Does any business leader seriously question the importance of deeply understanding their customers and delivering consistently satisfying experiences? We’d hope not. Demanding customers—more empowered than ever by technology—long ago made the idea of customer experience management a boardroom priority. Satisfy your customers or your competitors soon will.

There’s an upside to succeeding at customer experience management, too. Work by Forrester Research and others demonstrates that customer experience leaders outperform laggards on revenue growth and shareholder returns.

Leaders seem to understand this combined threat and opportunity:

Forrester Research further reports that 57% of companies aspire to be the customer experience leader in their industry.¹
Gartner reports that by 2016 89% of companies plan to compete primarily on the basis of the customer experience.

Unfortunately, many organizations undertake ambitious customer experience management initiatives and fail to see any meaningful benefit. Customer defections continue and revenue growth remains sluggish. And it’s only going to get more challenging going forward. Simple arithmetic dictates that 57% of companies can’t simultaneously lead their industries by competing on customer experience.

The fundamental problem traces to an all-too-common “inside-out” perspective on customers and their expectations. Inside-out thinking mistakenly focuses on what’s important or interesting to the organization, not the customer. It overlooks an essential truth: your customers’ perceptions are your reality. Their internal, personal sense of what they expected and experienced must therefore be at the core of your customer experience thinking.

Customer experience: how customers perceive their interactions with you

Megan Burns, Forrester Research VP, principal analyst

At a recent customer experience roundtable hosted by Connective DX in Boston, guest speaker Megan Burns, Forrester Research VP, principal analyst serving customer experience professionals, said that for practitioners, CX can be defined as how customers perceive their interactions with you. She stressed that there’s often a disconnect between customer perceptions and what the organization thinks is important or what should be important. To get CX right companies need to find ways to meet customer goals and business goals at the same time.

Her point is well taken. If you’re measuring and prioritizing things that matter to the business but not to customers you’re likely to have problems. If you’re not doing well in the things that your customers care about, your hopes of increasing loyalty and customer advocacy aren’t great.

At the event, Burns brought this truth to life with a fascinating case study from Delta Air Lines. Respected as a customer experience leader now, Delta struggled badly after a bankruptcy and 2008 merger with Northwest Airlines. Improvement ideas came and went with no real impact.

Top-down customer obsession transforms Delta’s customer experience

Research that Delta did with passengers in 2010 surfaced an interesting insight: Delta’s target customers value schedule predictability more than expected they hate the headaches caused by canceled flights. While neither one is good, it’s better to have a a delay than a cancellation. At least with a delay you’re more certain that you’ll still get to where you need to go.

Armed with a powerful insight about something that truly mattered to customers, Delta sprung into action. “If that’s what customers hate most, let’s not cancel any more flights,” said Dave Holtz, Delta’s vice president of operations control, in a Wall Street Journal interview. “We started twisting our whole model.”

With top-down support, Delta began to obsess about keeping passengers moving toward their destination. They invested in better crew scheduling software, accelerated repairs by stockpiling spare parts at hubs, and proactively handled aircraft maintenance—before breakdowns occurred. They even co-located teams to tighten communications. Most importantly, a no-cancellation mindset slowly permeated the organization, top to bottom.

It took time, but Delta eventually delivered unprecedented, industry-leading performance. The same Wall Street Journal article reported that in 2013 Delta “cancelled just 0.3% of its flights, according to flight-tracking service FlightStats.com. That was twice as good as the next-best airlines, Southwest and Alaska, and five times better than the industry average of 1.7%.” On a full 72 days of 2013, Delta didn’t cancel a single one of its 2,500 flights. “We’re posting numbers that we’ve never seen in our industry,” said Delta President Edward Bastian.

By mid-2014, Bloomberg News noted, “For all practical purposes, the nation’s third-largest airline no longer cancels flights. Delta scrubbed 19 flights in June—that’s out of 69,621 flights in total.”

Delta’s finding about how important it is to avoid flight cancellations was quickly validated by customer feedback. According to the July 2014 Forrester report, “Case Study: How Delta Air Lines Soared In The Customer Experience Index,” the airline shot up in Forrester’s 2014 Customer Experience Index benchmark. The American Customer Satisfaction Index’s 2014 report named Delta the leader in satisfaction among legacy airlines. That performance represents a 27% improvement since its all-time low in 2011. J.D. Power’s 2015 North America Airline Satisfaction study further confirmed Delta’s place as the leader amongst legacy airlines.

Great CX delivers market-leading shareholder returns

But Delta’s improved customer experience does not only make life easier for customers. As this stock performance chart from Jan. 10, 2010 through Sept. 30, 2015, shows, great CX was also a win for shareholders.

Delta’s stock performance eclipsed the S&P 500 as well as the Dow Transportation Index (Yahoo! Finance).

We bring this story back to an important takeaway for leaders looking to improve their organization’s customer experience. Delta’s customer turnaround, Burns notes, came only because they took an outside-in mindset. That is, they focused obsessively on what matters to customers, trusting that helping customers achieve their goals is the best way for a business to achieve theirs. As you think about improving your customer experience, we encourage you to challenge yourself to do likewise.

This is your time to create remarkable customer service experiences to create lasting relationships with your customers. Customer service skills.

customer service skills — Customer service skills

How often, as a customer, do you experience WOW customer service … the type that you normally can’t imagine? If it is often, would you consider yourself an expert in customer service skills?

Check out our thoughts on customer focus.

Average or less customer service seems like the norm in many industries. In some, it’s so common that when we provide great service, we yield customers who feel like they’ve won the lottery, if only for a moment. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Creating a customer service evangelist should not be rocket science, should it?

If you were asked to name the top 5-10 items that have the greatest influence on creating a customer service evangelist, what would your list include?

Our agency often runs customer experience/service design workshops, and this question is a key exercise in the workshop.

With that said, let’s get into some specific skills that every support employee can master to “WOW” the customers that they interact with on a daily basis…

Connect and give credence to every customer

This is critical. This is where you establish rapport and begin a relationship building process. Connecting means you’re building trust that runs both ways. Do this by engaging your customer.

Start by giving them your name and asking theirs.

Be interested in them and what they want. Ask questions. Listen. Respond appropriately. Have a conversation with them. Be genuine.

People know whether you are genuinely interested in helping them or not. If you are, they are more likely to respond positively to you and to develop trust with you. If you are not interested, they’ll sense it.

You’ll have a much harder time developing the trust you need to help them.

Customer service skills … Patience

If you don’t see this near the top of a customer service skills list, you should just stop considering customer service.

Derek Sivers explained his view on “slower” service as being an interaction where the time spent with the customer was used to understand their problems and needs better from the company.

If you deal with customers on a daily basis, be sure to stay patient when they come to you stumped and frustrated, but also be sure to take the time to figure truly out what they want — they’d rather get competent service than being rushed out the door!

Pay special attention to complaints

Remember that complaints are often your best source of insights. In a recent article on Inc., Evernote CEO Phil Libin spoke about why he loves his most negative customers.

As he said in the article, customer feedback is great for telling you what you did wrong. It is not as effective on what you should do next.

Avoid criticizing specific employees but make sure everyone knows when there is bad news. Use it as a learning opportunity. Discuss what went wrong and how you might prevent it in the future.

Good service duties … attentiveness

The ability to listen to customers is essential to providing great service for some reasons.

Not only is it important to pay attention to individual customer interactions (watching the language/terms that they use to describe their problems), but it’s also important to be mindful and attentive to the feedback that you receive at large.

What are your customers telling you without saying it?

Gain insights

If you have a genuine conversation with your customer, you will discover insights into their wants and needs. Customers don’t always know what they want, or they might have trouble expressing it.

Often people know what they want, but they’re unsure how to get it. That’s where your engagement comes in.

By asking pertinent questions and paying attention to the answers, you can discover a lot about your customer. You can help guide them to getting what they want. That’s the role you fill.

Good customer service examples … clear communication skills

Make sure you’re getting to the problem at hand quickly; customers don’t need your life story or to hear about how your day is going.

More importantly, you need to be cautious about how some of your communication habits translate to customers, and it’s best to err on the side of caution whenever you find yourself questioning a situation.

Knowledge of the Product

The best forward-facing employees in your company will work on having a deep knowledge of how your product works.

It’s not that every single team member should be able to build your product from scratch, but rather they should know the ins and outs of how your product works, just like a customer who uses it every day would.

Without knowing your product from front-to-back, you won’t know how to help customers when they run into problems.

“Read” Customers

You won’t always be able to see customers face-to-face, and in many instances (nowadays) you won’t even hear a customer’s voice!

That doesn’t exempt you from understanding some basic principles of behavioral psychology and being able to “read” the customer’s current emotional state.

This skill is essential because you don’t want to misread a customer and end up losing them due to confusion and miscommunication.

Look and listen for subtle clues about their current mood, patience level, personality, etc., and you’ll go far in keeping your customer interactions positive.

Calming demeanor

There are a lot of metaphors for this type of personality: “keeps their cool,” “staying cool under pressure,” etc., but it all represents the same thing.

It represents the ability that some people have to stay calm and even influence others when things get a little hectic.

The best customer service reps know that they cannot let a heated customer force them to lose their cool; in fact, it is their job to try to be the “rock” for a customer who thinks the world is falling due to their current problem.

Goal oriented

This may seem like a strange thing to list as a customer service skill, but I assure you that it is vitally important.

When we empower employees, we note that many customer service experts have shown how giving employees the unfettered power to “WOW” customers don’t always generate the returns that many businesses expect to see.

That’s because it leaves employees without goals, and business goals + customer happiness can work hand-in-hand without resulting in poor service.

Handle surprises

Sometimes the customer support world is going to throw you a curveball.

Maybe the problem you encounter isn’t specifically covered by the company’s guidelines, or maybe the customer isn’t reacting how you thought they would.

Whatever the case, it’s best to be able to think on your feet… but it’s even better to create guidelines for yourself in these sorts of situations.

Persuasion skills

This is one a lot of people didn’t see coming!

Experienced customer support personnel know that often, you will get messages in your inbox that are more about the curiosity of your company’s product, rather than having problems with it.

To truly take your customer service skills to the next level, you need to have some mastery of persuasion so that you can convince interested customers that your product is right for them (if it truly is).

Tenacity

Call it what you want, but a great work ethic and a willingness to do what needs to be done (and not take shortcuts) are a key skill when providing the kind of service that people talk about.

The many memorable customer service examples out there (many of which had a huge impact on the business) were created by a single employee who refused just to do the “status quo” when it came to helping someone out.

Remembering that your customers are people too, and knowing that putting in the extra effort will come back to you ten-fold should be your driving motivation to never “cheat” your customers with lazy service.

What Have You Learned?

How about you? Do you have stories of people or companies that have completely “wowed” you with their customer service? Please join the conversation and share your thoughts.

Need some help in building better customer service for your customers? Have you noticed the growing importance of customer service you provide, especially for your marketing? Creative ideas to help enhance your word of mouth marketing?

Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your customer service improvement 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 for your service to customers.

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 at how reasonable we will be.