What Should You Do to Elevate Customer Experience?

Would you suffer occasional transactional losses to ensure excellent relationships with your customers?

Or would you say I, as a business, can’t lose money?

I Will Give You a Couple of Examples.

I placed a bulk order with a traditional hand-made snacks outlet to be provided as a gift to the attendees of a function. Since it was a bulk order, they were operating at a margin of 20%. They had to prepare the snacks over five days.

They had promised delivery to me on the fifth day.

However, the snack preparation was not up to the mark on the first day.

They had two choices: to ignore and mix it with the preparation of the remaining four days and deliver it to me on the fifth day. But, they chose the second choice, which was to inform me that they would be able to deliver only at the end of the sixth day, as they had messed up the preparation on the first day.

They discarded everything that they had prepared on the first day. Essentially, their entire profits were discarded.

Why would a small outlet do such a thing? Because they care about their customers.

The fact that they told me about it would make me want to go back to them every time for my needs.

Here Is the Next One.

I bought a Honda City car in the year 2010. Around 2016, they realized that some of the vehicles they manufactured in 2010 and 2011 had faulty airbag installations. So, they recalled all the cars manufactured in those years so that they could fix them.

This would have cost them a fortune.

Why would they do that?

Because absorbing one-off losses to maintain relationships is in the long-term interests of any business.

In the end, you are building a reputation of customer trust and reliability with your customers that would more than pay for your short-term losses.

These Are Great Examples, but How Do You Build Providing Excellent Customer Experiences as Part of Your Organizational Culture?

Everything you do should be directly related to the customer experience (CX). It should ease and facilitate your CX strategy.

Tips to Elevate Customer Experience

• Everyone’s job should be directly linked to the customer experience you provide – from the senior management to the sub-staff you have in your organization. Everyone’s KRA should include their CX contributions.
• Capture every tremendous or satisfactory experience that you provide in the form of stories, and circulate them across the organization
• Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and see what would be their wants, needs, and desires at different points. Fulfill them without waiting for the customers to get frustrated before you make any changes.

For instance, when implementing our cloud contact center platforms, we understood that the customers were not happy paying for their customizations.

So, what did we do?

We threw all customizations free when we implemented the platform for them. Today, all our initial customizations are done free across all our customers

• Measure the right metrics that work for you. For me, it is the customer effort score (CES) to understand the quality and consistency of the CX we provide. We monitor that to see how we are trending over a few months. Our goal is to have that delta improvement every month
• Make use of technology to the benefit of your customers. Ensure omnichannel capabilities that would allow you to have a single view of your customers. Be present in channels that your customers prefer to interact with, for you are trying to make things easier for your customers
• When things go wrong, make sure that you acknowledge the problem’s existence, reassure your customers, and solve it for them immediately
• Conduct regular meetings with your customer-facing resources to understand what the customers really want. It is imperative to listen to the frontline that would allow you to have an ear to the ground.
• Allow and encourage your staff to come up with ideas to improve CX consistently

Great customer relationships are genuine, which can only be achieved by providing great CX. It doesn’t matter how big or small you are as an organization; CX should be the base for your growth.

Get your CX right, and you don’t have to worry about acquiring customers, retaining, or growing your customers.