17 Nov Your customer’s experience starts here
Reading Time: 4 minutesPART 1
Where does your customer’s experience start? When they walk into your store or wander into your website? When they talk to a sales person? When they go searching for something on Google? When they see or hear your ad? When they use your products or services?
Sure these are all parts of the customer experience. But your customer experience starts much further back in the organisation. It starts with your values and purpose.
I know I can sound a bit like a broken record on this stuff but if you don’t know what your values are (the real ones, not the stuff you tell yourself for show) or know your purpose and what you care about – that enduring why – then you have little to no hope of delivering a consistent, aligned customer experience that sets and meets expectations (whatever they are) and builds loyalty and a strong resilient brand as a result.
I’m going to talk values today, I’ll come back to purpose next week.
I’ve written plenty of times about how to find your authentic values – those ones that live in the DNA of your culture. They are simply “how we do things around here”.
So if they shape how you do things – the decisions you make and actions you take – then it doesn’t take a very long piece of rope to connect that to the experience of the customer across all tangible and intangible facets of what you do.
And a deliberate and thoughtful experience doesn’t happen by chance – by chance is the other kind, the one most of your competitors are delivering! You’ve got to invest some serious time and thought into translating those values into design principles that can guide and shape those hows.
Take, for example, values of simplicity and customer-centricity (excuse the jargon). That might translate into a design principle of “making things simple and easy for our customers”. The key relationship there is not simple and easy for you, but for the customer, which might turn out to be more complicated for you.
As a design principle it can be used to guide how you deploy technology and what technology you use; the kinds of processes you put in place to handle complaints and questions; the actual mechanics of how products or services you’re selling work; the way you present information about it; the kind of language and messages you use. These are all things that when aligned build a great customer experience and resulting brand.
And so what’s the return on investment for all that work? Well, to know that you’ve got to measure it (but that’s another blog).
In general terms you get greater effectiveness internally (think how much better your car runs when the wheels are aligned). You get increased customer satisfaction and loyalty because words are cheap, but I’ll stick with someone who walks their talk and keeps their promises.
Which brings me to a big one – you get my confidence, and that’s a currency you can trade on. So you don’t have to be perfect every time but because I see the intent, the effort and the alignment I’ll give you a break if things occasionally don’t go as planned.
PART 2
The second part of that equation – your purpose.
I’ve talked about the role of purpose across the organisation many times in the past. When purpose is translated into the core promise you make, its role in your customer’s experience is singularly important.
I know plenty of people like to tack brand onto this to describe promise in this context because when you bring the customer into the equation the very idea of brand becomes synonomous. I’ll resist that temptation, but feel free to think of it that way if it makes more sense for you.
Once you’ve translated your purpose (that enduring why that guides you across time but never changes even as everything you do does) into a promise you want to make today to stakeholders and customers in particular, the work becomes embodying that along with the values derived design principles we discussed last week.
“Are we keeping our promise?” becomes the first question you have to answer. It’s the lead design principle.
Zappos is a great high-profile example of this in action. “We’re a customer service company that sells shoes” puts what Zappos cares about front and centre. It drives the way it structures everything it does and how it does it. From policies and process to presence and promotions.
That’s not to say service has to be your promise. Yours might be an Apple-like focus on design and user experience, or a Walmart-style love of low prices. The important thing is not what your promise is (well okay, saying “we’re going to rip you off and treat you badly” probably won’t fly) – it’s that you have one and use it to guide what you do and how you do it.
And if you want that to translate into an aligned experience that your customers will care about and come back for, my best suggestion is to take your inspiration from all the guys who don’t do it – you know the companies, you deal with them every day.
Learn from what they don’t do. What drives you crazy? Work it backwards and look at why that is. What’s missing? What would have made it work for you? Was the promise missing in action or was something else going on?
Then apply that to your own company. It will be different for each of you. But one thing is constant: You have to be deliberate about mapping what you do and how you do it aligned to your puprose via promise and values via design principles. And then consciously build an experience that makes those things tangible to your customers via every point they come into connection with you.
If you don’t, they might buy from you once, but you’ll never have their devotion.
Thanks for reading
First published in two parts on SmartCompany.com.au