Redefining the “Customer Experience”

“A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.” - Henry Ford

What the Customer wants!!

 Too often we become more concerned with what we can offer the customer instead of figuring out what the customer wants.  The easiest way is most often the last path taken: Ask them what they want.  Make sure you understand what their needs are so you can tailor your solution to that.  If they aren’t sure, that is where your knowledge of your industry, product and company can serve them best.  Help them figure it out by offering to work through the process with them.  More often than not, a simple conversation can help the customer decide the difference between what they want and what they need.  Once that is done, be prepared to offer them solutions to how you can provide for them.

Becoming the Customer’s Ally

Being an ally means that you are working to provide not just an answer to the customer, but a solution.  You are giving them another set of hands or eyes to help them solve their problems.  You are the subject matter expert when it comes to your product.  Utilize that expertise to give the customer confidence in how you can make their job easier and their business more successful.  As a business you are the customer’s partner.  Your success depends on theirs, and the more you can assist with theirs, the higher the level you will achieve.

Being there for the Customer

Customers need to be communicated to.  Every one of your customers know they are not your only one, however, being there for them means treating them like they are when they need something from you.  Being there means being proactive to how you approach your customer.  In order to best serve them, you must know what they need, and the best way to find that out is to become part of their business.

Forget about the Competition

When you are having a conversation about your product and services with your customer make sure it stays about what you can offer.  It doesn’t matter what the competition offers if you are giving the customer what they need.  Focus your attention and time on what the customer needs and how you can build your product or service to their demands.  All of your customer driven programs should be designed to be able to cater to different needs from different customers in the same market.  Using the competition as a benchmark for your product or success is giving them too much power and possibly undue attention.

Building a better relationship

Building a relationship with your customer base can be a difficult task if undertaken without the commitment to actually having the relationship work.  There is much more to a solid customer relationship than just putting yourself if front of the customer and your business card in their hand.  Relationships never work unless:

A.       They are built on a solid basis of trust and communication.  If you can’t deliver what you promise, they customer isn’t going to trust you.

B.      They are mutually beneficial.  You need the customer to spend their money with you, they need a good reason to part with their hard earned cash.  You must make sure that you go into the relationship building stage with the understanding that your main goal is to know the customer and understand their specific needs.

C.      You are willing to commit to the good times and the bad times.  People make mistakes, businesses make mistakes and yes, even customers make mistakes.  Being there for your customer to help them solve whatever issues come up shows them that you are committed to them.  In most cases, your business will be rated not based on how you handle your day to day operations, but how you handle it when things don’t go as planned.

Attracting Your Customers

Attracting the customer is the first step in growing our business and taking care of our customers.  In order to be attractive we have to change both our outward and inward appearance.  How we portray ourselves to the customer, vendors and public will affect our ability to become successful. 

Do we want to be the wallflower standing in the corner waiting for someone to come and ask us to dance, or the pretty one standing in the middle with the ability to choose any partner we want?

There are a number of things that need to be done to make ourselves more attractive.  The easiest are the internal ones that we can make immediate changes to.  While our individuality is something we should strive to celebrate, there is something to be said for consistency. 

This action plan will lay out guidelines, expectations and ideas on how we can improve our attractiveness to our customer base.  Our success will be based on the sum of all of the parts.  Just doing a few of them correctly, or only having a few of our team mates doing them all correctly will have a significant impact on our ability to bring aboard new customer and retain our existing ones.

Laws of attraction:

1.        Your product and service must be clearly defined. – What do we want to do and what do we want to be known for.

2.        You must develop customer awareness – How do we make sure the customer knows what we can offer.

3.       You must be credible –  If the customer doesn’t believe us or believe in us, there isn’t much likelihood of them trusting us with their business.

4.       You must always be consistent  –  How well are our customers trained?  Training them incorrectly can have a negative impact on our attractiveness.

5.       Always maintain your focus –  Know what you do and how you do it.

6.       You must offer customer based solutions -  Ask the right questions to the right people and cater your product to their needs.

7.       Be confident in what you do. – Confidence is quite possibly the most attractive quality any customer will look for.  Learn your job and approach the customer with the confidence that you know what you are doing and that your company is standing behind you 100%

Making sure that we are following these laws on a daily basis will ensure that we are providing the customer with the best possible services. 

Going forward, each department will be responsible for ensuring that they have a plan in place to meet these expectations. 

In order to attract our customers, we have to offer something they want.  Every current or potential customer in our industry has the same thing in common:  a need for our product.  Convincing them that our product is the best solution for them becomes the goal.  You don’t have to sell them on whether or not they need your product, you have to sell them on whether or not it is your product they want.

Make your product exciting – Even the most basic product or service can be put in a better light.  You don’t have to allocate a huge marketing budget in order to accomplish this.  Think of your product in terms of what it means to your customer.  It could be just a spark plug, or it could be a laser welded platinum tip spark plug with superior anti-fouling technology.  Make your product pitch sing.

Make your business exciting – Most customers know very little about the companies they do business with.  Take the opportunity to tell your customer about the history of your business.  Let them know if you take an active role in the community or if you have a charity your help to sponsor.  If your company was the first to do something in the industry or has made a significant improvement in its product or its business plan, let them know.  You aren’t just trying to attract the customer to your product or service, you are trying to attract them to your business.

Make yourself exciting – Sure some of us live boring lives, but we have all done something that the customer could find exciting.  It doesn’t even have to be an event, just coming across as passionate about what you do and who you are is sufficient to spark the interest of the customer. If the customer looks forward to seeing you again, or hearing from you again, they will find reasons to get you back.

Create a buzz in your marketplace about your business. Customers talk to each other, they talk to their other vendors and they talk to the people in their company.  When they have these conversations and are talking about what person or company is really giving them what they want, have it be you. 

Remember – what you may find attractive may not have the same draw to your customers.  If you don’t listen to what they want they won’t want what you have.  Be willing and able to adapt to your audience.

Creating a Customer-Centric Environment

The key to keeping your customer is the word “YOUR”.  You’ve done the work to attract them, put in the time and effort to satisfy them and now they belong to you.  At this point, in order to remain successful, you must take ownership of your customers.  You may not be a stock holder in your customer’s company, but your investment can still pay dividends.

Ownership is the key to keeping your customer.   Through the concentrated efforts of your business, you have taken the responsibility of maintaining and growing your relationship with the customer.  They trust you to provide them what they need and you need to honor their trust by continually giving them reasons to keep doing business with you.

It is up to every member of your company to put in the effort to retain your customers.  This is accomplished through the concentrated efforts of each individual and an overall commitment to excellence. 

One of the biggest causes of losing a customer is through providing an inferior service.  Each of us can look back at a time where we have determined never to return to a business based on a negative experience.  More often than not, that negative experience has to do with an interaction with an employee rather than the product or location the business is in.   Businesses with high employee turnover are often the same businesses with high levels of customer attrition. 

Creating a Customer-centric environment

There are two key components to creating a customer-centric environment:  Customer satisfaction and Employee satisfaction.  Both are equally important and cannot be achieved separately.

Any customer retention strategy must contain a customer-centric theme.  The customers, after all, are the reason your business exists.  Without them, you would have no outlet for your product and no revenue to support your business.  That being said, because you have a business, you must have customers.  Forgetting about your employees on your way down the path to customer satisfaction will leave you alone at the end of your journey.

Customer and Employee Satisfaction –

Having happy employees equates to having employees that are bound and determined to share that happiness with their customers.  Having happy customers is the result of a positive experience they are having with you and your employees.   Happiness at work revolves around the level of involvement, excitement and sense of belonging both the employees and customers share.

Challenges

Employees

Giving your employees challenges that they have control over the outcome will give them a sense of responsibility.   Continually providing an atmosphere where each member of your team is accountable for developing, implementing and managing creative solutions to challenging problems keeps them thinking, involved and active in the growth of the business.

                Customers

While customers don’t want to be challenged by your company in a way that negatively affects your relationships, they often have their own challenges that they need help coming up with solutions.  It is possible to continually try to challenge your customers to come up with ways you can solve their issues, improve your own service, and collaborate on creative solutions to potential industry wide challenges.

Ownership

Employees

While some business go so far as allowing employees to invest their own money in a business, we aren’t all set up like that.  However, we can all equate our time as having a value, so in essence, our ownership of the business can be related to the amount of time we spend working there.  Employee ownership goes beyond the shell of the business, employees need to start by having the accountability and ownership of their position, the tasks they undertake and the results of their decisions.  Creating an environment where the employee is not only allowed, but encouraged to take full responsibility of these actions gives them the sense of ownership necessary for them to invest more than just their time.

Customers

While your customers don’t have literal ownership of your business, they do pay your bills.  They need to be treated as a benefactor not a hindrance.  One way to accomplish this is to make sure they know where their investments are going.  Keep your customers apprised of new equipment you are purchasing, training that is underway or has been completed.  Share your business with your customers.  In addition, make them feel like they belong.  All of your customers know that they aren’t your only one; but they should never feel that way when they are dealing with anyone from your company.

Training

Employee

The biggest mistake most employers make is forgetting to continually train their employees.  Employees who receive ongoing training are more likely to feel as though their time investment in the company is being rewarded by the sense of trust that continual training provides.  Training doesn’t have to be a scheduled event either.  Making the time to improve basic skills such as computer programs, typing, reports and presentations or phone etiquette are examples of things that can be taught as they come up.  Formal training should be done as well.  One thing we can have a tendency to take for granted is not knowing what our employees don’t know.  One of the most frustrating things for employees can be making a decision and finding out after the fact that there was a piece of information or a tool that they weren’t aware that would have influenced their decision or caused a more positive outcome.

Customer

Informed employees can provide information to customers.  The more a customer knows about your product, your employees and how you do run your business, they more likely they are to continue to do business with you.  Product information and training opportunities should be offered to your customers on a regular basis.  Being able to provide this type of training with the people in your company they already know and are comfortable with gives an extra sense of satisfaction to both parties.  A customer will be trained on how you do business by two methods: communication and action.  Telling them you are committed to doing business one way and then performing you tasks in another not only confuses them but doesn’t provide the credibility you want to retain their business.  Make sure your actions match your words.

10 Keys to Effective Customer Service

1.      Know your role.  In the relationship with the customer, understanding your role is the first key to ensuring success.  The customer should always be in charge of the conversation. 

2.      Understand what the customer wants.  Being a great listener is better than being a great talker. 

3.      Provide the customer what they want.  Don’t make assumptions that you know better than the customer what they are looking for.  Be an advocate for them.

4.      Treat customers with respect.  On the phone or in person, make sure to let the customers know that they are important.  Don’t leave them on hold forever, and no matter what you are doing, if a customer shows up in front of you, acknowledge them.

5.      Train the Customer.  Customers feel more comfortable when they know what to expect.  Letting them know not only what you are doing for them, but how you are going to accomplish it helps to ease any apprehension they may have.

6.      Be an advocate.  Nobody wants to hear no.  Give your customers options.

7.      Let them complain.  You will learn more from a customer when they are complaining than when they are complacent.

8.      Keep improving.  Take what the customer gives you for feedback and use it to improve how you act, react and how you do business.  Ask for input from your customer and allow them to be part of the solution.

9.      Elevate their expectations.  Don’t just meet the customer’s needs, use your knowledge of your business to exceed them.

10.  Take care of yourself.  Happy employees equal happy customers.  Nobody wants to do business with someone who doesn’t want to be there.  You have the power to decide how you want to feel about your job.

Preparing for Change

Just like changes require preparation, so do the people involved in them.  When changes are afoot, (and in any good organization, they are always coming), being ready for them makes them go a lot smoother and are much easier to take.

It’s not about bracing for the impact of change, it’s about embracing the needs for the change and the methods in which they are brought about.

First of all, understand that change isn’t a light switch; it is a chain of events that bring about an outcome that is different than it would be if everything stayed the same.  Each event within that chain requires the same dedication and understanding as the one before it and the one after.

What can you do to be ready and willing to accept the changes as they come?

Understand the changes – It is the responsibility of an organization to communicate what is going to change, how it’s going to change and why the changes are necessary.  Unless you have an understanding of these facts, change will be that ugly word we talked about earlier.  If you don’t understand them, or don’t feel like all of these are being addressed, ask someone.  You have the responsibility of making sure that you have this understanding.  If your organization fails to provide the information, don’t fail the organization by not taking it on yourself to ask questions.  Organizational changes are an organizational effort requiring everyone to hold everyone accountable. 

Don’t take it personally – Even if the upcoming changes are specific to your department or even your job, it isn’t personal.  Changing the way you do something, or what tools you use to do it, doesn’t mean you are doing it wrong.  You were trained to do it the way you are doing it and it wasn’t wrong then.  Change plans come about when something is determined to be a weak link in a system.  If it happens to be your area, it doesn’t make you the weak link.

Invest in the data – In good organizations, data drives change.  In other organizations, change is driven by data assumptions.  In either organization, data will need to be collected to validate the change and benchmark the results.  Many times, change plans come with an increased amount of data collection.  If you fall into the “other organizations” part, the starting data may be incomplete or missing entirely. 

Don’t look at providing more data as an additional task taking more time out of your already busy day, look at is as a means to an end.  Your efforts have the ability to decrease the amount of time a change process will take.  At some point, the data collection can be made more automated, but if you aren’t there yet, invest in the outcome of the process by providing the information necessary.

Trust the system – This might be the biggest issue that organizations face when developing and implementing change plans.  They are expecting that each member of the organization the changes affect will trust that the people planning, deploying and managing the change know what they are doing and that the methods they are using are sound.  The good news is that organizational change management is a thing.  You can even get educational certificates for it now.  That doesn’t mean that the people in your organization have one, or even need one for that matter.  What it does mean is that there is plenty of guidance and support for any organization when it comes to making changes properly. 

Trust that the change managers have the best interest of the business in mind when they make decisions, even if at first it seems like they are sending the business on a wild goose chase.  Trust that you will be provided with training and support when the changes take place because it will make the change managers look bad if they can’t make changes because they didn’t build in a training and support mechanism.  You may not get all of the information you need on the schedule you want, but there will always be someone to ask questions to along the way, even after they have gone on to the next project.

Be prepared – Yes, you have to prepare yourself.  Preparation is as much mental as it is physical and being mentally prepared for change is one of those things that often get overlooked.  Mental preparation will have the affect you desire it to have.  If you think positively about the upcoming changes and are willing to overlook some of the obstacles and pitfalls that accompany every change during its implementation, the odds are the change will go smoothly.  If on the other hand, you are certain that the changes will cause extra stress, extra tasks and at the end of them they won’t make a difference, often times that will become a self-fulfilling prophesy.  

The physical part of the preparation consists of cleaning things up.  If you know they are going to be changing the way you handle your Accounts Receivable, make every effort to get the old stuff cleaned up.  If the change is going to require new hardware, get your work area cleaned up so the transition will take less time.  The key to this part is making sure you have things cleaned up.  Going into a new system or process with a mess only makes it take a lot longer to get to where you want to be.

You Can't Motivate Your Employees

In every corporate culture, there comes a discussion about how to motivate the employees.  More often than not, these discussions come at a time when the business is faltering or having difficult times.  A business needs to push ahead, increase revenue and profitability, grow market share or any other number of growth ideals.  In order to do that, they need to get the most out of their employees.  At this point, a business must make that difficult decision on how to get their work force to be more productive.  What is the correct way to motivate your employees?

As the title of this post says, you can’t motivate your employees.

If you’ve gotten to the point where you need to determine how to motivate your employees because your business needs immediate growth, more likely than not, looking to motivate your employees may be too little too late. 

Every employee at every company is capable of doing more and doing it better than they are currently doing.  This is not a quantifiable fact, but a theoretical one based on the logic that humans by nature are capable of extraordinary effort when they are in a situation where they are motivated to do so.  No sane person would jump in front of a moving vehicle just because someone asked them to (unless they are a Hollywood stuntman), but put their child in the way and the vast majority of them would risk it to save their child.

I’m not saying you need to put your employee’s children in front of moving vehicles, but the point of the analogy is that employee motivation stems from the individual, not the company.

I’ve seen a number of different ways that corporations have tried to motivate their employees:

-          Give them more money – This might be a short term fix for some of the more financially motivated employees.  The problem with this motivation is that you are giving more money to an employee who more than likely has learned to live on what they are already making.  Giving them more money and then asking them to do more will more than likely mean you will have higher paid employees doing the same amount of work.

-          Threaten them – While this sounds very old school in the business world of today, it happens very often.  Telling an employee that if they don’t improve they will lose their job will most likely result in an employee doing the bare minimum to keep their job while they search for another one.  Most of your employees have had jobs before they came to work for you, while having to go and look for one isn’t a great prospect, it’s not a gamble you always want to take, and more often than not, it ends up with you getting a little more effort in the short term and then having to find someone to replace them.

-          Appeal to their loyalty – Companies seem to have a pretty big ego when it comes to dealing with their employees.  Asking an employee to dig deeper in a time of need because they company needs them to may work for a small group of employees, but the majority of them will start looking for reasons that they aren’t the ones who caused the problems and it’s your job to make sure they still have a job tomorrow. 

-          Dangle a carrot – Companies can’t always afford to give employees raises or promotions, so they do the next best thing and tell the employees if they can get them through the tough times, the pot of gold will be waiting on the other side for them.  What you are really telling your employee is that their worth is only based on the how well the company is doing and not the value they believe they are adding on a daily basis.

All of these methods have one thing in common.  They make the employee feel like an employee instead of being part of something. The employee is not given control of their own destiny.  You could argue that  The other common side effect is that you are excluding them from your circle of trust.  Making a companywide decision on how to motivate all of the employees within that company is making a blanket statement that you know better than the individual how to motivate them.

Motivation is an employee based ideal, not a company based one.  A business is defined and carried out by the individuals they choose to employ.  Making a decision about what motivates them has the same detrimental effect to a company as trying to tell your customers what they want and how they want it.

Effective businesses understand that when they say their business is employee based, they mean it.  No business can make all of their employees happy all of the time, but when the majority of them feel like they are part of the decision making process and have a close relationship with their employees, the employees can motivate themselves into putting in the extra effort needed with nothing more than a request.  In great companies, the request doesn’t even have to be made because the employees are in tune with what is going on and have their own accountability and motivation to push forward.

These same businesses know that the motivational process and the involvement process begins with the hiring process.  Understanding who you are hiring, what they are looking for in a job, and what motivates them as an individual is key in the development of an employee based, self-motivated work force.  Having this information, and using it during the training process, employee reviews and on-going coaching is an excellent way to stay in touch with the needs and requirements of your employees. 

Birth of the five minute thinker

Short term thinking  in a long term world is killing many businesses.  In a hierarchal sense, most business are structured to have their strategists at the top of the pyramid and those managing the path of the decisions following below.  Many smaller companies today are utilizing their managers as strategists. While on a personal level, there may be many managers capable of developing strategic plans, the companies are many times either not set up, or are wary of providing the essential information needed to make an effective strategic decision.  The result of this is the Five Minute Thinker.

The Five Minute Thinker has only either enough time or information (and many times less of both) to take a snapshot of the recent past and an estimate of the company’s future.  This type of thinking has the unfortunate consequence of relying on those decisions to mold the future and pad the balance sheet.  A business cannot survive long term when the decisions that shape it’s future are being made by Five Minute Thinkers.

Strategy has to come from someone who has three equally important powers:

The power of accountability – They are being held accountable for the decisions they are making.  Someone, or a group of people, is taking the time and energy to review the decisions and the effect they will have on the business.  This is the check and balance necessary to ensure long term survivability.

The power of authority – They have the authority to enact any changes or actions that a process will bring with them.  They can institute and hold others accountable for ensuring that their decisions are being followed through and any issues that arise are being dealt with accordingly. 

The power of information – They have access and to a certain extent, control, of any information necessary to make both short and long term decisions. 

If these powers are intact, only then can a realistic and intelligent strategy be presented.  Excluding or limiting one of these mutually exclusive powers will only serve to the detriment of the company.  A true leader can persevere having any one of these powers be limited, but trying to grow and deepen a company’s talent pool in a similar scenario will lead to frustration and degradation of the company’s infrastructure and effectiveness.

Five minute thinking needs to be pushed out of today’s business environment.  Strong businesses, especially those with plans to remain in business for the long term, need to either give the power of strategy to a designated strategist, or need to give their current strategy oriented employees the three powers listed above. 

Long term commitments are something businesses make on a daily basis to their customers, landlords, lending institutions, etc.  As easy as a long term commitment seems to be with those outside of the company, more of them need to be made within the company.  If a company really wants to stick around, they need to commit to it, starting from the top.  Companies need to commit to their own future by taking the ability and necessity of making strategic, long term decisions serious enough to provide those with the function of making them enough accountability, authority and information to get it done.