Be Different or be dead

February 20, 2017

Why real passion is key to delivering amazing service

Source: Unsplash

Why real passion is key to delivering amazing service.

Many organizations today declare they are in the business of providing memorable customer experiences; they believe that delivering an amazing experience to their customers is the vital strategy to gain a competitive advantage over others in their markets.

And there are a plethora of opinions of how to build a customer experience (CX) strategy, for example this is one of many takes on it.

If customer experience refers to the sum of every interaction a customer has with an organization, both pre and post sale, the customer experience strategy defines the actionable plans in place to deliver a positive, meaningful experience across those interactions.

And a number of inputs to building the strategy are mentioned including competitive insights, customer research, customer behaviour facts, market data, and the service strategy of the organization which is necessary to define context for the CX piece of it.

This sounds like a complicated (and expensive) piece of work for any organization who believes a ‘meaningful experience’ is the key to building a successful and sustainable service organization.

I don’t think it’s all that complicated; I believe there is a special ingredient to mixing a brew of remarkable customer experiences. And I don’t think extensive studies of your competitors, customer behaviour and the market are required to do it.

In fact I believe you can have a mediocre service strategy and know absolutely nothing about what your competitors are doing in the CX space and still deliver mind-blowing experiences for your customers.

Experiences happen with engagement — I believe that at its most fundamental level, experiences in any organization are created when an employee engages with a (potential) customer.

There are other moments of engagement that are facilitated by technology. People calling into a call center who have to engage with an Integrated Voice Response (IVR) system, who are on a website and need to use the chatbot, search or cart-building functions all come face-to-face with a piece of technology substituting for a human.

DIY is becoming a larger piece of the human-organization pie and has been given a major boost by COVID-19 which stripped most organizations of employees and has created a burgeoning online transaction business.

Technology facilitated interactions are on the rise, no question about it and that are likely to continue to increase in the future.

The critical ingredient in human-to-human contact is emotion.

But I believe, however, that they should be architected from the human-human connection in any event — how humans engage with other humans should be the benchmark for designing technology-human engagement.

Of course this is a very contentious point because the main driver behind technology-human substitution is cost reduction.
Technology is used not to create human based experiences for people but to replicate what people do at lower costs. And the problem has always been that costs are reduced but it drags the CX down with it.

Emotion defines the experience — So what is at the heart of the human-human moment that influences the experience?

If the moment is replete with descriptors like caring, politeness, respect, understanding, patience, responsiveness, trust, interest, feelings, and empathy on the part of the moment provider chances are the customer will have an amazing experience in contrast with a moment characterized by words such as frustration, anger, dominated, ignored and unfulfilled.

Emotion is the common denominator of both delightful and painful moments so the challenge for any organization who covets the most amazing CX provider award is to architect every moment with emotion.

Every customer moment must be infused with emotion.

What emotion element(s) should be infused into call center moment, the server moment in a restaurant, the complaint-handler moment, the website chatbot moment, the website buy moment, the website search moment (one of the most frustrating moments for me personally), and the product return moment?

Emotion is the strategy — If customer moments are infused with emotion, it really doesn’t matter what your competitors are doing or what the textbooks say about consumer behaviour. Your customer will love the experience.
Nor does it matter what the strategy of the organization says.

Emotion-infused moments will keep customers committed to you; they’ll come back for more moments and will encourage their friends and family to do so as well.

A vague imperfect strategy fuelled with emotion moments will deliver amazingness involuntarily.

If you want a mind-blowing CX strategy, focus on emotion and nothing else. It should be a single driving force behind your recruitment strategy, not just for positions that interact with customers, but also for positions that design technology moments.

I would recruit someone for a web design position, for example, who gets emotion infusion over someone who doesn’t have the perspective of trying to make a technology moment as human as possible.

Final thought — be careful of those who suggest that you need to pump up your customer service training program as a solution.
The fact is that you can’t train someone to deliver customer emotion-moments; honest emotion and care for their fellow humans can’t be taught.

It’s something that people are born with and the challenge is to find more of them than your competitors.

Cheers,
Roy
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• Posted 2.20.17 at 05:44 am by Roy Osing
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