Welcome to CX 102 or Advanced CX. This course is a prerequisite for business professionals in the B2C or hospitality industry. It’s an elective for the B2B or the online/digital industry.
English writer Samuel Johnson said, “People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.” With that in mind, today’s lesson will be a future reminder for you. So let’s get started.
Customer loyalty is not one BIG WOW to a customer. It’s one little wow delivered consistently to every customer. And when you consistently deliver a little wow, you transform an average, satisfactory customer experience into a positively WOW Experience.
So, be Magnificently Boring! Consistently deliver a low-cost, no-cost “a little better than the average experience that customers expect” product or customer service so repetitively that you feel it is boring, but to the customer, at that moment, you are Magnificent! Your customers will return repeatedly, spend more money, and rave about you to others on social media. Consistency builds trust. Trust builds loyalty. Loyalty builds your business. Deliver consistency Magnificently!
Second, but as importantly, be Magnificently Boring to CARE for your customers. Remember this sentence from our first class:
Customers seek the best emotional value in their entire experience.
Now you know why customers don’t seek B2B or B2C businesses. They engage in businesses that are H2H. Human to Human. One to One. Heart to Heart. The value to your customers is in their personalized interactions, not your “cash or credit” business transactions. So, to earn customer loyalty, don’t get inside their heads. Get inside their hearts. Create an emotional connection. Be Magnificently Boring to CARE!
COMMUNICATE with every customer with a smile, eye contact, and polite interaction. Inform each customer transparently and interactively of the product’s or service’s function, liabilities, and advantages to them.
ACKNOWLEDGE each customer’s presence and value to you and your business.
RESPOND promptly and empathetically to each customer’s questions, concerns, and complaints.
ENRICH the experiences and, ultimately, the lives of every customer.
Consistently CARE for your customers so repetitively that you feel it is boring, but to every customer, at that moment, you are Magnificent! Your customers will feel respected, appreciated, and valued. They have an emotional connection with you. The more emotional the connections, the more memorable the experiences, and the more loyal the customers are. When it comes to customers and customer service, don’t just serve to satisfy your customers. Serve to WOW them. Serve to be Magnificently Boring to CARE for them. Don’t just be good. Be GREAT out there!
Does anyone have any questions? Whether you agree or agree to disagree, discuss or not, I’m sure that we can interact with each other without being disagreeable. So, I invite you to share your questions and comments.
Welcome to CX 101. Today’s course is a prerequisite for business professionals in the B2C or hospitality industry. It’s an elective for the B2B or the online/digital industry.
This is not a customer service training class. Training is finite, usually one to three days. And training is top-down, one-way “I know everything, you know nothing” instruction. Training is to develop THE BUSINESS. Training is for a job. And the job of employees is to serve to satisfy the customer.
Instead, our education classes are interactive. With suggestions, recommendations, and encouragement, we empower you and your colleagues to develop YOURSELVES. Ideally, all of you will be enthused and energized to engage customers, not just to satisfy, but to WOW them.
So let’s get started.
Customer service is what you do for your customers. Customer experience is how your customers feel before, during, and after what you do. Customer experience management is what you do before, during, and after you find out how customers feel about what you did. Customer loyalty is how your customers feel about what you did repeatedly.
Customers pay for their experience, not your product or service. And it’s THEIR experience, not yours. They buy with emotion and justify their decision with reason. Customers seek the best emotional value in their entire experience, not the minutiae of your best price, product, or service, virtual or physical locations, AI, online, chatGPT, or face-to-face customer support, NPS, CSAT or other CX metric, or the many other details of your business experience.
You are happy because your customers are satisfied with their experience. You met their expectations. But that’s not good enough. Satisfied customers feel that their experience is good, not better, just average. Nobody raves about average. And satisfied customers will not return as soon as they find a better experience or a less expensive price. So you have to do more than satisfy your customers. Don’t just serve to sell to customers. And don’t serve to satisfy customers. Serve to WOW them.
Next week’s class is postponed until Valentine’s Day.
So the next class two weeks from now: How to serve to WOW your customers.
Before next week’s class, are there any questions? Whether you agree or agree to disagree, discuss or not, I’m sure that we can interact with each other without being disagreeable. So, I invite you to share your questions and comments.
English writer Samuel Johnson said, “People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.” So as you prepare yourself every morning to engage to WOW your customers, I encourage you to remind yourself when you say, “Don’t be just good. Be GREAT out there!
A wife walks into the living room where her husband is reading. She leans over and whispers “I love you.” Nothing. She repeats louder, “I love you.” Complete silence. She stares at him and asks, “I say I love you a LOT to you. You NEVER say I love you back. Why is that?” Her husband turns to her and declares, “Look, I told you I loved you when we got married. If that should change, I’ll let you know.” Now, is that enough? Of course not. If you want love to flourish, you have to be reminded every so often.
It’s the same for customer service. You already know what customer service is, but to make it flourish, you and your team need to be reminded periodically. If you want to drive customer loyalty, you cannot see customer service training as attending only one finite event, but rather you must see it as a participant in a continuous process.
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Just a little over a year ago, I authored a blog post that implied that customer service training is good, not better, just average. Nobody raves about average. So, I offered people a continuous education in customer CARE. If you missed it, just follow it here:
Instead of “Hire for attitude, not aptitude” or “Hire for personality, train for skills”, remind yourself when you recruit to
Select for passion, not past performance.
You hire an employee. At some point, before employees start or while they begin working, they may think that you could be a top-down, one-way, “I know everything, you know nothing” command-and-control dictator. They would feel that, as their boss, you don’t care much about them. And, soon, they could care less about you and your business.
Instead, select a person. Employees don’t seek B2B or B2C companies. They engage in companies that are H2H. Human to Human. Heart to Heart. Employees don’t care how big you are. They only care about how big you care about them. So CARE for them. Communicate. Appreciate. Recognize. Empower. (See my previous post about “People First”. https://billquiseng.com/2022/01/10/when-it-all-comes-down-to-business-its-people-first/)
As for attitude and personality , thinking and talking about service excellence does not make it happen; doing something does. Service excellence is passion, not attitude or personality. You HAVE TO have attitude and personality to serve customers. But when you have passion, you always WANT to WOW them.
QUI Takeaway: Select for passion, not past performance. Don’t train your people with your top-down, one-way, “I know everything, you know nothing” instruction. Instead, educate your people interactively, frequently, and continuously. With suggestions, recommendations, and encouragement, empower your people to develop, not a business, but themselves. Your people will be enthused and energized to passionately engage customers. They will create an emotional connection with your customers. The more emotional the connections, the more memorable the experiences, the more loyal the customers are. And everyone, your people and your customers alike, will be enriched, literally and figuratively.
In retail customer service, your people are NOT your most important assets.
In the book Good to Great, Jim Collins writes that “People are not your most important asset. The right people are.”
Stephen Covey, the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, claims that success in any job is 20% knowledge and 80% interpersonal skills. Ultimately, success in retail customer service is all about interpersonal skills.
There are a lot of people wanting to enter the retail business. And for an industry set to take advantage of retail sales that will be generated by Gen X and baby boomers, that is good news. Unfortunately, while there are people who want to work in retail customer service, there are many who simply are not the right people. As a resort general manager who personally interviewed every candidate finalist and as a former college instructor interacting with students and displaced workers from other industries, I feel that many people lack the necessary interpersonal skills because they have grown up or interacted with others in a generation far different from our own.
I am convinced that people can only deliver an experience that they themselves have experienced. In order to succeed in retail, they would have had to personally experience and learn from great examples of others exhibiting stellar interpersonal skills in their day-to-day interactions with them.
But those opportunities to learn firsthand from face-to-face interactions have all changed in less than a generation. Not too long ago there was no direct deposit or internet banking. If we wanted to deposit our paycheck, we would have to go weekly to the bank. After a while, the teller got to know who we were, where we worked, what we did there, and regularly asked how work and our company were doing. Remember when gas station attendants checked your oil and tire pressure, cleaned your windshield, and asked you if there was anything else they could do for you for a little over a dollar per gallon? How bad has customer service gotten when we never see an attendant and actually pump our own gas for more than four dollars per gallon?
The average Facebook user today has 338 friends. When a person posts on his or her page, they don’t have a loss of self-esteem when only 50 “like” the post. The other 288 have ignored them and they are OK with that! Today, we have cell phones. But what are many doing with their cell phones? I’m so old I remember someone actually laughing out loud on my phone. Texting is really one-way communication. You don’t hear voice tone or inflection or a pause. In real life, there is no “delete” or “backspace”.
Where is the reinforcement of interpersonal skills in those experiences?
So, the experiences for many people are not full of good examples of emotional intelligence, body language, or verbal communication that only face-to-face interactions can teach. I believe that translates into the real world that is OK to ignore the customer and your co-workers. You don’t have to greet your co-workers every morning or every customer who walks through the door. Having not experienced often enough good examples of communication, collaboration, or relationship-building skills, how will those people entering retail customer service, the people you entrust to customers, be successful? And if you allow yourself to accept that level of performance as adequate, how will your businesses succeed?
The answer is that you, as manager, are responsible for the education of those who do not have those skills. For you to succeed in this very competitive retail marketplace, you will need the right people. You will need people who know how to consistently welcome your customers with eye contact and a smile, inform each customer transparently and interactively of the product’s or service’s function, liabilities, and advantages to them, listen and respond empathetically, and bid them a sincere fond farewell. So, you will need to ask the proper interview questions with the specific intent of finding out if the candidates have the necessary skills of expressing sincerity, empathy, and trust. And you will be the one who will have to educate the people you select to deliver that experience for your customers. Interpersonal skills training cannot simply end after the first-week orientation. It must be consistent and continual. Only then will you build the interpersonal skills of your staff to drive their success and yours.
Ever since I had my stroke in April last year, writing has been literally a labor of love. I hope that you have gained some insight into how to Deliver the World’s Best Customer Experience by not just serving to satisfy customers, but rather to WOW them.
I want to thank each of you for reading my blog this year. I very much appreciate you. In appreciation, and in paying it forward, for this New Year, I don’t wish you good luck in the future. I wish you GREAT success and fortune, literally and figuratively.
Merriest of Christmases and happiest of Holidays and New Years! May your New Year be GREAT out there!
Don’t offer customer service training. Training is finite, usually only one to several days. Training is top-down, one-way “I know everything, you know nothing” instruction. Training is the how and what of service. Training is to develop THE BUSINESS. In the end, training is for a job. And the job of employees is to serve to satisfy the customer. The mission is to TAKE CARE of the customer.
Instead, have customer CARE education. Don’t have trainers or instructors. Have mentors and coaches. Your education is interactive and frequent. Your education is the how, what, and, why of service excellence. As mentors, educate your students with role-playing customer CARE (Communicate, Acknowledge, Respond, Enrich) actions to practice their soft skills. Your students will learn and appreciate the value of appearance standards, telephone etiquette, service recovery, and customer care. After “graduation”, as coaches, remind the people interactively, frequently, and continuously of your customer CARE excellence strategies. With suggestions, recommendations, and encouragement, empower your people to develop THEMSELVES. Your people will be enthused and energized to engage customers. They will create an emotional connection with your customers. The more emotional the connection, the more memorable the experience, the more loyal the customer. And everyone’s lives will be enriched. Your passion is to CARE for everyone, your people and customers alike.
And, yes, educate everyone. If you’re not caring for the customer, you darn well better be caring for the person who is.
When you create a great experience for people as much as you do for customers, you will earn the loyalty of both. And soon, without your focus on profits, profits will grow.
Customer loyalty is not by offering discounts, upgrades, or subscriptions to repeat customers. Real customer loyalty is built on service so great that customers return again and again, raving to others along the way. This week guest blogger Karen Hertzberg offers three QUI strategies to improve your service to keep customers coming back. You can read more about Karen at the end of her post.
What’s better than gaining a new customer? Keeping an existing one.
That’s why a high customer retention rate is an important goal for many businesses. Excellent customer service is one of the best ways to achieve this goal.
Customer retention supports long-term growth because it creates a loyal customer base. When these loyal customers are supported through great customer service, then they don’t have a reason to seek out other businesses.
Why Does Customer Service Impact Retention?
The quality of your service or product helps determine your company’s success, but a positive customer experience truly solidifies a strong relationship with your customers.
When a customer encounters great customer service, they trust that your company will treat them right no matter what issue pops up. This, in turn, makes them more likely to stick with your company the next time they need your products or services. You’re a safer bet than another company whose customer service quality is unknown.
Many business owners focus on building their customer base over delivering excellent customer service. But customer service shouldn’t be an afterthought. Your business is going to make mistakes sometimes, and solid customer service is the only way to make sure those mistakes don’t come back to haunt you.
How Do I Know if My Customer Service is Hurting Customer Retention?
Asking customers to complete a survey after a customer service experience will show you where your weaknesses are. Many times, businesses think they’re doing the right thing but they don’t have a solid understanding of what their customers actually want.
Let your customers tell you where your strengths and weaknesses are. For the best results, make your survey quick, easy to understand, and offer a reward, such as a discount on their next purchase, for completing the survey.
What Are Some Customer Service Strategies I Can Implement Today?
Not sure where to start to improve your customer service quality? Try some of these strategies below to guide your business.
Write a Mission Statement
If you’re ready to rebuild your customer service strategy for the better, start with writing a mission statement. You should always strategize with your long-term goals in mind and a mission statement helps keep you focused.
Set Reasonable Expectations
While it’s tempting to brag about your excellent customer service, it’s far better to pleasantly surprise your customers than to disappoint them. That doesn’t mean you should set low expectations for your customer service. Just be mindful about making claims that your customer service team might not be able to live up to.
Be Honest About Mistakes
Don’t try to cover up any mistakes when you’re dealing with a customer service complaint. If something went wrong, your customer knows it. They won’t appreciate your dishonesty.
If you acknowledge your mistakes and do something to make it up to your customer (a future discount, refund, etc.), this shows your commitment to improving the customer experience.
I hope these tips help your business prioritize the customer experience to build up your customer retention. If you’re looking for more information about customer retention, the visual below debunks some customer service myths to set you on the right path for long-term growth.
Karen Hertzberg is a writer and digital content marketer from the Seattle metro area. Along with consulting on content strategy, she creates effective how-to and thought leadership content for several B2B and B2C companies. Empathy is her superpower, and she’s obsessed with clear, thoughtful written communication.
Social media is bad for customer service. Whether ranting or raving, customers are telling stories online about businesses whether those businesses are listening or not. With customers using platforms like Twitter and Facebook to complain loudly and sometimes virally to the world, companies have had to add resources to respond accordingly. But I am not against monitoring social media or using it as a responsive customer service channel. On the contrary, I believe social media has been literally and figuratively priceless for small businesses. Those businesses offering exceptional customer service don’t build their brand through advertising. Their customers build it for them via their raves on social media.
So, it is critical to know how to respond on social media, especially to the rants from dissatisfied customers. If you feel you need to get better at social customer service, don’t look to me for advice. If you want to become a millionaire, don’t ask me. I am not a millionaire. I’d tell you to go to Las Vegas or play the lottery. If you want to become a millionaire, ask people who have worked hard to earn a million dollars.
When I say social media is bad for customer service, it is because, for retail, hospitality, healthcare, and other bricks-and-mortar customer service positions, it has created a pool of candidates who are lacking in the social skills to connect with and please customers. Millennials have already overtaken Baby Boomers as America’s largest generation. By 2025, Millennials will comprise 75 percent of the global workforce.
While today’s technology can create the opportunities to personalize customer service, it is still up to a person to deliver it. Yet this incoming generation can only deliver to the level of service that they themselves have experienced. And their experience has mainly been without in-person interaction. Text messaging and social media have made their interactions one-way communication. Baby Boomers have cellphones, and the subsequent generations have cell phones. But what is Gen X, Gen Y or Millennials doing on their cell phones? “OMG. LOL.” No real live conversations. I’m so old I remember hearing on my phone someone actually laughing out loud. I contend two text monologues do not make a real dialog. Texting is one-way communication. You don’t hear voice tone or inflection. Even a pause is dubious. Was it because they were thinking about what you said or is it because they got busy with something else for a minute?
Likewise, a post and a reply on Facebook do not make for real dialog. The average Facebook user today has 338 friends. When people post on their page, they have no loss of self-esteem when only eight “like” the post. The other 330 have ignored them – and they are OK with that! Even those that “like” the post rarely leave a comment to begin an interaction. A meager “thumbs up” is all the acknowledgement given to a friend. Really?
Despite all the buzz about how social media keeps people connected, social media is not really social. Look around you. Social media and text messaging have turned people into digital zombies. Walk into your staff break room and see what is going on. Did anyone even look up to acknowledge you? Do you hear any real conversations going on?
At the same time, retail technology in the form of self-service or contactless purchases may have made it more convenient for the customer, but it eliminated the human connection.
As a result, the experiences for many people are not full of good examples of emotional intelligence, body language or verbal communication that only face-to-face interactions can teach. I believe that translates in a real world where it is OK to ignore our co-workers and worse, ignore the customer. Many don’t feel it is important to greet our co-workers every morning or every customer who walks through the door.
People buy from people they know, like and trust. Likeability is perceived by a smile. Trustability is driven by eye contact. Yet, self-service technology and social media have reduced the number of human interactions for potential candidates to not only experience it for themselves but also to understand the value of its importance. Having not experienced good examples of communication, collaboration or relationship-building skills, how will your people whom you entrust to take care of your customers emotionally connect with them? And if you allow yourself to accept that such a level of emotionless transactions is adequate, how will your business build customer loyalty to succeed? Remember that satisfied customers are not necessarily loyal ones.
QUI CUSTOMER SERVICE LEADERSHIP STRATEGY
For you to succeed in this very competitive marketplace, you will need the right people. You will need people who know how to consistently welcome your customers with eye contact and a smile, listen and respond empathetically, and bid them a sincere fond farewell. You should not assume that every candidate who applies for your open positions will do that just because you put it into your job ad. Finding and keeping the right people starts with the selection process to welcoming them at first day orientation and continues every day thereafter for as long as they are with you.
As the manager, always remind yourself that you are only as good as the people who surround you. Your success is dependent on you identifying the right people among all the candidates by asking the proper interview questions with the specific intent of finding out if the candidates have the skills or potential to express sincerity, empathy and trust. The STAR interview process will better be able to identify the right candidate than the standard interview questionnaire.
Take ownership for the education of those you select to deliver the experience your customers are expecting. That education starts on the first day. Of course, you need to introduce the policies and rules required by your legal department or the state. But the first day should be as much, and I contend should be more about your company mission, values and performance standards. And that message should not be delivered by the Human Resources onboarding specialist. It should be delivered by the highest-ranking operations manager to convey the critical role your employees play in driving customer satisfaction. That manager, ideally the CEO, should convey the message that when employees interact with an individual customer, they ARE the company to that customer. As the general manager, I scheduled myself for every orientation to explain that with every single customer interaction, we were expecting them to commit to “Be the Company”. I shared a video of the CEO of the company headquartered in another state reinforcing that commitment to end orientation.
Customer service training cannot be a “Day One and Done” kind of thing. Soft skills reinforcement must be continuous. Define forbidden phrases like “No problem,” or “Sure, you bet,” and offer the proper alternatives. Role-play recent customer situations and the best responses. Explain the service recovery process and empowerment guidelines. Build in frequent opportunities to remind your team what great customer service looks like. Whether it is a daily 15-minute huddle or weekly update e-mail newsletter, be sure to reinforce often your customer service performance standards. Repeat it often to make it stick.
Regularly ask “What are you hearing?” to get feedback from those who are directly interacting with your customers. Listen, act, and let them know what you did.
And if you want your employees to make it a habit to deliver outstanding customer service, you need to make it a habit to thank them when they do. For example, share customer feedback and rave reviews you earn on Yelp or TripAdvisor with everyone.
QUI TAKEAWAY: Select the right people. Educate them on what great customer service looks like in your business. And then continually remind and recognize them when they deliver it. Only then will you strengthen the interpersonal skills of your staff to drive their success and yours.
Recently in a LinkedIn group, one of the members asked the following question: “The global economy is slowing down, but you’ve been asked to do the impossible: Control costs AND improve customer service experience. How can you do it?” While I commented within the group, LinkedIn limited the space allowed for the response so I wanted to elaborate here.
Here are three low cost ways that have worked for me in improving customer service.
Create a Customer Satisfaction Investigation (CSI) team. Isn’t it criminal to take a customer’s money and then not deliver to meet his expectations? This team, with at least one representative from every department, should meet at least once a week to review customer feedback. Like a CSI team, the purpose of the team is to review all the details of each negative customer experience to see if they can find out why it happened. If you do not have a survey process, ask your employees to document and forward any complaint to the CSI team. For every customer who complains, 26 others didn’t say anything (Lee Resource, Inc.) and simply walked away. No one can afford that kind of customer churn. Once identified, work fast to eliminate the dissatisfier. You cannot begin to satisfy customers until you remove all the potential dissatisfiers. You have got to remove them from negatively affecting future customer experiences.
Continually remind your team of the importance of customer service. One of my favorite quotes is from Samuel Johnson, “People need to be reminded more than they need to be instructed.” Day One and Done customer service training is simply not enough. It’s amazing how much of the first day of new hire orientation is spent on defining the rules and restrictions, usually required by the legal department, that, if not followed, will result in termination. While that information is important, consider the overall message you are giving new employees at the end of their first day. Balance the message by describing the empowerment processes that employees can use to exceed customer expectations and offer specific stories when employees went above and beyond for your customers. After onboarding, continue to reinforce that message with customer service tips and stories via email, screensaver messages, and periodic refresher customer service training. As many of the luxury hotel chains and fine dining restaurants known for delivering consistently exceptional service, conduct a fifteen-minute daily briefing that reinforces your brand’s core values and service standards.
Recognize and celebrate those who deliver great customer service. Too often managers focus on identifying an employee’s service deficiencies. These “areas that need improvement” are usually only conveyed to the employee at the annual performance review. Instead celebrate throughout the year the stories of employees who have created WOW moments for their customers. Create a booklet of customer service stories to be distributed on Day One of your onboarding process. Every new employee is a sponge of company information on the first day. Let them soak in the stellar reputation of your company as built by your customers’ perceptions of your employees’ exceptional service. To reinforce that Day One feeling, frequently post or distribute via email the positive customer comments. Send a handwritten thank you note to the home of the individual employees who created a memorable moment for one of your customers. You can be assured they will share proudly that note with their family. If you want your employees to make it a habit to deliver outstanding customer service, you have to make it a habit to thank them when they do.
QUI TAKEAWAY: When you systematically remove the potential dissatisfiers, continually remind your employees of the importance of customer service, and habitually recognize and celebrate the stories of exceptional service you will increase dramatically the value of service as perceived by your customer.
"People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed."
Samuel Johnson
This blog, along with my Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pages, offer practical tips, insight and inspiration to serve as reminders on how to improve your personal delivery of customer service.
BILL QUISENG | Deliver the World's Best Customer Experience 