
This law refers to ways in which expectations affect perceptions and behavior. When people are aware of a probable outcome, their attitudes and behaviors are influenced in many respects.
Expectation management should be a key component of the design process.
Exposure effect
To obtain a good exposure effect, find the best stimuli to repeatedly present. Find the ones that are best liked, accepted, and shared.
The strongest types of incentives to consider are photos and meaningful phrases
Hick’s Law
This law states that the time required for a customer to make a decision is a direct function of the number of available choices. Providing too many choices is not a good design.
Immersion
A state of customer mental focus can be so high that the awareness of the ‘real’ world is lost. This immersion results in happiness and satisfaction.
Customer life cycle stages
All customer experiences progress through life cycle stages of existence. They must be understood and designed for.
These stages include awareness, consideration, acquisition, service and warranty, and reconsideration.
What is the best customer insight you have ever put to work for your business? We would love to hear about it. Would you do us a favor and tell us in the comments section? It would be greatly appreciated by our readers and us.
Need some help in building better customer trust from your customer experiences? Creative ideas to help grow your client relationships?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job and pay for results.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that struggle gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas to make your customer experiences better.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.
More reading on customer experience from our Library:
Client Satisfaction …10 Secrets to Improve Customer Experience
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 small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
John Rockefeller once was quoted: the secret of success is to do the common things uncommonly well. A secret? No, not really. Small things? Yes, certainly. Sometimes small actions or inactions by a business can have a big impact on customer experiences. And it is usually due to a lack of an explicit customer experience strategy.
Companies lose customers for a variety of reasons, some of which they never discover. Sometimes customers walk away after a single unpleasant experience. Other times they’re frustrated by a series of small perceived problems.
Is a lack of a customer experience strategy costing your company customers? Do you know the answer?
It is not rocket science, is it? It is a key secret to your success, however.
Creating a great customer experience for your business requires more than just good customer service. You have to get to know your customers and invest in longer-term relationships so you can provide personalized experiences across the customer journey — from beginning to end.
The truth is, it usually takes significantly more time and energy to find new customers than it does to lose them.
So you can be sure a strategy to build a positive customer experience can pay off when done well.
All the marketing in the world cannot make up the damage when it is done poorly or ignored.
Customers today interact with businesses in many different ways, leading to numerous touch points and tremendous opportunities for positively influencing their customer experience.
If one considers the hundreds of interactions each customer has throughout his/her lifecycle with a company, how do you define a customer experience to focus their limited resources?
Here are some priorities to consider:
What is the experience that you are trying to deliver?
You need to define in no uncertain terms what you are striving to achieve with your Customer Experience.
You are somewhere now; but you want to improve, which is to say you want to be somewhere else.
You need to define where that is and share it throughout your organization.
To test this concept, I like to ask three people in your organization from different departments this question and see if I get three different answers.
Successful companies will have all three employees uttering the one response. However, most organizations do not have a clear articulation of the Customer Experience they are trying to deliver and we typically get three different answers.
What emotions are you trying to evoke in your customers?
Over half of a Customer Experience is about how customers feel. Relationships are all about emotions, and you have a relationship with your customers.
For us, one of the key things we look for is an emotion that drives value (i.e., $$$$) for your organization. Knowing what that emotion is for your organization is critical and evoking it is, too.
Customer experience strategy … what is the subconscious experience?
My regular readers (and regular podcast listeners) know that I talk about this a lot.
A Customer Experience is made up of the rational experience, or the things a customer is doing, and the emotional experience, or how the customer is feeling about the experience.
Also, there is the subconscious experience, which is the part of the experience of which the customer isn’t even aware but is happening beneath the surface.
Finally, there is the psychological experience, which is how our brains influence our interpretation of and behavior during an interaction.
The subconscious experience is often the part most organizations aren’t aware they are producing. It usually takes examining your experience from the outside in, as if you were a customer, to discover how the moments in your present experience affect your subconscious.
Customer experience strategy … what do your customers really want?
What customers tell you they are going to do and what they do can be entirely different. For example, I often bring up the case of the type of food you eat at Disneyland. Park attendees told Disney they wanted the option of a salad.
However, when guests ordered food at Disneyland, they ate hamburgers and fries. So, maybe what customers really want is a calorie-free hamburger and fries; now THAT would be some Disney Magic right there!
All joking aside, customers might tell you they want something but then do something different within your experience. It is your job to ascertain what people really want in the experience (i.e., research) so you can provide it—even if they didn’t say it themselves.
How well are you embracing your customers’ irrationality?
This question addresses all the concepts we cover about Behavioral Economics, which is how psychology affects our actions as customers. Your customers are people, which means they are mostly irrational beings.
How they feel affects how they behave. If you don’t accept or believe this concept, then you will have problems improving your Customer Experience past a certain point.
To take it to the next level of excellence, you need to understand your customers’ psychology and how your experience triggers their reactions.
In our experience as global Customer Experience consultants, we find that most organizations do not understand these concepts or how their experience affects their customers’ psychological experience.
Customer experience strategy … is your customer experience deliberate?
Most organizations we work with have an experience that is accidental or consequential. In other words, they are unintentionally providing the experience they have.
They have not considered how the moments throughout the customer experience evoke emotions and how those emotions affect the steps a customer takes next.
Most organizations look at their experience from the inside and out at the customer.
We encourage them to take an outside-in approach and experience the interaction with their organization as if they were a customer themselves.
This exercise often reveals ways to design a Customer Experience that will be what they want instead of what they happen to have.
As global Customer Experience consultants, we often see organizations make the mistake of trying to improve their experience without actually changing anything in the organization.
Naïve, Transactional, Enlightened, or Natural. The Natural companies are the most customer-centric, while the Naïve is not so much.
Although this may sound obvious, when striving to improve customer experience, it is critical to define the segments in the marketplace that you want your business to focus on.
Map the consumer experience steps
Define the steps of the consumer journey. Remember to think of the entire journey, not just the steps your company is involved in.
For example, for the home movie entertainment businesses, these steps would be: define the occasion, select a title, get, watch, and return the movie.
It’s important to map these steps for each of your priority segments.
Also important for each step of the journey is to understand the time spent, the activities performed, the criteria used to make a decision and move to the next step of the journey.
And finally defining how to make each step as short and easy as possible.
Understand influencers
Define the categories of influencers at each step of the journey. Touchpoints are opportunities to intersect with and influence the customer experience.
In the home entertainment example, the influencers would be self, retailers, external resources, friends, family members, and movie studios. Remember that the activities performed by a consumer fit at the intersection of an influencer with each step of the journey.
For example, a consumer may go to Netflix and view recommendations and retailers would be the influencer.
In this example, providing online recommendations that are trusted would be the touch-point. For each priority segment, understanding the relative importance of various influencers by steps of the consumer journey is the key to success.
Experiment with collaboration
An effective way to ensure that experiences meet customers’ needs is to bring customers and frontline employees into the design process through collaboration.
And yes, in our opinion there are many customers that would welcome this approach.
When they are face-to-face with a design team, customers can provide valuable input, including firsthand accounts of what they want seeds of ideas to build upon, and feedback for real-time prototyping.
Align customer-facing employees
The quality of customer experience depends on a complex interdependent set of employees, partners, processes, policies, and technology.
Firms like USAA, Apple, Zappos, and Starwood Hotels are firms that do a good job of orchestrating across their enterprise.
USAA has identified approximately 100 key experiences associated with customer company engagements like buying a car or preparing to deploy abroad, all of which have owners and cross-functional teams responsible for detailed customer processes.
For one of those car buying experiences, the company manages auto dealership relationships on behalf of customers, understanding that customer hesitation haggling with dealers for pricing slows its ability to provide loans and sell insurance.
Customer experience strategy … act on customer signals
Your customer insights are essential to this effort. We’re not talking just satisfaction surveys—good customer understanding doesn’t come just from spreadsheets and data crunching.
Instead, we’re talking about customer sentiments and needs through detailed customer observation, listening and relationship building.
Social skills that identify and shares unspoken or latent needs. A process of gaining good insights and then acting on them.
Experimenting at first and then full ahead. Having a governance mechanism to act on insights is critical…otherwise, there will be no positive change.
Activate Improvements
Now for the most critical touch points, you could generate ideas for improvement.
In the example above, an activation idea could be to develop a studio agnostic website that incents consumers to state their preferences, tracks their viewership, and accordingly makes highly relevant recommendations for what to watch next.
After you have implemented this framework for the first time, it will yield recommendations for what data to collect and at which critical touch points, and what types of analyses and metrics are needed to improve the customer experience.
A customer experience example
Want to know one of the most effective ways Zappos has found to create reciprocity with their customers? And create customer experience differentiation at the same time?
Surprise them!
People like getting things for free and like them, even more, when they are viewed as “favors,” but they love receiving these favors as surprises.
For instance, did you know that Zappos automatically upgrades all purchases to priority shipping … without so much as even a mention on the sales or checkout page?
Why offer this sort of benefit without mentioning it?
Simple: A company like Zappos, a business leader in customer service, recognizes the benefits of surprising people with a next day delivery. That’s not even mentioning the fact that this shipping creates immense goodwill between Zappos and their first-time buyers.
That kind of reciprocity is justified by almost any cost, and the hit Zappos takes by doing this is paid back multiple times over by the customer loyalty they generate from making people happy.
Companies that are proactively managing all elements of their customer experiences are most successful in achieving customer loyalty.
The bottom line
It’s always good practice to meet customers’ expectations and ensure they are satisfied and happy with your business — but if your strategy ends there, you’re missing out on all the value you can drive back into your business.
Make an effort to leverage that superior customer experience into new and repeat business, and pretty soon, you’ll reap all the rewards of satisfied, long-term customers.
Remember, customers create the most value for you … when you create the most value for them.
People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Maya Angelou
Before we continue, let me ask you a question.
What works best for customer experience design in your business? We would love to hear what it was. Would you do us a favor and post it in the comments section below? Be the one who starts a conversation.
We often get questions and comments on delivering great customer service and experiences. From clients and customers commenting on our blog. Many relate to customer service actions that are reminders of what we already know (but we occasionally forget). These are big enablers of customer service. They usually won’t create Wow service on their own, but their absence is noted by customers and lowers excellent customer service to just good enough or less.
Here are eight well-known customer service actions that are effective in keeping us on track, so we consistently deliver what our customers want from us.
Much of how we help people deliver better customer service is with examples. These are fun and useful because we all have them (since we’re all customers.) And sometimes it helps to look at examples of things we shouldn’t say to customers. That is if we want them to keep coming back.
So, here is my top 10 list of actions not to take or things you should never say to a customer that we often use in client workshops:
Lower customer experience … following a script
Because scripts and checklists are all the rage now, employees are scripted to death. Many feel (and some are told) they are not there to think but to follow the script. And often that’s exactly what they do, even when it makes no sense and wastes the customer’s time.
When I hear a script, I wonder if the person has the capability to help me. Not a confidence builder, is it? If you have a script or checklist, pay attention to the real world too. Your customers will thank you.
Related post: Client Satisfaction …10 Secrets to Improve Customer Experience
Never say not my error.
Not my error
Never pass the buck or blame someone else, especially if they’re part of your company. You don’t look any better or smarter by doing so. But you certainly appear uninterested in solving the customer’s problem. Your time is better spent fixing and helping rather than blaming and finger-pointing.
I’m sorry if you feel that way
People often say this as an apology. But it’s not. Because it again shifts the blame to the customer.
If you’re sorry, then say so. Don’t qualify it. When customers hear an apology like this, they understand what you’re doing. You’re saying, “I know I’m supposed to apologize, but I don’t want to.“
Related: Crash Course on How to Apologize to a Customer
A better option is just to say “I’m sorry this happened” or simply “I’m sorry.”
It tells the customer you are sorry for the situation the customer is in without making you responsible for it.
Customer experience optimization … just calm down
Is there ever a situation where this has the intended effect? Not that we can see. It seems like you are tossing gasoline on the fire.
More like they’ll get even angrier while they tell YOU to calm down. They’ll escalate the matter, and they’ll probably become a former customer.
Listen, let them vent, have them talk to someone else if they want. But never tell them to calm down.
Recording: Your call is very important to us.
I hear this so often I ignore it. And that is how it should be. A recorded message is not the place to tell your customers how much you value their business. Do it with a real, live, caring human being. That’s a message your customers will believe (and respond to).
Customer experience strategy … you made a mistake
We all know customers make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. But when you point it out in a direct and blatant way, you risk offending or embarrassing your customer. How would you like it? No blaming is needed. Instead, focus on helping them understand the right way to do things so they won’t make the mistake again.
Talk to corporate office
If a customer has feedback, a request or a complaint, they don’t care who YOU have to forward it to. They don’t care that another person in you organization will deal with it. What they want is for YOU to take the initiative to get the ball rolling. It’s not the customer’s job to go trying to find the exact person who should handle their situation. That’s YOUR job.
Importance of customer experience.
Lower customer experience … it’s our company policy
With too many employees this is just an easy way to get out of doing something they’d rather not do.
If you want to help, then find a way. Don’t hide behind a company policy. And if you can’t work around the policy, offer an alternative or escalate the matter for the customer. If your customers see you are trying to help, they’ll be less disappointed even if they don’t get exactly what they want.
Please take a number (often when you’re the only customer)
If I were the customer in this situation, “huh?” is the only response I’d be able to muster, assuming I didn’t just walk out. But it happens. People get so focused on policies, procedures, systems and rules that they forget about a little tool called “common sense.”
No one else has complained
This one always amazes me. Are we taking a survey? Are we voting on the situation? If enough other customers have a problem then you’ll listen to me (or handle my problem)? Is that really how you want to be perceived?
Of course not, that’s ridiculous. But I’ve heard employees (and managers) say this all too often. The problem is they are focusing on their perspective. They should be focusing on the customer and helping solve a problem.
Remember one simple thing here: all employees need to view themselves as customer advocates, period. Customer service actions that are remarkable get talked about. And getting talked about in this light is a great thing, right? No question.
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?
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.
It’s up to you to keep improving your customer attention and focus. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, 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 fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Need some help in building better customer trust from your customer experiences? Creative ideas to help grow your customer relationships?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job and pay for results.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas to make your customer experiences better.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.
More reading on customer experience from our Library:
Client Satisfaction …10 Secrets to Improve Customer Experience
