Today, it appears that it’s all too easy to deliver a poor customer experience. If you don’t have the right training and you don’t understand want your customers’ really want, you’ll find it difficult to keep your customers coming back for more. We have all experienced slow response times, a lack of caring, and low quality products or services that will send us running to the competition. Are your customers doing the same?
The most important key to delivering magic moments that matter experiences is focusing on delivering what your customers value most. Depending on your business, this may be value, great service, dependability, quick responses, caring employees or personal service. But the only way you’ll know is by collecting feedback and speaking with your customers and frontline employees.
Not only do you need to listen carefully to what your customers and employees tell you, but you need to act on that feedback and be able to show that you’ve taken action. Creating moments that matter experiences take conscious thought and effort, but they are much easier to deliver with the right training and understanding of what your customers value.
Here’s a look at what you need in place at your business, to ensure you’re able to deliver a great customer experience.
Listen to your employees
Your employees spend the most time talking and interacting with your customers. Not only do they have a direct impact on the customer experience, but they likely have good ideas of what your customers’ really want and value the most.
Simply taking the time to listen and engage your employees in improving the customer experience will set you apart from 93% of businesses. Employees not only hold a vast amount of information about your customers, but they will also feel more valued and invested in the customer experience when they feel listened to and see that you’re incorporating their feedback into how you do business.
93% of business don’t engage employees in building a customer experience culture.
Do you have a culture that is open to accepting feedback, so employees feel comfortable speaking with you and management and sharing when they see issues that may impact the customer experience? It is time to start.
You also want to empower your employees to respond to customer feedback. Have a system in place to allow employees to see feedback and respond quickly. By giving your employees the power to respond faster, they can proactively create magic moments in the customer experience, turn negative customer experiences into positive ones, and help you win more repeat business and positive word-of-mouth referrals.
Take a look at your customer journey
Customer experience is not just one interaction—it’s every interaction. So you need to be thinking about the entire customer journey, including what channels your customers use (or would prefer to use) when doing business. When their journey is what they want, their experience is more likely to be positive.
When considering how to make the entire experience easier for your customers, think about every touch point that you have with your customers and which are most frequently used in your business. Your website, social media, phone, email, text, signage, parking lots, store entry, lobby, restrooms, stocking of merchandise, atmosphere, point of sale, helpfulness of employees, sense of urgency, organized, etc. Now, think about how to make each touch point moment the best experience? How can you improve those that do not?
Get everyone onboard
To create magical moments that matter experience, you have to have all of your employees bought in. Here are a few tips to help:
- Reward employees for positive mentions in reviews and feedback
This encourages employees to get on a first-name basis with customers, which helps to build even stronger relationships and garner more loyalty.
2. Incentivize employees to collect reviews and feedback
When there’s something “in it” for employees—whether a monetary bonus or a lunch at a nice restaurant—employees will be more proactive in asking customers to provide reviews or feedback. You can even make it a fun competition between employees to see who can collect the most reviews or feedback in a week or month.
3. Empower employees to please the customer
The more you empower your employees to solve issues in the moment and on their own, the faster you can resolve customer issues. At The Ritz-Carlton, they believe so strongly in empowering employees to improve the customer experience that they empower employees at all levels of the organization to spend up to $2,000 per guest, per incident, just to ensure the guest experience is always exceptional.
4. Discuss your customer experience goals with employees
Include your frontline employees in a discussion about what you want your customers to say about your business and the kind of impression you want your customers to have of your business. Share customer reviews, Facebook posts, emails, phone calls, survey results and other customer feedback with them and get their input on ways to continue to improve. You’ll not only get more buy-in to achieve that experience, but you’ll also create a culture that values the importance of everyone participating in delivering moments that matter and a magical customer experience.
Need help? Contact John today to see how his coaching and team training programs can be tailored to fit your needs and budget. info@johnformica.com or (704) 965-4090.