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Overcoming High Failure Rate in the Customer Experience
By Yvonne Bailey
There’s trouble lurking among us. Within our offices and throughout our customer interactions, an invisible presence wreaks havoc on our deliverables, throws our best efforts into a tailspin, and sidelines customer expectations on a daily basis. When things go wrong, as we know they will, this unseen phantom is most often behind the failure.
At first glance, this might sound like a people problem, but it rarely is. In fact, in the 1950s, Dr. Deming (the father of quality improvement in Japanese manufacturing), found that 94% of failures are caused by systems, not people. We’ve come a long way since then, but the need for fail-safe systems is still important today.
Systems are now common practice in product and service companies alike. But what is less common are companies that make a deliberate effort to extend their systems beyond the four walls of an organization to account for the actual experience of the customer.
Whether your company primarily sells hard goods or soft services, the service experience is a part of every business. The quality of that experience is indelibly linked to the effectiveness of your people and the systems that support them. This makes the service environment a proverbial melting pot of your strongest and weakest human tendencies and systems efficiencies. As such we can all benefit from taking a close look at the systems behind the experiences we create.
Creating a system that produces consistent results every time
We give consideration to our technological systems and workflow processes to drive efficiency up and costs out. But how do these systems and processes actually tie directly into the customer experience? How can we ensure that customers meet with a fulfilling experience each and every time they have dealings with our companies?
We have only to look at the successful business model of the franchise to grasp the significance of using effective systems. Every year teenagers, whom we barely trust to drive the family car, are responsible for generating billions of dollars in revenue.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not comparing your years of hard-won expertise and specialization to the process of making and serving fries and hamburgers. But there is an important parallel here. Ray Kroc, took a product that was largely dependent on the inputs and processes of the individual and standardized it in such a way to ensure that 50 years later we still know exactly what to expect each and every time we see the “golden arches.”
As much as we joke about it, we can’t standardize other people’s behaviors, not the ones we work with or the ones for which we complete the work. But we can use certain principles to govern our interaction with customers and to create a consistent experience, no matter who delivers it.
Six guidelines to create a consistent customer experience
What steps can we take to ensure that we deliver a consistent and high quality customer experience every time? Here are a few key guidelines to use in assessing and re-aligning your organization.
1. Understand the brand is the experience
Our human spirit craves fulfilling experiences at work or at play. We gravitate over and over again to experiences that resonate with us, whether it is a friendly retail clerk or great service at a four-star hotel. When it comes to service, it’s virtually impossible to separate our deliverables from the experience itself.
Think beyond features and benefits, needs and wants. The customers’ entire experience from the assessment, purchase, use, service and maintenance of your products and services, affect how they perceive your brand and your company. How does the experience you create for the customer affect his or her perception of value?
If your TV or print ads are selling wholesome and practical products to make life easier for the customer, while your customer service department is rife with complaints about long hold times and unfair return policies, or you packaging and pricing change every three months to reap more profits for the company while providing less value to the customer, your customers will be understandably confused about your brand.
2. Products may change, but experiences remain
If you’ve ever had a bad experience with a particular company, you are likely to remember the experience long after you forget the details of what you bought, what you paid or whether you were satisfied with the product/service.
Fortunately, good experiences also stick with us. In some ways they stand out more than bad experiences, perhaps because they happen less often. Although we may not pick up the phone or get online and tell our peers when we’ve had a good experience, we do carry it with us in our memory banks. This works as a silent but powerful force to bring your customers back for repeat purchases and remains stored for reference, when a friend or colleague asks them for an opinion on your brand versus that of a competitor.
3. Begin with the end in mind
When we look to the final customer experience as a key measure of quality service delivery, we find an important standard on which to base our systems development. What experience do you want to create for your customers at each touch point?
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What does a customer who is delighted with every aspect of your service look like?
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What do they say when they bring your product home?
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How do they respond when one of your prospects calls them for a reference on your company?
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If you were socializing with this customer, where would you hang out and what would you talk about?
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How would they regard you, your service, and your company?
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How would they speak about their interaction with you and your company when speaking with their peers, colleagues or boss? What about one of your competitors?
4. Tie your internal systems back to the customer
With a clear picture in your mind of the experience you want to create for your customers, you can start to look for ways to extend your internal systems. The goal is to provide support for your team’s best efforts. Too often the systems we implement cause employees and managers to have to rework their thought processes and their behaviors, simply for the sake of following a system.
When everyone understands how their efforts affect the finished product or service and the customer’s experience, they are more likely to follow the systems in place and to come up with effective systems of their own to produce consistent results.
5. Spend two-thirds of your time building the system
Abe Lincoln said, “If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.” Rather than just jumping in to complete the task, we should actually spend two-thirds of our time improving the tools and systems that will make your entire team more effective.
Having an effective system in place gives us the leverage we need to accomplish extraordinary things. Imagine any great architect or engineer trying to build a structure to support the free movement of millions of people, without first designing it in its entirety using a blueprint.
6. Know what your customers expect
We work at managing customers expectations, but expectations are not set in a vacuum. They change and fluctuate with new developments and changes in the market and buyer’s environment. And what about the expectations that are unexpressed, or the expectations of millions of consumers, how do we effectively manage those?
We can start by asking the right questions and giving our client’s multiple open-ended channels to communicate with us. In a previous column, we talked about the shortcomings of email forms, feedback and satisfaction surveys. It’s important to allow customers to speak from their own experience.
A common breakdown here is that customers can’t always articulate their expectations. You may be receiving plenty of messages about what they don’t want, rather than what they do want. The task at hand is to experiment with communication methods that help the customer speak freely and add to the experience of your brand.
It’s an unfortunate side effect of our market environment, customers believe a small portion of what we say and have come to expect very little of the companies they do business with. Implementing customer-focused systems helps to streamline the chaotic efforts of individuals into a well-orchestrated business experience. Building a system that achieves a desired result that can be replicated over and over again by anyone, regardless of skill and expertise is the fail-safe way to move beyond the hit and miss nature of customer satisfaction and create experiences that your competitors will be hard pressed to duplicate.
Yvonne Bailey is a customer engagement specialist and President of EVE Consulting. She helps companies to better engage, connect and relate to customers and build deeper, more profitable relationships. If you’d like to discuss implementing customer-driven strategies for market leadership in your business, she can be reached at 604-841-4468 or join our upcoming webinar.
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