EVERY EMPLOYEE inside your business either delivers or has an impact on your customer experience…every single one. They can’t help it or stop it because they interact at some point at some level either directly with the customer or directly with employees that interact with your customers. This is just a part of business.
When we wrote our initial book, “Creating and Delivering Totally Awesome Customer Experiences,” we talked about how critical it is to have all your employees on the same page when it comes to how you want to deliver an experience. One of the biggest issues we saw (and still see) in companies is their lack of consistency…employees deliver the experience in different ways. This can be devastating to a company because of a simple but incredibly important issue…
RANDOM ACTS OF EXCELLENCE AND CHAOS LEAD TO CUSTOMER CONFUSION WHICH LEADS TO CUSTOMER DEFECTION (LEAVING THE RELATIONSHIP WITH YOU).
This was a phrase we created and it rings more deeply today than ever before. And this is where YOUR BEST EMPLOYEES CAN HURT YOU the most. They are “over achievers” and the ones that have their heart into the business and want to go the extra mile to help the company and make you look as good as you can. Sounds great…until you realize what is really happening to your customers.
Let’s say for example we have employee Sally who is one of our best employees and will do whatever it takes to make our customers happy. She goes out of her way to make sure they get what they need and gets it to them in not just a timely manner but ahead of schedule in most cases. She ensures they don’t hit all the snags we have in our processes and clears the path for them to have a smooth sailing experience. And to top it off, she is always so dang happy that customers go out of their way to talk to her because she makes their day. Sounds pretty good doesn’t it?
Sally, one of your BEST EMPLOYEES, can take your company down …
How many “Sally’s” do you have in your company? Most business owners would tell me they have somewhere between 10 – 20% of these kind of “best employees” in their company. But let’s be aggressive here and say you have twice that number…20 – 40% of your employees are these awesome “Sally’s”. While you might think this is awesome, it can be very destructive…here’s why.
The key question you have to ask yourself is, “What are the other 60 – 80% of our employees doing when they work with your customers?” What kind of experience are they delivering?
From my experience, they are delivering something substantially less than Sally. While it is a pretty good experience, it isn’t close to Sally’s. It isn’t a terrible or bad experience, it just isn’t the “over the top” experience Sally is delivering. The issue is that Sally has set the bar really high…higher than 60-80% of your employees can’t reach. But your customers enjoy this “over the top” experience…a lot…and as such want it every time…from every employee. But the majority of time they don’t get it.
THEY ARE CONFUSED…and a confused customer is an unhappy customer and unhappy customers leave.
This is what causes “Random acts of Excellence and Chaos” within organizations. It isn’t intentional…in fact most don’t even really realize it’s going on…but your customers see it with every interaction. They hope they get to interact with the Sally’s but the odds are they don’t get to…they get the other 60-80% of your employees. They are confused and frustrated.
Customers defect when they are confused…so would you as a customer. This isn’t hard to understand when you put yourself in this same situation as your customer. Say you go to a business and almost every time you interact with someone the experience is different. You don’t know what to expect. This causes stress, anxiety, uncertainty, and frustration. CUSTOMERS HATE TO HAVE THESE FEELINGS when they are interacting with a business.
So you start to look around at other options to hopefully eliminate this confusion you get with this company…you have made the first step to defecting.
But the answer is simple, even if the implementation isn’t quite so simple…develop a consistent experience all your employees can deliver day in and day out. It works. That is the foundation of our book I referenced above…building consistency into the experience. But regardless of how you tackle this issue, it is paramount today for companies to figure this out…BECAUSE THERE ARE SO MANY OPTIONS TODAY!
Take a look inside your own company…identify the “Sally’s” in your organization. See what they are doing that really goes over the top with making your customers happy. If everyone isn’t reaching this bar, you are creating “Random Acts of Excellence and Chaos” in your business.
Here’s the challenging part…you don’t want to “dial down” the Sally’s, you want to turn up the other 60-80% of your employees. You want the “over the top” experience because it is differentiating for your business…but you need everyone rowing the boat in the same direction. But your “best employees” are the ones that can bring the company down because they have set such a high watermark for your company that you can’t deliver on consistently with ALL YOUR EMPLOYEES.
If this is happening, you are actually on a great path if you can move the rest of the company to this higher level of experience. You can build/engineer the experiences in such a way that the rest of the employees can see what needs to be done. The few employees that just can’t get there have to go and you replace them with more that get the vision and can deliver it. This is your time of opportunity to take advantage of what the Sally’s have started inside your company.
When this happens, customers are not only less confused…they are ecstatic! They love working with All YOUR EMPLOYEES, not just the Sally’s any longer. This is differentiating because all your competition is still trying to figure out why they are losing customers. No longer do you have to deal with “Random Acts of Excellence and Chaos”…YOU ARE CONSISTENT AND AWESOME!!
