Turning Customer Service into a Positive Customer Experience
When organisations are espousing commitment to customer service, shouldn’t they really be talking about the customer experience? Commitment to delivering a positive experience will build loyalty to your brand and ensure you hold the heart and mind of your customer. This in turn will differentiate your business from competitors and create clear advantage, at same time realising positive impact on the bottom-line.
It’s very important to distinguish service from experience because, in this context, service is just the mechanism for delivering the experience to the customer; whilst it’s the experience itself which builds an emotional connection between your customer and the brand. The customer experience will encompass every aspect of your brand’s offering. Therefore good products backed up by quality service will result in a positive experience. For example, Dell managed to turn the risky process of buying a computer over the internet into a reliable and positive experience by making improvements that focused on mitigating their customer’s perceived risk.
These day’s businesses should be focusing on the customer experience. Whatever business you’re in, attached to every interaction with a customer (i.e. the ‘touch points’) is the memory of that engagement which translates into a customer experience; critically important because as mentioned the customer’s experience supports recall of your brand.
However, if customer service is directly related to experience, what can be done to ensure the highest possible service delivery? A service as a product is intangible and subject to variability which also makes the customer’s experience just as varied. Key to this is consistency… but to be consistent your business needs to attract and retain the right people. The customer’s experience will only be as good as the people delivering the service. To get the people with the attributes you need all starts with your recruitment criteria. In 2006, McKinsey & Co reported on the growing trend at the Bank of America of hiring retail professionals as branch managers. According to the report, the retail mind-set these employees have is exactly what the bank utilises when seeking to create a positive customer experience.
Secondly, standardise service delivery performance. Believe it or not your customers will recall your brand every time if they get to relive the quality experience they had last time. Consistent and quality service delivery will always promote a positive experience for your customer. When FedEx introduced tracking and shipment support over the internet the initiative was not so much concerned with what service was being provided but how. Offering this to customers over the internet allowed FedEx to create systems that would standardise its service delivery to ensure every customer came away with a similar positive experience.
Lastly, constantly seek feedback from your customer. It is essential to have open dialogue with your customers. This feedback can be captured using customer surveys aimed at collecting information around perception and attitude, and the satisfaction of your customers overall experience. One common method of doing this is surveying customers as they exit the premises or when the transaction has been finalised, i.e. using an exit survey. Knowing how to identify and to improve aspects of overall customer experience will establish competitive advantage and improve business profitability generally.
Behind each of the customer ‘touch points’ mentioned is also the need to have adequate metrics that show where your business is excelling and where improvements are required. Ongoing customer focused metrics will allow your business to monitor its overall capability in delivering a positive experience. Researchers A. Parasuraman, Valerie Zeithaml and Leonard Berry created the SERVQUAL scale which gives guidance in establishing effective metrics. They discovered five attributes that are fundamental to service quality:
- Reliability – Do we provide the service as promised?
- Responsiveness – Are we prompt, helpful and ready to respond to customer requests?
- Assurance – Do our employees instill confidence in customers?
- Empathy – Do we give full attention and understand the needs of our customers?
- Tangibles – Do we utilise modern and appealing facilities and employ people who behave in a professional manner?
Taking into consideration these five key metrics when developing your customer ‘touch points’ will help ensure your customer’s experience is a positive one.