How many different excuses can you come up with to describe why you can’t achieve the experience you want for your customers? We seem to have gone overboard in our efforts to include every type of excuse ever thought of in modern times. Aren’t we all, customers? Aren’t we buying products or requesting services or asking for assistance? What type of experience do you want? Wouldn’t your customers want a really good customer experience as well? Enough with all the excuses. It’s time to act.

I’ve said it once. I’ll say it now. And unfortunately, I’ll probably keep saying it for a very long time. You don’t need complicated strategy documents, journey maps, expensive surveys, and months of tying up human and financial resources to understand your customers’ experience. You already know what’s wrong with the experience, otherwise you wouldn’t be doing all the things I just mentioned. So why not simply act. Fix what is causing customer frustration.

Two groups of stakeholders can tell you exactly what’s wrong and what to do about it – your employees and your customers (in that order). Why not take some time to talk with both groups to help confirm what you already suspected was negatively impacting your desired customer experience?

Things like:

  • Cumbersome and inefficient websites
  • Discounts and promotions that confuse rather than promote
  • Long service times for calls and emails
  • Employees who lack empathy or knowledge
  • Broken and outdated policies
  • Leaders and managers who lack the skills and training
  • Staff unable to handle difficult customer challenges
  • Hiring the wrong people or placing people in the wrong roles
  • Lack of sytems, structure and accountability
  • Tolerating bad behavior
  • Overcharges, billing mistakes, excessive shipping charges
  • Poor cleanliness and run down and tired looking facilities

None of these things should be happening when your customers interact with your employees and business. Yet, they continue to happen every hour of every day. Why? The latest excuses are labor shortages, supply chain woes, and of course, the pandemic. The problem is bad experiences in some businesses were happening BEFORE this latest round of crises.

If your customer experience was broken, this and future crises will only make it go from bad to worse. And of course, now those same businesses with broken experiences, claim they don’t have time to fix it. Unfortunately, this isn’t a good reason. If your customer experience is broken, you must fix it now. Your customers aren’t going to wait for you to get your act together. They will move on to your competitor and any remaining loyalty you may have had will be gone for good.

As Isaac Newton said, “Objects in motion tend to stay in motion”. If your customers are moving to your competitors, it’s hard to stop them once they’ve started. But it’s also a way to start improving your customer experiences – once you move in that direction, it’s hard to stop. It becomes easier to overcome the roadblocks and speed bumps.

Fixing the core problems now is what needs to be done. Getting to the root cause of what’s causing customer friction points and creating a sustainable customer experience is the goal. Mistakes will happen but how well you recover from them and fix the problem once and for all is the key. Customers will understand “a” mistake – they just don’t understand the same mistakes being made repeatedly. You want customers who are not only satisfied with your products and services but are loyal to your businesses  and tell others about their experiences.

Stop the excuse making and take action now whether it is training your leaders and staff, reorganizing, coaching or more. The success of your business is at stake. Like my great mentor, Walt Disney always told us, “It’s time to quit talking and begin doing.” Now that would be Magical!

Need help? Contact me today! info@johnformica, (704) 965-4090