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Taking Your Customer Experience to The Next Level
Paula Kaye • 27 November 2020
From Mediocre to Magical
We all have stories of truly memorable customer service that lifts your spirits and makes you want to share your experience with others. So, what is the magic dust that makes good service great and makes a satisfactory customer experience a memorable one? Knowing this answer will enable you to differentiate your business from the competition. We can all think of businesses that consistently get their customer service experience right and we reward them with our loyalty. These businesses do not have a silver bullet, so what do they have that transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary?
I spent over 35 years working with businesses that deliver award winning customer service. I have had the pleasure of leading and developing the customer service strategy within Bettys for many of those years, so I am well qualified to know what it takes to achieve this. COVID-19 has made the delivery of an exceptional customer experience more important than ever, as businesses need to ensure that customers want to return and that they can build loyalty. Below I share the key things you need to do if you want to create a customer experience that is anything but ordinary.
1. Listen
– creating a culture of extraordinary service requires businesses to actively listen to their front-line people and their customers. Keep close to your customers and gather data and feedback on their experience so you can continuously develop and improve it. Everyone in the team needs to be aligned to a mission based around great service and Leaders need to make it their business to remove any barriers or obstacles that get in the way. Making sure your front-line staff have the right tools and equipment to deliver great service and prioritising all the things that make great service delivery easy and inevitable.
2. Consistency is key,
great service never has a day off, you need to deliver on your brand promise every time. By mapping the step by step customer journey so every member of the team knows exactly what they need to deliver for the customer to feel special and engaged. This should start from the moment customers are planning their visit through to the welcome on arrival and right through to the thank you and goodbye. A way to envisage this is to imagine your customers are taking a magic carpet ride, for them to have the full experience you need to ensure nothing is missed out so your customers can enjoy the full brand experience delivered to them by ambassadors and promoters of your brand.
3. Systems behind the service: You need to have the right processes and practices to make the delivery of exceptional service easy. This includes a clear purpose beyond making money that all the team can get behind. Having defined service values around employees’ behaviours will provide clarity on expectations so they can hold themselves and one another to account. A great Induction and onboarding process centred around your Customer Experience. Service Manuals that provide a step by step guide to support training and embed best practice. Having the right people is critical so ensuring your recruitment policy reflects the need to recruit for personality, appointing people who have a natural flair/ desire to be of service. Consider putting in place daily briefings to reinforce the mission and to set your team up for success.
4. Reward the behaviours you want to see, develop a Reward and Recognition initiative, sharing stories of great customer engagement to highlight and encourage best practice. Measure customer satisfaction in a way that allows customers to highlight great staff members and ensure leaders take time to speak to and acknowledge those mentioned. Promote the idea of lateral customer service to develop a culture of peer-based recognition allowing employees to nominate colleagues who they see go out of their way to deliver great service either internally or directly to a customer. Leaders need to role model this, taking time to acknowledge those who go out of their way to deliver exceptional service.
5. Keep raising the bar
as great service never stops you need to be relentless in your pursuit of customer service excellence. Develop a culture of continuous improvement encourage ideas from the team to evolve and improve the way you do things. Get everyone in the team to ask yourselves each week what they have done to make a difference to the customer experience and share the stories.
6. Recovery Quickly:
Every business gets it wrong sometimes, but customer focused ones know they need to put things right quickly and professionally. They have an excellent recovery process for complaints, and they empower their teams to do what is needed to make sure that every customer goes away delighted. They respond to complaints in a timely matter, always within 24 hours of receiving it. They track complaints and collate information so they can use this data effectively to highlight any themes and they work tirelessly to address them.
Businesses with a culture of great service know happy staff mean happy customers, so they put people at the heart of everything they do. They invest in their people, seeing value in training and developing their teams so they can be the best they can be. They know customers value the opportunity to build rapport and relationship, creating a loyal and engaged team provides stability and tenure means staff can get to know their customers, their likes and dislikes, allowing them to anticipate their needs and build strong relationships.
They never adopt hard selling techniques as the quality of their products and service means they don’t need to as employees feel proud to share knowledge and assist customers in navigating the menu without feeling the pressure to directly sell. Great service is all about making the process as easy and enjoyable as you can for your customer. Great service is seamless every element creates a chain reaction that delights customers it builds trust and makes the customer feel special and looked after.
Businesses with a great service culture create a loyal customer base by building strong and authentic relationships. Their customers and staff become their ambassadors and promoters by sharing the experience with other. A positive legacy of the pandemic is that customers will be seeking out businesses that provide an experience that engages with them on an emotional level, lifting spirits and creating happiness.
If want to know how you take your customer experience to a new level contact me at enquires@boost-consultancy.co.uk
or call me on 07595 278159
as I would love to help.
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