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Why are there a few brands with a high percentage of customers who cannot live without them while the competition struggles? Customer-centric brands have made price irrelevant.
The key to building long-term customer loyalty is building a positive experience so engaging and memorable that your existing clients can’t stop talking about it, resulting in repeat business and customer referrals. It is about creating your brand’s signature experience.
Companies spend millions creating and advertising their brands, yet the customer’s experience drives customer perception, retention, and referrals. If you take care of your existing clients, they will generate more new customers than any advertising campaign ever could. Think about what might happen if you reversed your advertising and customer service budget.
Are your customers’ experiences dependent on which employee they encounter? Are there employees on your team you hope your best clients don’t interact with? If so, you have what is known as “employee roulette,” a problem most organizations have. The customer shouldn’t suffer just because you have a new employee in a customer-facing role in their first 90 days.
Remember: The enemy of a great customer experience is inconsistency.
In addition to employee roulette, there can be department roulette, location roulette, or franchisee roulette. You need to remove employee roulette. There is good news: You can significantly improve your customer experience with your existing group of employees.
What do the following phrases have in common?
“We are a customer-first organization.”
“Treat customers the way you want to be treated.”
“Exceed customer’s expectations.”
“Going above and beyond is our standard.”
“We deliver genuine hospitality.”
These are great mantras, but they don’t provide concrete direction for their team members. You will get 100 personal interpretations if you tell 100 employees to exceed customer expectations or go above and beyond for your client. Truly world-class customer experience organizations remove personal interpretations when training team members to deliver exceptional service at each customer journey touchpoint.
How do you reduce employee roulette and eliminate employees’ personal interpretations? You create your brand’s signature experience.
Your business must have a unique signature experience to stand out from your competition. A signature experience is your organization’s distinct experience that your customers can only get consistently from you. Creating a signature experience has nothing to do with the type of industry you are in, B2B or B2C.
World-class brands build signature experiences through customer journey mapping. Businesses visualize the path their customers take from initial contact to the final sale and beyond. This process helps organizations understand customer experiences at touchpoints across channels, allowing them to identify areas to improve and enhance overall customer experience. Customer journey mapping is an ongoing process that can significantly impact your strategic decisions and help deliver a better customer experience.
Your customer journey mapping will result in a training tool that The DiJulius Group calls a Customer Experience Cycle (CEC). Replace the word “Customer” with whatever you call the person buying from you, i.e., client, patient, or guest. The CEC dramatically increases the likelihood that your customers receive a consistent, high-level customer experience, regardless of whom they encounter.
Every stage of the CEC needs to be looked at from the customer’s perspective. For a restaurant, the stages might be reservations, initial greeting, table seating, server greeting, meal presentation, table visit, and check delivery. Once you know your stages, break down each into four components:
The CEC is all about giving your teams—across shifts, departments, and locations—a tool so that they can deliver a consistently great experience.
When done right, the CEC exercise:
The end result is training materials (manuals, videos, etc.) that every existing and new employee is trained on, tested, certified, and held accountable for executing.
In today’s world, to stand out and make your customer experience your single biggest competitive advantage, you must create your signature experience. A signature experience is your organization’s distinct customer experience that your customers can only get consistently from you. Once you do, you are making price irrelevant and becoming the brand your customers cannot live without.
John DiJulius III, author of The Customer Service Revolution, is president of The DiJulius Group, a customer service consulting firm that works with companies such as Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, Ritz-Carlton, Nestle, PwC, Lexus, and many more. Contact him at info@thedijuliusgroup.com or 216-839-1430.