Guest Blogger William Cusick: Why Your Best Intentions Have Nothing to Do with Customer Perception
You love your customers, right? Of course you do. After all, your customers are the basis for your company's success or failure. But maybe it's not just business. Maybe you have a real commitment to the happiness of your customers. You look at someone like Tony Hsieh at Zappos, whose mission is "delivering happiness" to his customers and employees, and say to yourself, "That's just like me!" Not so fast, tiger.
Your Best Intentions Don't Matter to the Customer
I've known CEOs and other business people who make a personal, even emotional commitment to their customers. It's heartening, but it doesn't translate into a personal or emotional experience for the customer. Good intentions do not equal a positive customer experience, or ultimately a positive customer perception. And without a positive customer perception, you cannot expect positive customer behavior, like retention, cross-sales, or referrals.
Here's why your intentions don't matter: the only thing that the customer can perceive is the experience. It's the layout of your store, or the tone of the person answering the phone, or the clarity of your billing statements, or the usability of your website that creates a customer perception -- positive or negative. What the customer doesn't see (and frankly, doesn't care about) is the idealistic picture in your head of well-intentioned products, service and interactions.
And here's the problem: If you're like most business owners, you are making dangerous assumptions. You are assuming that your customer experience is a reflection of your best intentions. Chances are it's not. In fact, the person at the top of the pyramid (I'm talking to you, CEO, Chairman, Owner) often has the worst view of the actual customer experience. Not only is she usually the furthest away from the frontlines, she also can be receiving skewed (I won't say false) information as it's filtered and filtered again on the way through the organization up to the big office.
For a Better Customer Experience, Get Real
So what's the solution? To create that ideal experience, you must first get a better grasp on your actual customer experience. It's the only way to begin to incrementally improve the customer perception in order to better match that utopian picture in your head -- not what you want it to be (since that has no relation to reality), but what it is. Of course there are a number of ways to begin, but I'd suggest starting within the company. Get a limited number of folks in a room from different areas of the business that have something to do with the customer experience (everything from reception, to website programming, to billing). Then, using an outside facilitator, create a process flow that incorporates every actual step in a designated portion of the customer experience.
What I guarantee you'll find (as I've personally seen) is that no one person in the room has a complete, objective picture of what the customer confronts when interacting with your business. There will be gaps and opportunities within the experience that you can address in ways that will get you closer to creating that caring relationship with the customer that looks so good in your head.
If you can understand and then transform your experience, you'll create a customer perception that will "deliver happiness" to everybody.
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About the Author: William J. Cusick is CEO and founder of Vox Inc., and is the author of All Customers Are Irrational: Understanding What They Think, What They Feel, and What Keeps Them Coming Back (AMACOM 2010).
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I can tell you from experience how frustrating it is to try to get a non-customer facing person to change what they are doing because we could see how it was affecting customers. The same thing happens from the inside; someone says that a project is not going to do for the customer what the company thinks it will, and nobody listens.
One of the things I think needs to be done is to experience and identify problems. In a blog post It's Not Rocket Science, the Key to Determining if Your Company Gives Great Service, the suggestion is to become a "customer" and try all the channels customers have available and experience them yourself.
Process mapping is indeed a valuable tool in the journey to develop a better experience for your customers. I want to emphasize the point Bill made about ensuring that the maps are from the customer viewpoint (interaction).
I have found that this process is the best way to break through organizational boundaries and silos of responsibility. It is both eye-opening, instructional and valuable to have an outside-in view of the business.
Lastly, you would be surprised at how uncomfortable it makes non-customer facing managers to think about how they serve the customer - the breakthrough is when they make the discovery - that's when the really significant improvements are designed.
Toni Hendrix, Chief Customer Officer, NJPAC