Making raving fans

Customer experience is a culture. You have to live it. It’s not a tag line. 

Upsets happen. But what you do about those can set the culture and alter the customer experience. 

Using a hotel guest as an analogy, imagine having an upset customer. You can essentially explain to the customer why something can't be done or just deal with the customer patronizing them until they go away, frustrated and unhandled and later think about how wrong they were.... 

Or you can listen, acknowledge them, take ownership for any mistakes or frustrations and then handle it, fully. 

Look for any possible ways to service them to make the experience a 10 despite the upset. Treat it as an opportunity. 

Perhaps things like upgrading their room, delivering a complimentary dinner, making sure anything that was wrong gets corrected plus some. 

Whatever you do -- the idea is to listen and lean into the situation and fully handle it until the customer is converted from annoyed or frustrated to feeling fully taken care of. 

Don’t think of the customer as a nuisance, think of them as you. What would you want if you were them? 

That builds raving fans. They may reflect on how it started off but ultimately the'll remember how the hotel handled everything and went the extra distance to take care of them. 

That’s contagious. That’s how great brands are built. And this applies to B2B as much as B2C. 

In many cases, companies just don't do the work to service the customer fully, truly taking care of them. Ideally, you avoid upsets altogether from having great customer experience practices in place but should things happen -- it's critical that you own them and service the customer fully. Don't blame or find fault or try to make the customer wrong, focus on servicing them to the level that you would want to be serviced. 

In many cases, this can be sticker than having great products or services. The product/service needs to be great, no question but the customer experience can supersede even that. 

With that said, I think the product/service is actually part of the customer experience journey because you can’t deliver a world class customer experience without great products. 

Dummy run your entire end to end process as if you were the customer. See what it’s like. Is it great? Do you feel taken care of? Where does it break down? 

Great companies, and I mean the best, have this nailed. The vast majority of the rest don’t. 

Today, I think there are a lot of companies that build great products. But only a very few build great customer experiences. 

Many talk about it but few execute on it. 

And if your mission is to build a truly great company, you can’t do it without nailing the customer experience journey. 

— Robert

About Robert Cornish: Robert Cornish founded Richter in early 2008 to build an agency focused on communication strategies that support sales growth for business to business technology-related companies. Bootstrapped with zero capital in the middle of the financial meltdown, Richter went on to make the Inc 5000 list comprised of the fastest-growing companies in America five times. Richter made the Silicon Valley Fast 50 four times and the Entrepreneur360 award two times. Robert has been featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Selling Power Magazine, Inc Magazine and IDEA magazine. He's been a guest speaker for ACG Los Angeles, IASA Summit, West Point and been interviewed for 33Voices, EnTRUEpreneurship Podcast and IDEA Magazine by Northwood University. In 2012 Wiley & Sons published his book, What Works, about the lessons he's learned while growing his agency from start-up navigating his way to a multi-million dollar agency. Robert currently owns five companies.

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