Here’s a reality check. Service excellence has to be earned every single day. For those businesses that are not prepared to work at earning magnificent customer outcomes on a daily basis, attaining a state of service excellence may be elusive. It’s a slippery slope when a business pegs its belief system to the thinking that if it wins with customers on a Monday, that winning on a Tuesday and every other day of the week, is guaranteed.
Customers have to be won over every single day. At the opening of the business day, the customer experience slate is blank, awaiting the imprint of the day. The mission therefore, is to repeat good actions and avoid the sour notes that can destroy customer goodwill.
Just to be clear. I am not saying that a permanent state of service excellence is unattainable, but rather that it has to be “earned” on a daily basis by a business. The businesses that have sustained success at customer experience, achieve this payoff because the formula for success is “lived” as a part of a naturalized rhythm that emerges out of consistent application of clear customer experience improvement strategies.
Service excellence has to be earned every single day.
In my early days of working with clients on their service transformation journeys, a common predilection that I encountered at the first signs of service improvement, was the mistaken belief that the business had arrived at its service centricity destination. Invariably, this assumption would question the necessity of further action and place the continuation of the journey at risk.
In some cases, the assumption would be followed by the client’s abandonment of the effort and momentum that had been built painstakingly. In other cases, l would have been successful in redirecting this thinking by advising gently, that what we were witnessing was the start of pushing the rock of service transformation up the mountain. I had to reset the reality to one of more sober expectation.
But why would this counterproductive thinking (“we’ve arrived,” when clearly….they had not) and counterproductive behaviour (abandonment of the effort, when it was time to lean in), exist in the first place?
The businesses that have sustained success at customer experience, achieve this payoff because the formula for success is “lived” as a part of a naturalized rhythm that emerges out of consistent application of clear customer experience improvement strategies.
One reason is that at the leadership level of many businesses, there’s an abundant lack of understanding change and the meandering nature of the change process, particularly in the domain of behavioural change. Often, new behaviours suffer from the “recency syndrome.” Because some desirable new behaviours, in the moment, evoke a euphoric emotional response, they tend to be activated almost immediately. This creates a false positive outcome that has a short shelf life, simply because the behaviours have not been naturalized by individuals and so, interlope with the more imbedded default behaviours, causing oscillation between the old and the new behavioural state.
This vacillation gets repeated several times until, through dogged commitment, repetition and enforcement, the new behaviours displace the old and begin to be rooted in permanence.
May I suggest that one of the most productive questions regarding service excellence that business leaders should ask is, “What can we do to ensure a permanent solution to achieving permanently great customer outcomes?”
A reason for the premature abandonment of the service improvement effort occurs when over-allegiance to business revenue generation, holds more sway over leadership decision-making than customer relationship optimization. Why spend more time, money and effort when the customer happiness numbers are climbing? Surely, given that the needle is moving in the right direction, the momentum will persist.
When a business is wired around numbers, it takes minimal evidence to cause a pause in investment.
Some business leaders prioritize the numbers over the care for customers. History and experience are teaching us that customers matter and whenever businesses make them feel like they don’t, they take matters into their own hands.
The answer will include a mix of having a dogged determination for the business to be the best version of itself daily, optimized customer relationships and a muscular service delivery framework.
One of the greatest threats and risks to permanence of service excellence, is the miseducation surrounding the forces that either make or break great customer outcomes. One inconspicuous saboteur is the pervasive pre-occupation with the behavioural side of the customer experience. What about the chat, app, online transaction, self-service and other omni-channel intersections? The equivalency of the customer experience at these points of contact is essential, given that customers toggle between channels.
When we ask the right questions, the universe endows us with the right answers. May I suggest that one of the most productive questions regarding service excellence that business leaders should ask is, “What can we do to ensure a permanent solution to achieving permanently great customer outcomes?”
The answer will include a mix of having a dogged determination for the business to be the best version of itself daily, optimized customer relationships and a muscular service delivery framework.
This is the slow climb up the mountain.