Getting attention from your customer has become a scarce commodity, their attention is pulled in all directions, thanks to the web browser, mobile device, social platforms and word of mouth.
Customers have an instinctual distaste to direct advertising and promotions, especially when you are yelling at them at times when they don’t need what you have to offer. Right out of the gate you are already having to prove yourself worthy over all the other players that are pulling your customers to them.
How you capture the attention of your customer is through the emotional connection your customers make at first contact through your brand’s marketing.
Keeping your customer is done through the front line, your employees, the processes, and systems you have in place.
With every customer journey you must train your staff to surprise and delight your customers, so that they have a memorable and shareable experience.
Creating a circle of influence around your business may sound easy, but with my experience, it can become extremely hard especially for the big brand chains.
Here is what you can do. Start by outlining each touch point of the customer journey. From first contact, which is absolutely the most critical touch point of the customer journey, whether it’s your website, advertising, the person they first talk to in your organization or what you might not think you can control and that is others talking about you.
The first touch point is the largest influence to nudge them forward in the customer journey. Then look at the next touch point, is it them getting the service or product, is there an email being sent out after the first contact, are you giving them an invoice? Look at every single interaction and determine whether that touch point is necessary and how can you make it easy and seamless for the customer.
Customers want the value to be higher than the cost and value is perceive it is not tangible or objective. What’s valuable to me may not be valuable to you.
Consider that everyone already has a set of expectations, your expectations of what you want the customer to do, and the customer of your organization’s role. For example, if you own a restaurant, you expect the customer to be polite to the servers and to pay their bill after the meal.
Even if the expectations aren’t outlined, they are very apparent.
And as a customer when you go to a restaurant your expectation is to have a great experience, to have exceptional food and service.
These expectations increase every time the customer has an experience with your organization. If they are surprised and delighted each time with a free perk it’s to become expected.
If your staff is very friendly and then you hire someone who doesn’t have that customer service acumen, then the customer becomes deterred from your organization.
Every single employee contributes greatly to the customer experience, even if they aren’t directly communicating with the customer. How? Every department is interconnected and needs to be there to make the organization function. The payroll department operates so that employees can get paid, when employees get paid, they can continue to work with your organization, and when they continue to work they interact with your customer.
Each factor in the organization is an influence on the next. So why does this matter for the customer experience because your goal in the organization is to create something that the customer can share and talk about. An experience.
There are two important factors to consider when they share the experience they had.
The first is that they are comfortable with risking their reputation in believing that your business will provide the same experience for the person they share with.
Second, they will become a returning customer.
Very simple measures of success are: the customer returns, the customer refers you to someone else, the customer leave a review about your service. The last one might be a little trickier then the other two as sometimes it needs a prompt and the question becomes is it genuine.
This is business 101 on the retention of customers and most businesses will not survive without this cycle.
Today the customer has a megaphone, and if Jenn from the big box store has made the experience for Shauna special, Shauna is likely to voice her opinion to the people who are listening to her.
The best customers are the ones who return, the ones who you don’t need to advertise to because they are already committed. They are also the ones who talk about your brand, they are your brand ambassadors.
As the attention gets scarcer and people avoid intentionally being sold too through native advertisements (buy this product/service now), what is being said through the social channels matters and creates a ripple effect.
As I was leaving a Canadian chain supermarket, I overheard an employee yell at a customer outside; “I cannot do that, I will lose my job if I do.”
I didn’t quite get the full context but watching the customer storm off and the employee safeguards herself, I felt that something wasn’t right about the processes of this big chain.
It is valuing the company policy so much so that employees are fearful of losing their jobs over it.
Creating a user based experience becomes so important because of the 100 other options that a customer can choose from to get what they want.
How do you create a safe environment for your employees so that they can create that user experience for the customers and not feel threatened about losing their livelihood?
I believe it’s done through the training of employees before and soon after they get hired, and through the culture of the organizations.
Teaching your employees values and not policies, so that the employees can make judgments based not on what the rules and stipulations say but rather what is ethical and moral. When you do thing that works you can stand for it.
It’s human nature to respond in a flight or fight response, and neither of these work when it comes to dealing with customers. If your front line feels they are threatened then the company culture has instilled fear and bureaucracy.
Employees are customers too when they shop elsewhere, so how is it that they act a certain way when they shop and expect great customer service elsewhere yet, they can’t practice it themselves?
Businesses no matter the size will always be threatened by the quality of product and service, competition, customers, but should never let their employees feel threatened of losing their job.
All your front-line employees need to act like the customer service team, better yet act like CEOs. Think people before profit.
Your employees need to ask the following questions;
What would I do if I owned the business? How would I treat the customer and why? Putting yourself in the customer’s shoes, how would I think, feel and act if I were the customer?
You hire people that are going to stand for the company and represent the brand, yet what they are doing instead is protecting themselves from any danger, because they look at policies and not the values.
When everyone in your organization is aligned with the values of the company, you will have a dominant, thriving and engaging workforce.
The cost of not having the company’s values internalized is colossal. It costs you more profits because of the disengagement from your employee and employee turnover rate.
This happens when your front-line acts are based on policies and procedures.
Your employees act not because they want the business to grow, but instead because they need a paycheque and worry about losing their jobs due to not following procedure.
That to me sounds like a tyranny.
No matter what business you’re in your employees, always, need to come first and foremost before anyone else.
For the employees, their peers come first, then customers. Keeping each other accountable in exemplifying the values of the organization.
You can teach your employees values, which I highly don’t suggest, or you can hire employees that are already aligned with the organizational values.
They must agree upon those values, when that happens they will base their decisions on those values, they will know when to fire customers based on those values and they will know what to do in times when customers are exasperated.
When your employees get the values of your organization, so to will your customers, because your employees will act based on those values.
This type of culture makes for seamless and fast decision-making processes. Speed is a valued ingredient when it comes to user experience. Customers want what they want, and they want it better and faster each time. How can you keep up to that?
Remember the attention is scarce and for the customer to have to deal with a situation is one thing but as the situation takes hold of the customer in no time it creates annoyance and turns it into enragement.
Employees who embody the organizational values internalized will know what to do in times of desolation and will be able to solve circumstances. It becomes instinctual.
