Pleasing customers is not complicated. Complication steps in when businesses don’t take the time to discover what will please customers, so their efforts become a hit and miss dance. When a business gets the pleasure formula right, however, even the angelic choirs join the customers in rejoicing.
Simply put, customers want a consistently positive experience. The norm, as all of us have discovered, is service and experience inconsistency. I’ve come across so many businesses that are stuck in the “service inconsistency status quo.” The irony is that whilst they proclaim loudly, that it’s an untenable situation, many are unwilling to push the rock up the mountain to achieve a level of service delivery that is consistent in a positive way. The problem starts with that little (big?) word…… consistency.
An improvement initiative should always be driven by the ultimate intention of achieving a sustainable customer experience that is consistent and standardized. In other words, upgrades deliver the best value when they achieve a long-lasting and sustainable result.
Simply put, customers want a consistently positive experience.
Except for maybe technology initiatives, the improvement that occurs when a business initiates any service quality upgrade, can only last so long without the supplementary actions that imbed the shift. By making the shift permanent, customer confidence in being able to predict a pleasing outcome, rises to a high level of certainty.
The brands that are differentiated in their experience impact, have a zero tolerance for unpredictability and have no problem putting in the effort to move customer pleasure up to the top of the mountain. They believe that customers must be able to predict the positive experience that they will encounter and be right in their expectations.
As a service transformation consultant who has worked with many businesses to help them to improve the quality of their service delivery, the goal is to move clients along the service excellence continuum to the ultimate landing point of service excellence maturity. This means meeting clients wherever they are on the continuum and moving them to a higher level, a process that takes time, since it has to be sequenced with the exigencies of the client’s ecosystem.
An improvement initiative should always be driven by the ultimate intention of achieving a sustainable customer experience that is consistent and standardized.
So why is a consistently positive experience so elusive? Well, let’s take a look at three reasons.
The first reason is incongruence, because consistency is not always part of the “lived character” of the business. If the core operating system of a business is characteristically inconsistent, it’s not hard to imagine that the quality of customer experience will follow suit. This is why it’s so important to look below the surface when completing a diagnosis of the service footprint of a business. A lot is revealed when the business is viewed as a whole ecosystem.
A second reason comes from the distant relationship that businesses have with data analytics. We don’t have to look far for the benefits of data and analysis to be validated. Even the most gifted physicians lean on validation tools such as x-rays and scans to take the guesswork out of the decision-making equation. They understand the need to balance knowledge, experience and opinion with risk management.
It’s no different in the world of business. As a matter of fact, gathering customer data from as many sources as possible and interrogating the content, helps to reduce confusion when customer-impact decisions are being made in the boardrooms. The emerging clarity will serve the purpose of triggering strategies that affect the life of the customer and the revenue stream of the business, with a better hit rate.
Moving a business to service excellence maturity is not rocket science. It’s simply about focussing consistently on improving the sum of small, continuous interactions being experienced delightfully by the customer.
Thirdly, the lack of dissection of the customer’s journey is a major hindrance to nailing the service-to- expectations relationship. Businesses forget that in addition to a transactional experience, customers want an emotional experience as well, with the latter imprinting a longer-lasting impression. When a business fails to understand the customer’s end-to-end journey, a huge vacuum is created and into it goes many valuable data points on how to keep the customer delightfully happy.
Additionally, making provision for employees to understand the customer’s journey from an emotional perspective as well, spotlights the rules of empathy that should be normalized in face-to-face and digital customer interactions. Empathy, as we now know, is a lever for creating emotional connectedness with the customer.
Moving a business to service excellence maturity is not rocket science. It’s simply about focussing consistently, on improving the sum of small, continuous interactions being experienced delightfully by the customer.