“It’s hard to be 100% better than your competition, but you can be 1% better in 100 ways.” Rich Melman

Here are three things you can do today that can set you above your competition:

1. Define and dissect just one of the Moments of Truth customer contact points in your company’s customer experience. Take a potentially negative Moment of Truth and make it neutral. Take a neutral Moment of Truth and make it a reward. For example, educate your front line staff not to say “May I help you?” Your customer obviously needs help if he or she is approaching the staff member.  The proper response should be to greet the customer and ask “How many I help you?” Even better, “How may I serve you today?”
2. Use the CASE Method to improve the customer experience. Identify just one different idea outside of your industry that you can CASE (Copy and Steal Everything) that would enhance the customer experience. For example, shopping mall food courts offer free samples of their menu to passing customers. If you work in a hotel, could you CASE that in your restaurant at lunch of your signature dinner dishes? How can you offer free samples from your company to potential customers?
3. Today walk through one of your competition’s location with a mindset to “Be Their Customer”. What are some of the little things that they do better than you? How can you improve upon those touchpoints to enhance and differentiate you from them? Too often, in our own day to day operation we live in a silo mistakenly thinking that our competition just sits there with no intention of doing anything different than before.  Get out there  to actually see for yourself how “the other guys” are doing.