Be Different or be dead

August 17, 2023

5 crazy simple ways to really take your customer’s breath away

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5 crazy simple ways to really take your customer’s breath away.

Everyone’s talking about creating memorable experiences for their customers.

Experiences are the new black in the strategy world. Deliver amazing experiences and superlative performance follows.

There’s a great deal of talk about why creating delightful experiences is a key strategic imperative for organizations, but it seems to stop there.

There’s not too much granularity on HOW practically to go about DOING it.

So I’m going to fill that void for you.

These 5 Moves were instrumental in our ability to create and deliver quality experiences for our customers as we grew an early stage internet company to A BILLION IN ANNUAL SALES.

Our goal wasn’t to just make the customer’s experience with us enjoyable, it was to create a set of engagement dynamics that would literally ‘take their breath away’.

#1. Be consistent. — There are two components to Service Quality: Core Service—the product or service that you provide—and The Service Experience—how people FEEL when they engage with you to receive your Core Service.

Lesson #1. You can’t take their breath away if you don’t first deliver your Core Service flawlessly and consistently.

If you stumble in delivering your product, THIS is what they will remember! Anything you do after that to make their experience with you amazing is a wasted effort unless you also have an OOPS! Recovery Strategy in place.

So, to earn the right to be in the Memorable Experiences Game, you need to get your core service right.

Deliver it consistently 24X7X365.

Core Service is the prerequisite platform on which WOW! experiences are built. If your Core Service sucks, you can’t be in the Customer Experience game.

#2. Be surprising.. — Deliver what you promise—your Core Service—AND surprise them with what they don’t expect.

Surprise Me! is the essence of a gaspworthy customer experience.

It’s actually the ‘shock and awe’ of the Customer Experience World.

Surprise Me! doesn’t have to be complicated (probably a statement on the mediocrity of customer service being provided today).

Find a way to Say Yes! to what the customer wants and you’re well on your way to surprising them and earning your ‘I just took their breath away’ badge.

#3. Be flexible.. — Flex to what the customer wants as opposed to trying to jam your stuff—rules, policies and procedures—down their throat.

Conflict is not the playground for creating memories.

Empower your frontline to bend your own rules in favor of the customer when it’s appropriate to do so. Trust that they will not sell you out and that they will protect your position when they are in the rule-bending mode.

Develop Empowerment Guidelines that place most of the power with the people dealing with customers and less power with those that supervise them.

#4. Be caring.. — Boring, right? How non-strategic is that?

Well, you can’t take their breath away if you don’t give a sh*t about them!

And if you don’t leave them gasping, they won’t be loyal to you.

And if they’re not loyal to you, your revenues will suffer.

And if your revenues suffer, your performance plummets.

And…

So, I would suggest that caring and empathy IS strategic and you better find a way to infuse the Customer Moment with as much of the ‘Caring Juice’ as you can.

How? Hire employees who actually like humans. You can teach them your business but you can’t teach or train them to ‘love homo sapiens’.

It’s a recruitment issue. Start hiring people who give you Goosebumps. NOW.

#5. Be easy.. — Have a ‘clean inside’. No Dumb Rules that customers hate, or grungy processes that customers resist following.

Make it easy for people to engage with you.

Remove the ‘pinch points’ in your engagement processes and let them flow with ease.

Enable people to deal with you, don’t control them and force them to comply with your internal systems and procedures.

And involve your customers in designing your rules, policies and procedures to get their input on what your ‘inside’ should look like to make it easy.

You can’t just declare that the Customer Experience is the Center of your universe. You have to put in place the actions to make it happen.

Make these 5 Moves, which successfully worked for me, and watch the gasping that results.

Cheers,
Roy
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• Posted 8.17.23 at 06:02 am by Roy Osing
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