Every brand aims to create a positive customer experience, but what truly makes a customer feel valued, heard, and appreciated? How do brands foster the loyalty that comes from offering a great experience? Meeting customer expectations is crucial for business success, and there are six key areas where this experience is provided.
Time
“Time is money.” This saying might be old, but it remains relevant. Time is valuable – it’s one of our most important resources. We all struggle to find enough time; life is busier than ever. To make customers feel appreciated and understood, it’s vital to save their time and avoid wasting it. Wasting a customer’s time can range from minor issues like keeping them on hold for too long to doctors making them wait an hour past their appointment. When we fail to fix our customers’ issues, putting them through a frustrating process due to our mistakes, we show a lack of respect for their time. Solutions can vary from small adjustments to a complete overhaul of the customer service experience. Companies need to recognize the importance of their customers’ time and respond accordingly, whether by providing easy-to-use online resources or enabling customer service teams to resolve issues on the first call.
Talent
It is people who provide the backbone for everything we do – including providing a great customer experience. Knowing what service is and empowering our people to deliver a great customer experience to every customer every time is how we build our reputations and market shares. We do this by hiring and training people who understand and appreciate the value of service.
Trust
How we conduct ourselves and our businesses must come from a place of integrity and honesty to build trust. Joel Peterson says trust is something you can’t afford to lose. In Peterson’s book, The 10 Laws of Trust: Building the Bonds that Make a Business Great, his steps for building trust include starting with integrity, investing in respect, empowering everyone, assuming the best, requiring accountability, creating a winning vision, keeping everyone informed, budgeting in line with expectations, embracing conflict, and forgetting “you” to become an effective leader. We need to treat customers with respect. Nine times out of 10, our customers are victims of company incompetence, not abusers of the system. Punishing all customers for the behaviors of a few is bad for business. Harry Gordon Selfridge coined the term “The customer is always right” in 1909. It’s still a good rule of thumb today.
Taste
Pleasing our senses – from the food we eat to the styles we choose to the atmosphere in the stores we visit – leaves a lingering taste of the brand in our hearts and minds. Taste is not just for food products – it’s about how our products and services are designed, constructed, packaged and presented. People can perceive how much taste has gone into something. We can see and taste the difference when something is made by people who care about their brands and customers. That difference comes through in everything from the quality of the ingredients used and the aesthetics of the packaging through the experience of using the product. Steve Jobs changed the face of the computer industry by being obsessed with quality and the look of everything, including the parts we couldn’t see.
Technology
As a currency, technology is undeniable, providing the backbone upon which speed, convenience, and innovation are built. From apps and websites that provide 24/7 access to what our customers want to solutions that keep everything running smoothly, technology is a powerful tool to deliver a better experience. It’s how the world stays connected.
Trends
Being in the know – knowing what customers want and more will want – and providing beneficial solutions – is essential. It shows we understand our customers and the world and provide solutions to real problems. How do we discover emerging trends and know what our customers want? Be out in the world observing, listening, and making connections.
To deliver an experience to our customers that communicates we value them, we need to know and employ the currencies in which experience is traded. It’s not just the moment of transaction that matters; it’s how we interact with the world.