PRINCIPLE TWO: Create Their Experience

Once every week throughout June, I offer each one of the Three Principles to Build Customer Loyalty. In this second week, I give you Principle Two: Create their Experience.

QUI Takeaway: Customers pay for their experience, not your product or service. They buy with emotion and justify their decision with reason. Customers seek the best emotional value in their experience, not your logically reasonable price, product, or service. When customers complain, they don’t complain about the price. They complain about the value of their experience for the price you’re asking them to pay.

To earn customer loyalty, Be the Customer and Create Their Experience. You are not in the supplier business or the provider business. You are in the Experience business. Customers are paying for their experience, not yours. This is a QUI concept. In order to earn customer loyalty, you need to create an experience for each customer.

I get that we are all doing more with less. I know we have all had cutbacks, and possibly even had some layoffs. There may be some days you are understaffed because a member of your team called in sick. Or your computers are down when their customers called you. Customers don’t care. Those issues are YOUR experience. Customers only care about THEIR experience, not yours. They are willing to give you their hard-earned money in exchange for an experience that they feel is more valuable to them than their money. And when they come to you, they never have an expectation that they will be dissatisfied.

Remove all potential dissatisfiers.

So how do you create your customers’ experience? First, do everything you can to make sure there are no negative surprises. Get rid of any potential dissatisfiers. For example, remove forbidden phrases such as “I’ll be back in a second,” Can you hold for just a minute?” and “I’ll be right with you.” Such phrases only frustrate a customer when more than 60 seconds go by. Even? “I’m new here,” or “I’m in training is a Forbidden Phrase. If your customers are going to pay their hard-earned money, do they want to be served by a rookie? When you say you’re in training, your service is a poor value for their experience. Even more, they don’t care about your experience. All they care about is their experience.?

Review all the customer touchpoints and take any negative issues and make them neutral. Minimize wait times. Clean dirty restrooms. Create “no hassle” return or exchange policies. Then, as Larry Winget, the Pitbull of Personal Development puts it, “Do what you said you would do when you said you would do it, the way you said you would do it.” That’s it. It’s that simple.

And when you take action, a negative customer experience has turned into a neutral one. But that’s not good enough. Satisfied customers feel their experience is good, not better, just average. Nobody raves about average. And satisfied customers will leave when they find an experience that is better or a price that is less expensive.

Don’t just serve to meet customer expectations. Serve to exceed their expectations. Serve to WOW them.

So don’t serve to satisfy customers. Don’t treat customers as they would have expected to be treated. And don’t treat them as they want to be treated. Instead, treat them a little better than they want to be treated. Serve to WOW them.

Deliver a low-cost, no-cost “a little better than the average experience that customers expect” product or service. For hotels, offer bottled water at arrival or departure. For auto service repair businesses, wash the car before returning the vehicle. For fine dining restaurants, personalize the menu with the customers’ names. Customers have an emotional connection with you. The more emotional the connections, the more memorable the experiences, and the more loyal the customers are. And loyal customers will return again and again, raving about you to others along the way.

Let me give you one example of how we created for customers THEIR experience. When I was the GM of a luxury resort, when a bus tour group arrived, we announced an IPT call over our walkie-talkies. IPT stood for I Practice Teamwork. When an IPT call was made, everyone had a role that was pre-determined. Administrative staff assisted check-in, maintenance, and security people served as elevator operators and housekeepers and sales managers on each floor assisted guests to their rooms. We did the same thing for breakfast. Everybody became a busser or poured coffee. Was that an inconvenience for the admin staff or the maintenance people, Of course. But it DIDN’T matter. We all understood that customers are paying for their experience, not ours.?

NEXT WEEK: Principle Three: Be Magnificently Boring!

#customerservice #customerexperience #custserv #custexp #cx

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English writer Samuel Johnson said, "“People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.” So, as you prepare your team to engage your customers, I encourage you to remind them when you say, "Let's not just be good. Let's be GREAT out there!"