Open your mind to new ideas for improving customer experience. It’s a fast-paced highly competitive world, so continual improvement — and occasional breakthroughs — are imperatives for consistently delivering superior customer experience.
Every person has creative capability. “There’s this common perception among managers that some people are creative, and most aren’t. That’s just not true,” says Teresa Amabile, head of Entrepreneurial Management at Harvard Read More
‘Too much information’ (TMI) can hurt customer experiences. It can be tempting to brag or complain about things as the customer waits for something. It can be easy to get long-winded telling a story to a customer. Be careful! Not only is TMI inappropriate and unprofessional, but it turns customers off. It can negate an otherwise stellar customer experience. Read More
Everyone wants good things to happen. For both customers and suppliers, we start off our day hoping everything will go well. Across numerous interactions you might feel great, or perhaps sometimes, let down. You probably want to feel great more often! How can that happen? It’s up to you as a supplier to create excellent customer experiences that result in enthusiastic positive word-of-mouth and great business results.
It’s up to you in all the decisions you make. As Jeanne Bliss explains in her book I Love You MORE THAN My Dog: 5 Decisions That Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times & Bad, “Consider the story that the collective decisions of your organization tells customers, employees, and the marketplace. What story is emerging about who you are and what you value? Are your decisions reflecting what you intended? Do they Read More
Creativity is essential in our highly competitive business environment. As technology and options expand, customers’ expectations for higher value are always rising. Companies that use creativity to understand, anticipate, and exceed customer expectations are the companies that grow, keep jobs, and thrive.
To win higher share-of-wallet from customers, avoid the temptation to simply charge them for things that used to be free. And avoid the temptation to Read More
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
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
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
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
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 <a href="http://clearaction.biz/blog/customer-experience-management-prevents-hassles/" target="_blank"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
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