Reanimate the Customer Experience

August 9, 2021
TOPRESTONBW

“We are not in the business of turning people away," said the manager of a new dining establishment as he followed my family outside.

The one-hour wait was more than we were willing to endure so we had decided to eat elsewhere. As he caught up with us, he invited us to  stay, assuring us that we would be seated within five minutes. We, of course, agreed and he opened a new section and waited on us himself. Little did the manager know that the new  restaurant was within walking distance from my office. Through the years I referred friends and colleagues, scheduled multiple lunches, dinners and events at the restaurant. An exceptional experience initiated by a leader and reflected by the entire staff led to years loyal patronage. 

To have an experience with a brand that leaves you thinking, “They get me," is a distinctive event, especially when it is repeated. You remember it. You talk about it. You form an affinity to the business and brand. You also know it did not happen by accident. It was architected and executed by a culture fixated on creating a remarkable customer experience. 

As the business world recovers from the collective disruption of a global pandemic, it is time to reanimate the customer experience with new breadth and depth. It is imperative to build back  a business that will sustain through the certainty of future disruptions and thrive in fluctuating business climates. 

How do you evolve your business and imbue your culture with a customer-centric ethic that  actually modifies your organizational DNA? Begin with a clear understanding of what customer  experience is and what it is not. It is not customer service.

Forbes defines the difference  between customer experience and customer service this way: Customer service is the advice or assistance a company gives its customers; customer experience is the total journey of a customer's continued interactions with a brand and the perceptions that customer internalizes  about your business. 

Under that definitional framework, here are four steps to becoming a customer-experience-driven company: 

1. Quantify your current operating reality. 

How does your business measure-up, exactly? Answering this question with a set of quantifiable customer-experience measures is critical. This is a two-way mirror: an objective inward assessment of your company and an assessment of your customer's perspective of interacting with your company. Gathering insights from customers on market conditions, demographics, products and services, competitors and their overall experience, then objectively correlating those to growth and performance for the company, will yield a trove of actionable results. With pertinent results, you can begin to stitch together plans that will decisively alter the fabric of your customer experience efforts.

2. Qualify crucial customer context.

From the first impression of your brand on a prospect, they are forming perceptions of your company. The value your brand messaging conveys, whether digital or direct, begins to  establish a context for the relationship. Qualifying the value your company can deliver in the context of the results that the customers expect to attain can be an enigmatic process. How does the customer define the success of the relationship? How will they objectively measure success? If your solution reduces time investment, speeds productivity and time to market for the customer, will you get credit? How does your customer quantify the results of your solution on their market performance, both top and bottom line? These are all qualifying questions that contextualize customers’ expectations. Establishing these performance expectations will allow  you to minimize, or even eliminate, variations in interpreting outcomes. 

This process is the practical outworking of the axiom, “Begin with the end in mind." The  framework within which you establish the context of customer success should be a collection of performance measurements you can regularly communicate to customers. Your team will  construct, track and manage the customer based upon these measures for the entirety of the customer lifecycle. 

3. Take radical ownership of outcomes.

From the outset, your team should be acutely focused on delivering on customer expectations. In every customer relationship, there is a time when promises made must become promises kept. Full transparency and accountability to performance outcomes are the central ingredients  in establishing trust with your customers. Providing detailed metrics and analytics on a scheduled basis through a business review process or dynamic dashboard of activity will advance the relationship, demonstrate your commitment to creating quantifiable value and facilitate business expansion opportunities. Furthermore, it will create historical performance records that you can reference at any time during the lifecycle of a customer. 

Was the restaurant from my earlier example always perfect in their customer experience delivery? Of course not. The goal of perfection is a myth. However, the service staff owned their mistakes and quickly remedied any service shortfalls. In your business you cannot be perfect in execution, but you can be perfectly consistent in the transparent and accountable way you remedy underperformance. Own the responsibility for misses and the subsequent recovery plan, and your customers will indeed view you as radically different from your competition. 

4. Galvanize and G\grade your resources.

Customer experience is the sum total of all interactions a customer has with your brand or business. This includes all passive and active communication through digital and direct channels. Every touchpoint matters. Every department within a company creates output that impacts the customer experience. Thus, every department should have multiple customer-experience measurements built into their performance evaluation. Galvanizing the entire company to see their work product through the eyes of the customer is another stitch in the cultural fabric. 

By adopting key customer experience measurements within your organization, you will be able to hone in on troubled departments or associates rather quickly. Each department should have metrics that roll up to executive management. This kind of accountability will ensure that your resources are performing at standards that will exceed your customer’s performance expectations, as well as your own.  

Every company has some vestige of customer-centricity in their DNA, otherwise they would not have survived their first year of existence. Following these four steps will launch you and your company on a journey where customer experience transcends culture and becomes a business philosophy. With the customer at the core of your philosophical beliefs, the company culture will automatically trigger the kind of experience that will set you apart from all others. 

Author’s Note: Watch for new articles that unpack each of these four steps to becoming a customer-experience-driven company.