We’ve all had this conversation at some point. It starts with a question along the lines of, “How was that special meal you booked for the weekend?” and finishes with “, Oh my goodness, it was just a terrible experience”, followed by a litany of reasons to never return to a particular establishment. It’s standard knowledge across the marketing industry that customers who experience a poor customer experience are likely to tell up to 20 people about it (and that’s without writing online reviews). If you’re sitting smugly thinking, “Well, this blog online relates to the service industry and this doesn’t relate to me” here’s a heads up, all businesses deliver a customer experience. If you have clients or customers, then they receive an experience from you, and you should be focused on ensuring that they’re satisfied.
Why is customer experience so important?
In the simplest terms, a satisfied customer is a returning customer. They’re also a customer that will recommend your business. So, it makes sense for a marketing strategy to include a customer experience programme. Marketing has changed a lot over the last two decades, and there is an increased focus on ‘relationship marketing’. Relationship marketing goes beyond just trying to make a sale. Instead, it combines marketing, providing a quality product or service and excellent customer experience. Good customer experience results in customer satisfaction!
How to design a customer experience programme.
Designing a customer experience programme takes four steps and, if implemented properly, will result in an increase in your most profitable customer base. The first step is to identify the customers that are the most valuable. This isn’t necessarily related to the amount they spend in each transaction. Instead, it focuses on their potential lifetime value. So, which is more profitable, a customer who makes a large purchase every so often or a customer who makes smaller, regular transactions?
Next, you need to identify your internal and external customers. External customers are the ones who buy from you, but an internal customer is someone who is involved in the product chain. As an example, a car mechanic will have a number of internal customers involved in servicing a car. There will be suppliers, fitters, maybe the company that provides card services or a website, and all these factors create the overall customer experience. If one falls down, the rest of the chain will be impacted. It’s vital that both sets of customers have a good customer experience. One supplier who is paid late can lead to a lack of supplies and a negative online review.
You also need to discover how your external customers see your business. The easiest way to do this is to ask them through a customer satisfaction survey. In it, you should ask about the quality and accuracy of service, promptness of responses, whether the facilities meet expectations, staff attitude, and complaint handling. Sometimes the replies you receive won’t be what you expect, but you need to remember that now you know that some customers are dissatisfied, you can do something to make a change.
Develop your customer experience programme.
You’ve spoken to your customers, you’ve identified the ones who will provide the best lifetime value, and you’ve collated the responses from the survey; so how do you take everything you’ve learned to improve customer experience?
At the offset, you need to design measurable and achievable standards to which everyone in your company can sign up. As an example, ‘Every phone call should be answered quickly’ isn’t as measurable as ‘Every phone call should be answered in 3 rings’. Your standards need to be achievable and understandable.
Next up, you need to ensure that all your team are aware of your customer experience standards, know what they need to do to achieve them, and are happy and fully signed up to the process. That goes for all levels of the business; if your floor staff are following the programme, so should your managers. You should also make sure that your team know that deviation from the standards is unacceptable and should regularly review them to make sure that they are still relevant. Staff who maintain the standards should expect to be rewarded (this doesn’t need to be expensive but should be considered of value).
Things to remember
When embarking on any kind of project of this type, the mantra to keep in mind is, “How would I like to be treated?” We figure that no matter what service or product we buy, we expect to deal with civil, courteous, and knowledgeable staff who pay attention to detail and provide prompt and efficient service. We also expect a person’s full and undivided attention when we are buying and rewards/thanks for continued custom.
If you can offer your customers what you would expect as a minimum for a good customer experience, you’re well on your way. Alternatively, if you think that you are too close to your business to discover what you need to do to improve it, or you want to use an integrated marketing agency that pulls together all aspects of marketing to achieve results, get in touch.
