BILL QUISENG | Deliver the World's Best Customer Experience | Customer Service Blog

Three things you can do now to get ahead of your competitors.

Don’t serve to sell to customers. And don’t serve to satisfy your customers. Serve to WOW them.

Don’t treat customers as they would expect. And don’t treat customers as they want to be treated. Treat them better than they want to be treated.

Here are three things you can do now that can WOW your customers and set you ahead of your competitors:

Define and dissect just one of the “ow” or WOW” moments in your company’s customer experience. Take a potentially negative “ow” and make it neutral. Take a neutral moment and make it a “WOW” reward. For example, educate your customer service representative not to say “May I help you?” Your customer obviously needs help if he or she is approaching the representative. The proper response should be to greet the customer and ask “How many I help you?” Even better, “How may I serve you today?”
Today walk through one of your competitors’ locations 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 day-to-day operation, we live in a silo mistakenly thinking that our competitors just sit there with no intention of doing anything different than before. Get out there to see for yourself how “the other guys” are doing.
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?

QUI QUESTIONS: Why only three? Because nobody remembers Number Four. Why now? Nobody cares how good you used to be. So do it now. And be GREAT out there!

What if we train them and they leave?

The very best customer-focused companies create a training budget that goes beyond orientation and the first week on the job training. It includes regularly scheduled retraining sessions or a budget for staff to attend corporate or appropriate offsite training sessions, as well. Marketing and advertising get the customer to your company the first time, but service brings them back. So there should be periodic retraining of staff to remind them of what outstanding service should look and feel like to the customer. Sometimes I get pushback from the decision-maker who says to me, “Retraining is too expensive. What if I bring you in to train them and they go to my competitor for fifty cents more an hour.” I tell them that is the wrong question to ask. It is not “What if I train them and they leave?” The question should be “What if I don’t train them and they stay?”