It Really Is All About the Customer Experience
Steve Henke
Helping MR firms create awareness, build reputation and generate sales leads with outsourced marketing, sales training & consulting; highly-regarded speaker, author (500+ articles and a dozen eBooks) and podcaster.
For Christmas of 2021, my wife and I bought our daughter and her husband, a Nespresso coffeemaker to replace an old Keurig machine that went kaput. And they loved it and have been using it ever since.
But recently, they started having some problems with it… and here’s where the story gets interesting.
To help solve the problem, my daughter reached out to customer support at Nespresso and – believe it or not – actually got to talk to a real human being.
This person then took the time to walk my daughter through a series of diagnostics and activities to try to fix the issue. When the problem couldn’t be fixed, the Nespresso rep said, “We’re sorry you’re having these problems… we’ll ship a new Nespresso machine off to you this afternoon – free of charge.”
Wow! Now that’s how to take care of a customer. Look at all the boxes that story checks:
- Great customer service. Getting through to a trained CS professional who took the time to listen to my daughter, then try to help her.
- Enhancing their brand. Being known as a company that stands behind its products, and really takes care of its customers.
- Not just improving customer satisfaction, but solidifying customer loyalty. Will my daughter ever buy another brand of coffeemaker? And how many people do you think my daughter will tell this story to?
- The total customer experience. From the product itself… to the helpful CS professional… to the replacement unit being sent out… Nespresso’s customer experience was on point.
Now, take a look at your own organization. Think about your website… your salespeople… your project managers… subject matter experts… senior leadership… project reports… your billing team. How’s the customer experience – along that continuum – for your clients? Are you reinforcing your brand and building customer loyalty at every touch point? Is everyone on your team empowered – in fact, directed – to do the right thing?
Bottom Line
Every day, all of us want to do great work for our clients… but sometimes, things go wrong. It happens. And our clients understand that. What’s really important is how we respond to those problems. And that response is at the center of a great customer experience.
Good luck!