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In this hyper connected world, where expectations are at an all-time high and word of mouth travels at the speed of text, the importance of positive customer experiences cannot be ignored. As a matter of fact, more than two-thirds of companies now compete primarily on the basis of customer experience. Having a competitive advantage is huge, and customer experience is the perfect tool to help you stand out from your competitors.
What Does “Customer Experience” Mean Exactly?
Customer experience is your customers’ perception of how your team treats them. These perceptions build memories and feelings to drive their loyalty.
In other words, if they like how you made them feel, they are going to continue to do business with you and recommend you to others
A totally delighted customer contributes 3 times as much revenue as a somewhat satisfied customer, and 14 times as much revenue as a dissatisfied customer.
It’s because of these extremes that 88 percent of companies now prioritize customer experience. Therefore, if you want your customers to have a positive experience, you must invest time defining what an “ideal customer experience” is at your company. Work to create specific scenarios they will encounter and clearly outline what you expect in each of these customer interactions—your team should be helping with this exercise, especially your high performers. Practice out loud how “right” sounds for your team. What does your team do in specific situations? Stop practicing while speaking with customers and practice for those customer interactions. Ensure your team is delivering value.
Practice Makes Perfect
Once you and your team have clearly defined what “right” looks and feels like, how do you get your team to embrace and apply this vision as part of their day-to-day mindset?
“To win in the marketplace, you must first win in the workplace.”
—Doug Conant, former President and CEO, Campbell Soup Company
A good place to start is through coaching and impactful feedback. Sometimes the “little things” can become the big things.
Your team needs regular coaching to develop their sales and service skills. Unfortunately, many times, coaching sessions turn into metric-making sessions. “Why haven’t you hit this number? What are YOU going to do about this situation?” Sound familiar? Often, leaders are so busy putting out the fires, they don’t make time to prevent the fires. An effective coaching session is when a coach gives the player an opportunity to practice plays before the “game.” This coaching style requires a lot of role-playing and repetition. The coach’s job is to identify where improvements need to be made, by observing, listening to calls, and modeling how to best execute what right looks like for your company.
As an example, let’s use a customer service team. A best practice might be to take call samples of your highest performers, listen to them with your team, replicate the scenarios, and then conduct repetition role-playing drills. Have fun and practice these real-life drills over and over again to ingrain them in memory, so when your team goes back to work, these techniques become second nature to them. You’re giving them a clearly defined path to excel.
When I say impactful feedback, what do I mean? Well, feedback is information about their work that helps the person who is receiving the feedback alter, change, adjust, or maintain his or her behavior and/or attitude. Impactful feedback creates AWARENESS and RESPONSIBILITY (or ownership) of the work in the performer, which, in turn, leads to increased self-trust and self-reliance.
What Is the Right Way to Provide Impactful Feedback?
I like to recommend the SAR method (some people refer to it as the STAR method):
Situation and/or Task: The employee describes the situation or the task that needs to be accomplished. (They must describe a specific event or situation, not a generalized description of what they have done in the past.)
Action: The employee describes the specific action he or she took. (Even if they are discussing a group project or effort, describe what they did—not the efforts of the team. Be sure they don’t tell what they might do, but tell what they diddo.)
Result: The employee explains the results he or she achieved. (What happened? How did the event end? What did they accomplish? What did they learn?)
This type of feedback helps employees collect and formulate their thoughts before articulating their response. Evaluating their own work helps employees become more self-reliant.
Conduct regular feedback sessions with your team. Try coaching your team on a weekly basis and be sure to listen intently as they share—you’ll be surprised how much valuable insight you will receive.
It is important to provide ongoing training, support, and measurement to allow your team to evolve into consultative sales and service experts who sell customer experiences, not widgets or rates. While it involves setting aside specific time, the satisfaction rate from customer surveys and statistics indicate that this approach can garner to up to a 95 percent satisfaction level.
If your people feel valued and appreciated, they will inherently pass this sentiment on to the customer and increase the chances of earning their repeat business.
“The responsibility of a company is to serve the customer. The responsibility of leadership is to serve their people so that their people may better serve the customer. If leaders fail to serve their people first, both customer and company will suffer.”
—Simon Sinek, author, motivational speaker, and marketing consultant
Jen Severns is Signature Worldwide’s national director of Sales. With more than 20 years of hospitality sales and marketing experience, Severns is responsible for developing and maintaining relationships with hospitality organizations throughout the southern United States. She serves as a consultant to her hospitality clients, offering suggestions to increase revenue and improve guest loyalty through training and business solutions. Prior to joining Signature, Severns worked as a director of corporate account management, vice president of business development and partnerships, and consultant for early stage and start-up companies in the hospitality industry.