Delivering the Wow - Part 1

This is the first in a three part series on Customer Service and how to Deliver the Wow to your customers.

Definition: Delivering the Wow: When your customer completes their interaction with your company, they say or think: "Wow, that was a great experience".  (It's that simple :) ).

Delivering the Wow – Part 1:  Is it worth it?

 Should you Wow your customers?  Recently I seem to read more articles that claim that Wow'ing your customers was just a fad – but was really not practical or necessary.  That it doesn’t scale.

 I contend this is not only incorrect, but not the right topic to be discussing.  The right question is – what is the customer experience you want to deliver?  This is a complex question and the answer differs depending on your product, your industry, how your company defines itself and the relationship it wants to have with its customers. 

 Some companies feel the best service is to let customers self-serve – that anytime a customer has to contact your customer service organization it represents a defect – a level of customer effort that should have been avoided.  Others companies encourage customers to contact them in order to establish a personal relationship with each and every customer. 

 Whichever strategy your company subscribes to, once a contact strategy is in place, you then have to decide on the quality of the transaction you want to deliver.  For some, good is good enough.  Customer service is something that just needs to not be a liability.  Others want to deliver an awesome customer experience at every contact.  An awesome customer contact experience can be either a fast, efficient resolution of the problem, or a long interaction focused on developing a relationship.  Both are usually supported by customer friendly policies and empowered front line agents.  Philosophies and approaches differ, but it’s rare to deliver extraordinary service without the two ingredients of customer friendly policies and empowered front line agents.

 Having clarity on your customer experience strategy will determine the level of Wow you want to deliver. But no matter how you lean on the above points, delivering some moments of Wow will benefit you in two ways:

 1) Demonstrating what great looks like raises the bar for your entire network.

Whether you have a large, dispersed network of agents located throughout the world that deliver support over multiple languages to customers in many countries, or a smaller network that is more focused, one of the most difficult tasks is to raise the overall level of service provided by your entire network.  Every time you deliver a moment of Wow and share it across your network, you are providing an example of what great looks like.  Don’t assume your agents know what great looks like – you need to provide examples on a regular basis. This is the power of moments of Wow – they are inspirational examples that show every other agent in your network what customer obsession means for your company.  In doing so, moments of Wow are teaching opportunities that help raise the bar on the entire network just a little bit.  And a small movement of the bar across the entire network is a big achievement.  Moments of Wow are one of the levers available to you to raise your bar in a scalable manner.

 2) Building your brand.

You can create an environment that allows Moments of Wow to happen (more on this in a later article), but you can’t manufacture them, and you sure can’t manufacture what will go viral.  But some of your moments of Wow will go viral and this is a tremendous boost to your brand.  For example, not long ago a customer returned an item to Amazon and the folks that process the Returns found a necklace that had dropped into the box.  The necklace was returned to the customer with a handwritten note.  The customer had realized she had lost the necklace, but not that it had fallen into the box she returned to Amazon.  Her post on Facebook got 48K Likes, 450 comments and was shared over 500 times.  Moments of Wow scale.

 I believe delivering a great customer experience is part of any successful, long term business strategy.  Delivering the right level of Wow is a powerful lever in accomplishing that goal.