Upgrading to a new model of any kind of product can be an exciting customer experience … but not if you as a supplier don’t set it up for success. All too often, upgrades cause too many surprises, wasted time and money, and frustration. It just doesn’t make any sense to spoil what could be a perfect opportunity to strengthen your fan base into brand evangelists. After all, buying an upgrade means customers are giving you a new revenue stream and market share. Show your appreciation for that with these keys Read More
Make Good Customer Experiences Easy! 1 / 15 / 10
Loyalty Is Not Just For Customers 1 / 7 / 10
Customer loyalty is important to business success. Profitability of customer retention is pretty much common knowledge.
So companies do a lot to encourage customer behavior that favors their brand, to increase:
- Purchase frequency and volume
- Involvement and structural ties
- Recommendations of the brand.
Yet, like most things in life, loyalty is a two-way street. Who are you loyal to?
“Loyalty by its very nature Read More
Double-Check Assumptions & Motives to Improve Customer Experience 11 / 23 / 09
When a customer asks you a question, do you double-check your assumptions about their intended outcome? So often we take customer inquiries at face value, or simply assume we know what is meant. No matter what your job, you have customers, and clarifying your customers’ intended outcome is smart business.
Examining Customer’s Intended Outcomes
An intended outcome may be quite different from the words a person chooses to make a request or to give you feedback. Different personality types shape our phrasing as well as our hearing. Have you ever played Boggle? It’s a letter-scramble game that challenges players to identify as many words as possible, and typically, it’s quite surprising to see that another player has a completely different point of view and hence, a unique list of words. Similarly, every interaction we have with a customer poses the possibility of mis-matched speaking and hearing.
Furthermore, the big picture may be unclear initially. It’s like the story of the Read More
The Art of Listening, for Customer Experience Improvement 10 / 5 / 09
Curiosity is the key to great listening skills that improve customer experience. When you’re truly curious about your customer’s opinions, expectations and requests, you’ll find the customer to be more pleasant, interesting and fulfilling to you as well.
Get Over Me-Focused Listening!
It’s easy to tell yourself you’re listening when in reality you’re focused on yourself. Whenever you worry about and think about what to say next, you’re not focused on the customer. Whenever you feel bored or compelled to end the discussion, you’re probably focused on your own agenda. If you feel a sense of urgency to fix the situation or person or circumstances, you’re probably more interested in serving yourself rather than the customer.
Practice Customer-Focused Listening Skills
It’s really pretty simple to be customer-focused. Be curious!
1) Allow yourself to wonder what the customer’s world is like.
2) Focus on Read More
To Improve Customer Experience, Help Me Help You! 8 / 31 / 09
You’ve heard of garbage-in, garbage out, right? It’s amazing how often work teams put up with substandard inputs “thrown over the fence” from groups they rely on for information or materials to do their work. Faulty inputs lead to imperfect outputs and inconsistent customer experience.
Everything that external customers receive is the result of business processes. Any business process is typically deployed by several departments. Otherwise, it’s likely a sub-process of a bigger process that delivers value to external customers.
In other words, a business process involves a value chain of internal suppliers and internal customers. Help your internal suppliers help you deliver better customer experiences — analyze your business processes and proactively communicate with your internal suppliers.
Timeliness and quality of handoffs throughout this internal value chain snowball Read More
Inventing Great Customer Experiences 7 / 10 / 09
Every person in an organization is needed for customer experience innovation. That’s because customer expectations and competitive offerings are always on the rise. Your processes, policies, skills, and motivations have a lot to do with keeping customers coming back — and even more to do with customers deciding not to come back.
Think of your own situation as a customer — whenever you’ve decided not to go back to a certain product or service or place, it was usually because you were turned off by a process, policy, skill, or motivation, right?
For example, at Procter & Gamble — the company that makes Tide, Duracell, Cover Girl, Pampers, Pringles, and much more — every one of their 100,000-plus employees is expected to continually innovate customer experience. Those employees work in a manufacturing company, not stores. So how do they innovate great customer experiences? Read More
Building a Customer-Centric Culture 6 / 10 / 09
CLICK HERE FOR INTERNET RADIO VERSION
What Does it Mean to be Customer-centric?
To have the customer’s best interests as the focus of your attention — not to be pre-occupied in your own interests at the customer’s expense.
To do this, you need to:
(1) Really know the customer in order to anticipate their best interests.
(2) Differentiate between primary and secondary motives.
Customer-Centric Primary Motives:
Making it easier and nicer for the customer to get and use solutions.Self-Centric Secondary Motives:
Building revenue and profit through new product development, word-of-mouth, etc.
There’s a myth that talking often to your customers (sales, service, surveys, etc.) means you’re customer-focused. However, customer-focus goes beyond lip-service to the primary motives Read More
Do The Whole Job for Customer Experience Success 5 / 15 / 09
CLICK HERE FOR PODCAST VERSION (3:40)
Whether you’ve got external or internal customers, they expect you to ‘do the whole job’! Show that you care about your customer … after all, if your customer decides he or she no longer needs you, you may be out of a job.
Customer Care Beyond Lip-Service
It’s easy enough to talk about commitment to customers, but what does it really mean? Whether you make an offer to a customer, or the customer makes a request to you, your sincerity is obvious to the degree that you do the whole job. That means standing behind your word, demonstrating Read More
What IS Customer Experience?! 5 / 1 / 09
by Lynn Hunsaker, head of ClearAction (www.clearaction.biz)
CLICK HERE FOR PODCAST VERSION (4:50)
You probably hear lots of “customer …” phrases that seem interchangeable. In reality, there are big differences in these terms, although they are related.
Customer Experience: customer’s journey from realization of a need until the need no longer exists.
Customer Satisfaction: customer’s perception of reality compared to their expectations.
Experiential Marketing: providing an extraordinary experience as part of a marketing campaign.
User Experience: Read More
Everybody Has a Customer 4 / 22 / 09
CLICK HERE FOR PODCAST VERSION (5:07)
Is there any job that doesn’t have a customer?
If you work directly with paying customers, you obviously impact customer experience.
If you don’t:
1. Eventually, the job you do ripples to those employees who do work directly with customers — don’t drop the baton!
2. Inside your company, the job you do has internal customers — figure out how to make their experience excellent!
What everyone in a company does can be reduced to one of two functions: to serve the customer or serve someone who does.1
Think of the purpose of your job — why is it worthwhile for the company to fund your position? To answer this, big-picture thinking is needed. Ultimately, what you do in your job must be important in some way to the needs of paying customers. Your answer is the beginning of customer-centric Read More