We continue to fail at the human touchpoints along the customer’s journey. Everywhere we turn, we encounter service failures when it comes to the behaviours and practices that govern interactions with the customer. While we have witnessed a wave of enthusiasm in the rush to enhance the user experience with technology fixes like online payment solutions, online ordering and self-service options, there is still an enormous gap in delivering on the human centered experience.
Take for instance, checkout counters or any counter where customer engagement occurs. Here’s the first question. “When was the last time that you walked up to a service counter and were treated to what we call “warm contact” behaviour…an enthusiastic welcome greeting with a smiling face and eye contact? Second question, “How often do you experience this warm contact at a place where you conduct business frequently?” The human touch needs serious refining. The dour persona that pervades the atmosphere behind the counter should be replaced with an enthusiastic, eager to serve, experience persona.
Recruiting the right people for counter service is critical to the delivery of a human centered experience.
Actually, what needs eliminating, is the constant chatter that occurs behind the counter while customers are being served. Instead of displaying a level of civility and diplomacy by focusing on the customer at hand, customer contact personnel demonstrate an oblivion to the need for genteel behaviour. In far too many businesses, there’s a significant disregard for the customer’s rights at service counters. One of these rights, is to be exposed to an atmosphere that is congenial, where the highest levels of customer pleasing actions are undertaken. Why? Because first, middle and last impressions matter and remain imprinted on the customer’s minds for a long time.
Now, I am not espousing the piecemeal approach to customer experience improvement, where, let’s say a business exposes only its frontline and customer contact personnel to service improvement training, with the expectation of a magical transformation of the business into a brand that delivers superlative customer experience. I am promoting the concept of customer science that is used to ensure that from the start to the end of the customer’s journey, the people, process and technology inputs are fused into an ecosystem that delivers a human centered experience for the customer.
With the right people, the problem of inane chatter and disengaged behaviour at the checkout and other service counters, goes away.
Recruiting the right people for counter service is critical to the delivery of a human centered experience. The right people would be selected based on the personality profile that the business would have generated as part of the “ideal employee persona” aspect of its customer experience strategy. Additionally, this persona would have been created in accord with the overarching vision for the brand of customer experience that the business would have envisioned for itself. With the right people, the problem of inane chatter and disengaged behaviour at the checkout and other service counters, goes away.
The problem I’ve highlighted at the counters is not wholly a counter problem. It’s an incongruity problem that leads to a discontinuity problem. The incongruity problem starts when a business has an unclear picture or vision for developing its customer experience brand and the multiple elements that will need to be combined to produce the desired brand. If there is no order in combining people, process and technology elements into a congruous assemblage, service delivery becomes a discontinuous, hit and miss affair.
The simple act of banning chatter, unprofessional behaviours, off-putting practices and dourness, can make a world of difference to creating a pleasant exit experience.
Even if a business does not have a well articulated customer success strategy, the least that can be done is to convert sales and service counters into points of hospitality. The simple act of banning chatter, unprofessional behaviours, off-putting practices and dourness, can make a world of difference to creating a pleasant exit experience.
The expression, “Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die” came up in conversation recently and it reminded me that many businesses want to be known for delivering a superlative customer experience, but resist making the time, effort and money investment necessary to achieve such an outcome.
The important point to note, is that the difference between intention and result, is action.
On the other hand, there are those businesses that have demonstrated a clear intention to become super powered customer experience brands and have left no stone unturned in the quest to achieve this status. The starting point on this quest can be as simple as resetting the experience at the service counters, or as comprehensive as undertaking a full scale transformation into a culture of service.
The important point to note, is that the difference between intention and result, is action.