It is well-established wisdom that the best route to mastering an activity, is through practice. Well, I am suggesting, on behalf of the customer experience (CX) improvement practitioners of the world that the best way to master customer experience is to “live” in the customer’s shoes. I’m not referring to walking a mile in his or her shoes, I’m talking about living the experience of the customer’s experience, first-hand.
Living in the customer’s shoes, means that a business is willing to invest time, resources and money, to understand its customers in an intimate way. The surveys, focus groups and voice of the customer listening channels are great knowledge (data) collection points, but businesses need to go a little further in making the intelligence-gathering a little more experiential.
To the executives and managers who are intent on creating a magical experience for their customers, a first-hand experience makes the difference between living in an alternate reality and in the customer’s reality. It takes the statistics out of the equation, humanizes the customer and reveals some of the barriers that the customers experience in their interactions with the business.
Today, I am talking about senior executives, middle managers and junior staff becoming “pretend” or “mystery” customers (PMCs) of the business and going incognito to discover just how the customer is faring, on a day to day basis. This means joining lines, calling the business, navigating the website and lodging complaints. This is a first-hand experience of the pain, the wait time, the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of policies, the friendliness or unfriendliness of processes, the disjointedness or seamlessness of switching across departments and the final sentiment when the transaction ends.
Today, I am talking about senior executives, middle managers and junior staff becoming “pretend” or “mystery” customers (PMCs) of the business and going incognito to discover just how the customer is faring, on a day to day basis. This means joining lines, calling the business, navigating the website and lodging complaints.
Going incognito as a “pretend” or internal “mystery” customer yields some big discoveries. For example, how do customer service representatives look whilst they are behind the counter? Do they look happy, irritated, resigned, bored, eager to serve, robotic or engaged? Do they move briskly, purposefully, with a sense of urgency, or casually, as if they are doing the customers a favour? This is the in-person experience, what about the online experience?
A couple of days ago, I visited a client’s website and immediately, a chatbot showed up to help me navigate the site. I felt welcomed and appreciated the fact that someone had taken the time to ensure that my experience on this e-branch channel of the business, would have been just as engaging as if I had visited in-person.
It’s so easy to forget the customer’s online experience. Often, a website is built, because it’s fashionable to boast of having a website, but it’s static, lacking interactivity features that enable customers to conduct business “live.” Likewise, some websites only have limited features that allow customers to only submit information, but not to execute and conclude transactions. In my world of customer experience, this is called designing the User Experience (UX) with the customer in mind. Quite a science actually.
Pretend customers should not restrict themselves to front-end experiences. Submitting a complaint, seeing how it lands and how it’s resolved, is another very telling bit of intelligence gathering. As a matter of fact, it’s a good idea to submit several types of complaints at odd hours, using various channels, just to test the consistency of response. As well, it’s a good idea to leave a message after hours, just to see if anyone responds to the “customer.”
Pretend customers should not restrict themselves to front-end experiences. Submitting a complaint, seeing how it lands and how it’s resolved, is another very telling bit of intelligence gathering. As a matter of fact, it’s a good idea to submit several types of complaints at odd hours, using various channels, just to test the consistency of response.
Consider a business with several branches and widely varying levels of customer experience, or a business with a salesforce, where each salesperson delivers a different brand of service. Recently, at the start of a client’s Service Improvement project, the Managing Director made it a point to visit all branches in the organization’s network. When he first started the exercise, the visits were “eye-opening” (his words). He discovered transaction inconsistencies, infrastructure problems and human resource inadequacies. He concluded those visits with a renewed sense of commitment to remediating the problems and removing barriers to a great customer experience. That’s the power of a first-hand experience…….. when the PMC is the ultimate decision-taker.
Let me tell you, this PMC game can yield some insights and discoveries that are split between hard to swallow and moments of pride.
Making PMCs a standard operating practice, can change the service and customer experience trajectory of a business. The benefits to improving the customer’s experience would include on-spot corrections, quick remediation, speedy decisions, easing of customers’ discomfort and elimination of pain points.
Making PMCs a standard operating practice, can change the service and customer experience trajectory of a business. The benefits to improving the customer’s experience would include on-spot corrections, quick remediation, speedy decisions, easing of customers’ discomfort and elimination of pain points.
I believe that it becomes game-changing, when a business decides to on-board a PMC army. It means that the business is ready to go beyond the scripted platitudes and palliative responses that have become so commonplace, to executing a problem-free experience, just to show customers that they are truly valued.