Be Different or be dead

February 2, 2012

3 amazing ways to delight your customers

Source: Pexels

3 amazing ways to delight your customers.

Creating maniacal, loyal customers is not about price. And it’s not about products and services that actually work to specifications.

People expect things to work and they expect to pay a reasonable price for it. That’s the price of admittance. That’s what any organization must do to play the game. If you can’t provide stuff that works all the time at a price people are willing to pay, you don’t have a business. Period.

If your quest is to attract a band of loyal followers that will do business with you forever, you must create a dazzling experience for them whenever they touch you. You must focus your attention on how they FEEL when they engage with you as opposed to what they GET from you.

How can you create an environment that is capable of creating dazzling service experiences?

1. Recruitment

Recruit people that have an innate desire to serve their fellow human beings.
Customers can’t be delighted if a frontline person really doesn’t want to serve. and you can’t train people to like people.

They either do or they don’t. You can train them to ’grin’— with a smile in their voice — but you can’t teach people to actually and honestly like others.

Dazzling service experiences are delivered by individuals who actually want to make the customer feel important.
To make them feel that they are listened to. To honor them. To do whatever it takes to see their eyes light up. 80% of your recruitment budget should be dedicated to this task.

2. Rules and policies

Design your rules, policies and procedures to serve the customer.
Every organization has dumb rules, rules that make no sense to customers. Rules that annoy and infuriate them and drive them to leave kicking and screaming to others.

Rules have a legitimate management control purpose but if they drive business away because customers are unwilling to abide by them what ‘s the benefit?
The issue is the customer element in rule design is missing. Management control drives the process. Give the customer an equal say in rule design. Engage them to help. They will be impressed that you are open enough to involve them and you will be on your way to dazzle.

3. Empowerment

Be flexible. Empower people to bend the rules on the customer’s behalf. Even if you have designed a rule system that optimizes on the customer experience, you will still have control-driven ones that remain. Empower your frontline to bend them when it makes sense to serve a customer.
Trust them to do the right thing to preserve the dazzle objective.

The end game is to deliver a mind-blowing service experience not to enforce the rules that get in the way.

Dazzle = Serving People + Rules that Serve + Caring Empowerment.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 2.2.12 at 10:59 am by Roy Osing
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