Consistency Is Key to Customer Experience

I listened to a podcast where the guest was Shannan Berry, Vice President of CX and Sales Strategy at TitleOne.

She recounted one personal story that stayed with me. This is how it goes; I am doing it in the first person.

We had a dog named Cooper. When my husband and I met, that was the time I was going to buy a dog. I was a single mom with two kids. We decided we would get a dog when I got a house or an apartment. That’s what we wanted.

So, we got Cooper. He was the most amazing dog, a Golden Retriever. He was human and was like one of our children. I could go on and on, but we had a situation where he got very sick. We experienced a lot of different vets, and one vet Dr. Weatherhead –was at Ewing Animal Hospital.

When it was finally time to put Cooper down – it was the day after Christmas, Dr. Weatherhead said it was time, as Cooper won’t even get up. He kept him alive for us for six months, and we did many things to make him better, and Dr. Weatherhead helped us through, and Cooper had a great last six months.

Dr. Weatherhead had a level of service for us that I can’t even explain. My husband and I had an alone moment with Cooper before he was put to rest. That was a life-changing moment for us.

The next day, I got a knock at the door. I wondered who is that so early in the morning. It was a delivery service delivering flowers from the vet, and it had a card with everyone’s signature from the hospital. Many of them had left a note as they had spent time with Cooper the past six months.

After receiving this, I called them and found out they do this for every single person – whether it is the first time you are visiting or you have been a customer for ten years. Without question, they deliver flowers and a note the very next day, every single time.

I am talking about it now after so many months. I have sent so many references to them, and their gesture is the difference, and it is a life-changing one.

This is consistency in experience.

How Relevant Is Consistency in Customer Experience?

Customer experience is something noteworthy that you deliver. Do you do that on a day-to-day basis?

How do you do that?

It would be best to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Define what the experiences you provide look like for them. How do you enhance it? How do you do them every single day?

Very often, when you are on the frontline of providing customer experience, you cannot control a lot of uncontrollables.

For instance, your delivery person has not delivered the package as promised, and your customer is calling to inquire about it. Your delivery person is still out; he hasn’t logged in with the status of deliveries on the system and isn’t reachable.

What do you do?

The best thing you can do is empathize with your customer and buy time to figure out the status and get back to the customer.

How often do you find customers with that level of patience?

Can you document a scenario like this and discuss how to help customers with the correct information as an organization?

What Do We Do?

We have daily meetings where our customer experience personnel talk about the following:

• The best experience they provided a customer and why they consider it important
• A difficult challenge that a customer faced and how the agent addressed it
• A difficult challenge that a customer faced for which the agent did not have a solution

All of this goes into the knowledge base and is now available for every customer-facing resource.

We don’t restrict this to the frontline employees, but our people talk about these aspects at an organizational level. Maybe, not daily, but at least weekly.

We take this knowledge base and create the training material for continuous learning of our existing people, and we include this in the induction process of the recruits.

Our commitment to customer experience and comprehensive training helps our resources provide the best possible customer experiences. This is possible because we, as an organization, move at least a delta every day towards delivering the perfect customer experience.

Consistency is the mantra that we follow and keep at it daily. The internal feedback and training process helps us in being a customer-centric organization.