Every athlete wants to be a winner, but few are willing to do the hard work required to get to the top and stay there. Every business wants to be known for demonstrating service brilliance, but how many are willing to do the work required to reach the brilliance bar? Very few.
It takes a business a while to get to the point of being competent at delivering consistently brilliant service. The work is pretty much like pushing a boulder up a mountain. During the course of a service transformation initiative that they may have undertaken, many businesses stop pushing when they begin to see an upward shift in their customer experience ratings. Wrong move. The time to really turn up the improvement effort, is when the improvements start to become visible.
But, for many businesses, these shifts signify, albeit erroneously, that the businesses have arrived at the service excellence endgame. Wrong belief. The shifts merely signify a bend in the road, not the end of the road.
These journeys to service brilliance and service greatness, require a business to master the science of customer experience competence.
These journeys to service brilliance and service greatness, require a business to master the science of customer experience competence. It’s a tough journey that shows up those businesses that are only interested in talking the talk and not walking the long walk to fame.
Customer experience competence is incongruent with shortcuts, it’s about the long game.
A willingness to learn from service failures is essential to building competence. Businesses that are serious about the long game are focussed on turning their learnings into insights about preventing service failures. While there is glamour in counting how many complaints have been resolved, the real glory lies in the number that have been prevented.
It’s similar to how safety cultures operate. The accolades are not about how many safety violations have been resolved, it’s about how many near misses were prevented.
Customer experience competence is incongruent with shortcuts, it’s about the long game.
A willingness to go beyond the temptation to be happy with a superficial understanding of service delivery, to a deep level of intelligence around the moving parts that comprise the service delivery and customer experience machinery, builds customer experience competence.
In the quest to differentiate itself through customer experience brilliance, just thinking of the innumerable moving parts to be included in the experience design process, can be overwhelming for a business. No wonder there are so many defaulters that get stuck at the minimum effort level.
A willingness to dismantle the status quo of responsiveness lethargy, is a key ingredient that builds experience competence. I am convinced that businesses are at war with the concept of urgency as a standard operating practice. Why else would under responsiveness to customers’ needs be at the top of the list of customers’ complaints, consistently?
A willingness to dismantle the status quo of responsiveness lethargy, is a key ingredient that builds experience competence.
The businesses that do not suffer from this malady, are those that are unafraid to mandate that a sense of urgency has to be germane to the character of the business. These businesses are obsessed with building a reputation for response agility. The result of this simple act of elevating responsiveness to a high value credential, pre-empts the service failures that plague other businesses that are not diligent about pleasing their customers.
Want to start an internal revolution that elevates response agility to the level of a key performance indicator, in your business? Establish a mandate that requires employees to act with urgency when responding to email messages, start your meetings on time and make following up with the customer, to close the communication loop, a non-negotiable standard of care.
If these actions are not yet standard operating practices in your business, let me advise that introducing them as new standards, will create a bit of tumult. There may be a fair measure of push back from employees, who will not appreciate having their status quo of response lethargy disrupted. But, if the business stands its ground, the landing point will be well worth the effort.
It’s about becoming a brand that is chosen for its ability to deliver an experience that meets cardinal expectations.
Becoming competent at customer experience design and delivery, is an inside-out job, that requires a business to undertake the most microscopic view of itself and its operations.
For an existing business that is intent on chasing brilliance, the mandate is to transform into a customer experience design business. The goal will be to go beyond high visibility through glitzy marketing efforts and to become a brand that is chosen by customers, for its sustained level of experience brilliance.
It’s about becoming a brand that is chosen for its ability to deliver an experience that meets cardinal expectations. Four of these are customer valuing, customer connectedness, experience consistency and experience predictability.
It’s also about not falling prey to being accused of experience dereliction.