The Behind-The-Scene Secret To Customer Experience
I like to think of my life as a series of experiences, some that I relish in, savor every moment of, and others that, well, they are downright bothersome, painful and the kind of experiences that I generally do my best to avoid.
Photo by Elena Koycheva
This behind-the-scene secret to customer experience will help you create a superior and lasting impression with every interaction.
I like to think of my life as a series of experiences, some that I relish in, savor every moment of, and others that, well, they are downright bothersome, painful and the kind of experiences that I generally do my best to avoid.
Each of these experience has the power to either lift me up or drag me down. And what happens in one experience with usually color the next one. Do you see this in your life too?
Now go with me on this train on thought for a moment.
Think of your life, a large number of your weekly experiences are in the pursuit of earning money, and there are also quite a lot of experiences in the area spending that money.
How are these experiences coloring your life? Are they lifting you up or dragging you down?
And taking that thought train to one more stop:
How are your interactions coloring the life of the people who work for you and who buy from you?
Are you providing opportunities for a great experience?
Let's first dive deeper into customer experience.
When someone comes to buy from you, what kind of experience do they have? And before you shrug off this question with a ‘yeah it is a great experience’, I want to share a statistic with you that, when Ryan Smith, CEO of Qualtics, shared this at the Qualtics 4X Event, almost had me falling off my chair.
80% of CEO’s believe they are providing a superior experience. That could translate to say 4 out of 5 of each person who is reading this. The crazy bit is that only 8% of customers agree.
That blows me away how significant the experience gap is in this area. And when we all think we are providing a superior experience, we aren’t looking for how we can make it better. It is time to step it up.
So what do we do?
First, meet the behind the scene secret to customer experience.
Behind the scene of customer experience we see that people buy from people. Your team, whether this is just you, or you have team upon team, your customers are buying from them. And I don’t just mean your sales and customer service people. They buy from the whole team.
From your CEO to your trainees, whether your customers talk to them or not, they all contribute to the customer’s experience. It is kind of huge to think of it. That everyone’s actions have an impact on customer experience.
It's time to talk about the employee experience.
Now let’s think about your team. I am going to start with a scary stat. According to research by Gallop, two-thirds of the global workforce is disengaged.
So if you are out there, wanting to create amazing experiences for your customers, think about what the experience is like for each member of your team, even if that is only you.
If your employees aren’t enjoying the experience of working for you, if they are disengaged, then it is that much harder for them to create an excellent experience for your customers. Put your oxygen mask on first. Make great experiences for your team.
Don't forget the flow on.
Each experience has the power to disrupt the next one. This happens to each of us moment by moment. If I lose my keys and rush about looking for them, I might get frustrated and then when I get in my car, and I might then cut someone off in my rush, and be out of sorts when I arrive at my destination.
Photo by Chandler Chen on Unsplash
If I am not careful, I can carry the downer of losing my keys for the whole day, mucking up each experience as I go. But that is just my side of it. The thing is, we don’t just keep this to ourselves. Our negative experiences can lead us to give others unpleasing experiences, like the car I cut off after losing my keys.
When you think of this on the level of your team and of your customers, you can see that without awareness and management, everyone’s experience can be tainted. But do not despair. The powerful thing is we can do the same thing with positive experiences. Let’s think about that for a moment.
What if every person, employee, customer and beyond, that came in contact with your business walked away feeling better than they did when they arrived?
Think of the difference that could make — the difference not only to your organisation’s success but to all those lives.
Five things that you can do today to give both customer experience and employee experience a lift:
- Get curious – find out what it is like to be a customer to you as well as an employee. Start asking questions and don’t stop.
- Get emphatic – be on a mission to see what it is like to walk in their shoes. How does it feel for them? What lifts them up? What knocks them down?
- Commit to change – genuinely commit to creating experiences that will lift everyone up. Find ways to make it happen
- Co-created action – an experience isn’t something you do to someone, it is something that happens in partnership. So the most powerful experiences are co-created.
- Celebrate – when you create a better experience, celebrate it, each step of the way, even if you still have more to do.
Think of the difference that could make — the difference not only to your organisation’s success but to all those lives.
