Over the past several months, I have done a lot of thinking about how to better assist my clients with their business. One thing we are doing is focusing on the customer experience.
Here are a few things you can do to improve your customer’s experience:
1. Get your customer’s FEEDBACK. While you may not want to hear negative complaints from customers, trust me – you do. This is the only way you can solve problems – and actually it is the best way to build loyal customers. They will appreciate when you bend over backwards to handle their concerns, thereby building a stronger relationship. Here are ten questions you can ask your customer.
2. OBSERVE your customer. What they say, and what they actually do, are sometimes different. Point is, you should always monitor the behavior of your customers, and see how they go through your company experience. It won’t be a smooth as you might expect…
3. Be sure they understand the VALUE you bring. Tell them that story. Often. Be sure they understand what value you bring to their business – how you are making them better. This enables them to better spread your story to their network.
4. EMPOWER your employees. It is critical that you give your employees the freedom to handle customer complaints and needs – on a moment’s notice. If you do not empower your employees to make decisions on their own – then you are seriously limiting your ability to satisfy and serve your customer.
5. Make yourself ACCESSIBLE. Make it easy for your customers to find you when they need you. In this day and age of easy communication – there is no excuse not to be easily found.
6. BE your brand. You must always live your brand. If you position yourself as a green company, you better always live that brand. If at any time you deviate from your brand, you will injure that reputation, and business will suffer. People will pay a premium to live the brand with you.
7. Never stop INNOVATING. Looking for ways to improve your service, product offerings, and customer experience – never stops. The minute you stop seeking improvements is the minute your business begins to fade away. As soon as you bring a new innovation to market isn’t the time to start looking for the next one – you should already be on that path.
8. Make your website EASY. Sometimes you, the business owner, may like the look and feel of your company website, but what does your customers and prospects think? Your site won’t always make the same sense to a new user as it does to you.
9. Make the experience UNIQUE. A person makes lots of transactions and decisions each day. They buy goods from the grocery, pay a utility bill, buy songs from iTunes, etc. What you should strive for is a unique business experience – one that stands out and is memorable. And what happens when your customer experiences this? They come back. And they tell others!
10. COMMUNICATE. Reach out to your customers. Often. Use social media tools. Blog. Send newsletters. E-newsletters. Progress reports. Keep them in the loop about what is going on.
11. TRAIN. If you want your employees to behave a certain way, and learn habits that will serve customers well, you need to establish good training programs. But also know that training never stops. The best athletes never stop practicing.
12. Install SYSTEMS. Establishing set processes and systems that are meticulously followed by you and your employees can create a standard that customers will come to trust and expect. Don’t get trapped into never changing (always be looking for improvements), but a system allows your company to perform consistently, and systems bring comfort to customers.
13. Have FUN. If you aren’t enjoying yourself and having fun running your business, you are not providing an environment suitable for you and your employees to give a good customer experience. Make working your business fun – and the customer will certainly benefit.
14. Think Customer FIRST. It is a mistake we all make. When we make decisions, we sometimes don’t think about how those decisions will impact the overall customer experience. You should not do ONE thing (however remote) in your business where you don’t question how it will impact the customer.
What are other ways to improve the customer experience?
{ 7 comments }
The tendencies that cause companies to want #12 cause them to fail miserably at #4.
Yeah, you make a great point. A lot of the companies I deal with choose one over the other. But I think you can achieve both. Do you? The beauty of a system is consistency – but a day in the life of any business is hardly consistent. And employees have to be able to deal with unique customer issues.
Hi, Todd. I love talking about customer experience and service, and your post falls on the heels of a few days (for me) steeped in conversations on the topics.
As you probably know, at SouthBySouthwest, Tony Hsich, CEO of Zappos, gave a fabulous keynote about building a strong company culture–a culture that permeates from the inside out (to its customers). Each year, Zappos updates its culture book, the handbook for employees. On the website it’s for purchase around $18, but you might also try asking for a comp copy (I just did via live chat, referencing #sxsw) if interested.
On the angle about soliciting client feedback, I’m a big proponent of the Net Promoter score, although one of my previous employers took a slightly different tact with quarterly satisfaction calls. The results fed into quarterly benchmarks and essentially the company was “graded” based on the median. Meeting goal meant bonus; not meeting goal meant no bonus.
Also at #SXSW was an interesting presentation by iFroggy (@ifroggy). Patrick O’Keefe, author, had a great talk about leveraging customer feedback. Topline, his suggestions were to be authentic in soliciting feedback–even if you disagree with what’s said, ask probing questions and try to find something to learn from it. Also, be appreciative of the time and interest the person took in offering feedback–again, there’s usually something to take-away of value.
Good post, thank you for the suggestions.
Thanks Heather, for the thoughtful and substantive comment. Zappos is the model I think for providing an environment where everyone can serve and give a good experience. And good to know about iFroggy’s presentation. You can’t get enough feedback, IMHO.
And, I look forward to hanging with you next year at SXSW!
Excellent Post, Todd (and Follow-up Commenters).
Expansion on #9 (Make The Experience Unique) — particularly powerful in the professional services environment, but surely has merit with tangible products as well . . . Make the PRE-purchase and POST-purchase experience truly unique — something your competitors are unable or unwilling to replicate.
I recently took a crack at describing this on the POST-purchase side at: http://tinyurl.com/avkwlx
Many advantages — not the least of which: Doing so can cost very little, or even nothing to execute.
Thanks for your contribution Stone – and you are right – sometimes the only cost is time and a little effort. But the payout is so huge! And I love the “Morning After” post!
Todd,
So many good points in this post – you should break it out and let us comment in detail on each one. Feedback from customers is good, but you’re right: you must OBSERVE.
Most people don’t like to give negative feedback to your face. So they’ll present a pleasant lie (“I just didn’t have time” or “We’re cutting the budget”) rather than tell you they don’t see the value in your product or they find your offerings to be too complicated.
Sometimes they don’t really know why they stopped coming to your store, or quit using their product. Most consumers don’t ask themselves if the product is valuable or if they are engaged by your organization. So if these are the missing elements, they simply don’t have the language to describe it. How can they give you feedback if they aren’t aware of why they dropped you?
One useful tool for me is to talk to people about why they stopped using a similar product to ours and to make sure we don’t fall into the same trap. It’s much easier to get them to talk about someone else’s mistakes than your own!
Beth
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