When a business prompts itself to “improve its service delivery,” that’s similar to making a new year’s resolution. When the business commits to keeping its customers happy, that’s a business mandate.
These are two very different intentions. Pretty much like many new year’s resolutions, the first intention can turn out to be performative, delivered in short bursts of energy, that are often unsustainable. The latter is consummate, defined by thoughtful attention to all of the internal and external inputs that affect the outcome of customer happiness.
Too often, the intention to “improve service” is driven by the adverse reality of mounting customer complaints and becomes an emotional response to the litany of incoming woes. When emotional reactions drive decisions around service delivery, there’s usually a sense of haste around “fixing” the problem and the essential infrastructure to ensure that the fixing is permanent, is forfeited.
When the business commits to keeping its customers happy, that’s a business mandate.
This reactive approach is counterfeit. It’s a one-dimensional way of resolving a situation that requires a multi-pronged process. So, in the same way that the lives of some new year’s resolutions follow a short arc, so too, do reactive approaches to “improving service delivery.” There’s haste to start, but not enough design integrity to power through to the end.
In the business of service and customer experience, quick fixes are notorious for their short shelf lives. A more worthwhile way of becoming a beloved, fan-favourite brand, is to create a service excellence model that is predictive in meeting customers existing and evolving expectations around their desired experience. in this way, customers are hardly ever disappointed and if they are, they’ll be willing to forgive and forget what they consider to be a simple misunderstanding and not an act of service delivery malpractice.
Often, I find myself having to remind business leaders that service excellence fundamentally, is about keeping customers happy, a process that is founded on brand visioning, managerial science, standards, culture management, behaviour change, technology adoption and impact measurement.
Service excellence fundamentally, is about keeping customers happy, a process that is founded on brand visioning, managerial science, standards, culture management, behaviour change, technology adoption and impact measurement.
In my experience as a service transformation consultant, the trigger for prospective clients reaching out for assistance in improving their customer happiness scores, is often the reality of mounting customer complaints.
My suggestion is that it’s time for businesses to step away from a “reactive” default mode which allows “incoming” service issues to act as the stimuli to shift the needle on excellence and begin to focus on elevation of the “outgoing” customer experience. As I have mentioned before, this process is not rocket-science, but it is scientific and requires a total company approach to hit its target effectively. That target being customer happiness, powered by customer success.
When a business becomes serious about making customer happiness a mandate, the first point of order should be what I call…the pause. It’s the process of putting the business under the microscope and taking stock of the prevailing state of affairs within the internal ecosystem.
The weak links that show up during the “taking stock” exercise, are the first “fixer uppers” that need to be addressed, otherwise they will compromise the integrity of the departmental crossings that the customer has to make on his or her experience pilgrimages. It’s important to make these journeys as frictionless and efficacious as possible, to spare the customer unnecessary grief.
the first point of order should be what I call…..the pause. It’s the process of putting the business under the microscope and taking stock of the prevailing state of affairs within the internal ecosystem.
Some businesses go all out on the customer happiness mandate and opt to green light a massive service transformation undertaking that is enterprise-wide. At this scale of change, commercial value is not the only benefit that accrues when this mandate is executed effectively. Businesses begin to break loose from the crippling effects of deeply imbedded people practices like the Abilene paradox, that imperil teamworking and horizontal collaboration, two inputs that are crucial to effecting service solutions.
It’s really so heartening when businesses follow the science on how to proceed when it comes to moving from their current state of hit and miss service delivery, to a sustainable, future state model, that glorifies customer centricity and its payoff…happy customers.
I look forward to the day when businesses are no longer propelled by fear of losing customers, but motivated by the joy of achieving customer happiness. That day when exceptional customer encounters are not episodic, but represent a way of life.
Imagine for a minute, a business taking a decision to introduce a mandatory customer experience standard, requiring all interactions in both the human and the digital space, to end with a smiling customer.
Imagine the unending number of smiling faces, if that business were to succeed in achieving its mandate.