Inspired to excellence

You’ve probably heard many Customer Experience statistics, numbers that simply don’t resonate with you and fade away. Mark Saxby and his wife Kerry run social media consultancy Status Social - Social Media With Results together. At a conference, they heard a statistic that struck a chord. ‘80% of people don’t return to a business if the experience is merely ‘okay’’. They realised excellence is the opposite of okay. This thought inspired them and they set about applying the idea of customer excellence to their business. They considered delivery and engagement.

“We moved from a strong ‘business’ focus to thinking about how we behave as customers and how we value excellent service.”

This flip in perspective, backed by the following actions, ensured excellence in delivery:

• They appointed a Customer Excellence Champion. The Champion who looked for and implemented ways to move from Okay to Excellent, raising standards across the business.
• Recruitment changed too. They focused on finding employees who shared the values of the business.
• And speaking of values... as a values-led business (meaning decisions are tested against the business’ values), they added ‘Excellence’ to the values, and it became one of their top three values driving growth.
• Client onboarding changed, and clients met the full team.
• The team held open conversations about performance with clients and a quarterly NPS survey.
• Staff retention and engagement became paramount to ensure consistence and continuous improvement.
• They engaged their team with accountabilities for performance. Even better, they supported them with tools to measure, track, improve and reward performance.

?No quarterly survey yielded detractors to use the Net Promoter Score jargon. And they celebrated every positive result with the Social Media Manager who made the customer happy. The team reviewed and analysed all comments. Then they agreed and delivered action to improve Customer Experience.

But it was not all, or even mainly, about these ‘businessy’ activities. Mark, Kerry and their team worked hard to make every customer feel welcomed and valued. Little things like:

• providing top notch coffee and food at workshops.
• meeting clients at their car and walking them though the office so the entire team could say hello while playing music the customer liked.

added up to create emotional connections. And clients responded with positive feedback and warmer relationships.

Mark and Kerry know that business growth depends on too-many factors for these changes to be ‘seen’ in revenue. In fact, Mark says:

“that wasn’t why we did it - we improved our customer service because it was the right thing to do. Taking your customers for granted and not caring for them is business suicide. We wanted our clients to be more than satisfied with us.”

And lists the benefits he wanted and achieved:

“We knew if clients were happy and likely to renew (or cancel) through the feedback process – so we could tackle issues if they arose.

People were more likely to work with us and for us because they felt special when they visited our offices. For example, the man who said “what a great place Status Social must be to work” after entering to a Disney soundtrack. We’d discovered he’d been to see the musical Aladdin a few days earlier.

Clients were more likely to invest further in us because they felt ‘looked after’ – the example I gave in the interview spent thousands of pounds more with us.

Our staff cared more for our clients as we showed them love and care – making them more likely to do an excellent job for them.”

It’s important to say Mark, Kerry and the team didn’t get it right all the time. But they learned from their mistakes and continued to improve.

“And it was an exciting journey as we did.”

Since this story, Mark and Kerry have consciously shrunk the business. They have moved in part away from social media community management to training and content creation. This gives them more time to focus on their charity. Positive Social goes into schools and helps young people take back control of their lives from social media.

They also continue to introduce new services such as “How to free yourself from your phone” which helps adults get more done and feel more satisfied at work.

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If you are looking for inspiration, give me a call. We can discuss what excellence means for your customers and how you can deliver it.