Customer Experience, Service, And Success – How Can You Help?

Who is your customer?

If you are in frontline sales or customer service that’s a quick answer. If you are insulated a few layers in and don’t interact directly with an outside customer, then your customer could be other employees or a supplier/vendor that’s important to your company.

We all have customers. Pause and reflect on who your customer is, and then pause again and write down a list of both your external and internal customers.

How are you treating your customers?

Do you care?

Do you take ownership in any situation that’s thrown your way, or do you deflect the task at hand to another person or department?

Are you helping your customer succeed?

Your success will be a byproduct of your customer’s success.

If you move mountains to help your customer, there will be positive results for you as a result.

It’s not easy, and that’s the point.

A customer’s definition of success is ever-changing, and their expectations of a superior customer service continue to rise with shorter attention spans and the need for instant gratification. We aren’t going to change the customer’s behavior or their modus operandi.

We need to understand that the demands of our customers continue to rise. We are never going back to the “good enough” days of customer service.

What if we ignore the customer’s expectations and provide a poor customer experience?

Some customers leave the room quietly while others make it a personal mission to tell all their friends and followers on social media. They pick up that rusty axe, start sharpening it, and then start swinging away until the forest is cleared.

The customer’s ability to tell their world about their experience is easier than ever. The tools of instant vindication continue to grow and now include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and TikTok. Good old-fashioned word of mouth still exists, and griping about a poor experience over a meal with our friends and family is a common topic of conversation.

New customer acquisition is expensive. It’s also a finite endeavor.

Your company’s brand and reputation make it easier or harder for the frontline customer service and sales reps to convert this potential opportunity into a paying customer.

When a prospect enters the room with a negative mindset of your product or service, the ability to convert them to a paying customer is exponentially more difficult than one that enters the room excited to be there and is looking for help and guidance to pick out what they want to buy.

How much money does your company need to spend on advertising and marketing to change their image or the customer’s perception of your company versus free word of mouth advertising and marketing that’s coming from the customer’s friends, followers, and family?

Spoiler alert: a lot of money.

The more a customer’s perception of a company is negative, the more money the company needs to spend to repair the damage caused by a previous poor customer experience. This experience might be by their friend or family, but the visceral feeling is the same as if it happened to them.

If a company doesn’t invest in these efforts to improve customer experience, then customers will continue to leave the room and find a similar product from someone else that’s providing a better customer experience.

The thought of an empty room filled with your products but with nobody walking through the doors to buy your wares should haunt you, but then motivate you to always work your hardest to provide an incredible customer experience … at all times.

Everything that you do is either helping or hurting the customer experience. Never forget who your customer is and how you can help them succeed.