Just how sterile will Customer Experience get?

At 6pm I receive a call to tell me that I need to get to the hardware store to collect my goods before midday the next day because all click and collect orders will be cancelled in preparation for the store reopening and staff will be busy with other things. I explain I went to the store earlier having read it was open until 5pm, to find at 4.10pm it had shut so hadn't been able to collect my goods. I'm told the store opens at 7am for collections tomorrow. I ask if there is likely to be a big queue so I can plan when to get there in order to get back to start work. I'm reassured that it could be really busy so as early as possible.

The alarm is set for 6.15am. I get up, get ready and head to the hardware store to join the early morning queue. As I head over in the car I think that it's a shame when I placed my order less than 36 hours before I didn't get some notice about the restricted click and collect window.

I pull into the car park with my mask and gloves, expecting the worse in terms of a queue. I find I am the only car and only person there. I walk over to the store and wait 20 minutes until it opens. Having been the shopper for our weekly supermarket trip for several weeks I expect and welcome the social distancing measures to organise the queues. It's not quite the same as the supermarkets, but this is only click and collect.

That said, I can't help but think of the CX cliché, 'the experience of every interaction, every time counts' and wonder whether this will be a memorable one.

I take a moment to assess the social distancing set up. I am surrounded by orange picketing fence, the sort used to direct rowdy crowds. As well as company branded tape stretched and damaged on the floor to create a make shift barrier.

Can health and safety be a customer experience differentiator?

This is my customer experience that's happening right now and it doesn't feel good. It's what protecting me looks like when an organisation hasn't needed to worry about it too much before. Historically, CX and Health and Safety have not been a good pairing. Customer Experience is partly to blame. The efforts are often focussed on fixing a bad experience relating to a transaction or creating a 'wow' experience to get social recommendations. But when health and safety holds the trump card, CX can be relegated as unnecessary and even detrimental to safety. There's no interest in NPS, effort or satisfaction scores when health and safety holds the clip board.

Waking up to a new form of Customer Experience

At just past seven in the morning, with just one other person now in the queue behind me, a glass door in front of me is unlocked and from a thin crack a faceless voice asks "Name?". I reply my name. The door closes and locks and I stand waiting for a few moments unsure what is going to happen. The door opens and a set of wooden beams I've ordered are brought out. I'm keen to ask a question. It's that support I find makes me choose this store over the one next to it. I'm about to ask, but no sooner has my order been put down than the 'name?' person has turned and headed through the doors, locked them and is out of sight.

I pick up my goods and leave. As I walk away I hear from behind me, 'name?' and it starts again. So what's happened to customer experience here? It's been left out and left behind. It's relegated because of health and safety. Forget personalisation. Forget empathy. Forget integrity, resolution and consistency. There is none of it. Health & safety has slapped a big fat 'warning' sign all over customer experience. The feeling is no longer satisfaction, so measuring it will be irrelevant if I'm treated like this. I am made to feel grateful. If that was the intended outcome, I'd score high.

There were 3 interactions in the journey I took; order, customer service call and collection. All have been executed badly and left me feeling less than keen to return when I think about a typical outcome set which drives my behaviour; valued, informed, resolved.

In fact, when I reflect on it further I feel like I have been an inconvenience. That's what happens with health and safety you are intentionally made to consider your actions to reduce the chance of risk. It's an intentional part of the design thinking and why it's not a natural buddy I reflect that with a 'Stay at home. Stay safe. Save lives' message ringing in my ears, long after the 8pm clap for the keyworkers, the experience provided at the hardware store (and I don't think it matters if it was Wickes or anywhere else) might just have been a deliberate stealth approach to discourage me from being socially active. Well it's worked. I'm put off returning.

Having worked with customer experience in organisations where health and safety and wellbeing for vulnerable groups are paramount, I know it doesn't have to be like this. If you properly understand the role of CX, you can make health and safety a caring and trusted element of the overall experience.

To achieve this a mindset shift is needed. Forget the mantra, "put the customer at the heart of the business". You need to evolve to a more inclusive, "putting the customer's world at the heart of the business" and you will find it makes all the difference.

Putting the customer's world at the heart of your business

The 'customer' is of value when the organisation extracts transactions from them. Therefore when you look at the CX its normally associated to this, even the post sale customer service. The problem with this is when there are no transactions, the customer is relegated. So the health and safety experience is treated as a functional endeavour because there is no connections to transactions.

However, when the company has a focus on the customer's world that means embracing everyone which impacts them, their communities and society in general. So health and safety experience is naturally seen as important as the transaction experience. 90% of CX programmes do not succeed* and this factor is key to that.

So we may suffer a very sterile period for customer experience (especially if we ask in the VoC programme is health and safety important to you - which I've seen several times already. But that's a separate topic in its own right).

First get the Customer Operating Model right

You can get it right and it will be down to your Customer Operating Model. If you haven't heard of that and you are in CX, get in touch and I'll show you how it will redefine your CX. Or if you'd like to know how well aligned you organisation is to deliver CX during the health and safety transition, again we can show you where you are, where you need to focus and the realistic potential of getting there.

As for Wickes, I will never forget that experience. And I've been in their store hundreds of unmemorable times before.

Posted by Christopher Brooks, Customer Experience Expert, Clientship CX