SHUT UP!!
I know…it sounds harsh but it makes the point.
The key is to stop talking. It has become a “knee-jerk” reaction today to come up with excuses or reasons why you couldn’t deliver an awesome customer experience. Employees are well armed today to do battle with any customer over why something didn’t work the way they wanted. It’s become the norm, not the exception to refute, excuse away, or simply deny the situation.
Go back in time…maybe 100 years and you would see the exact opposite of what we see today. The corner General Store would never allow an employee to treat a customer the way they are treated today. Customers were valuable and the owner of the store knew it so they did whatever they could within reason to make it right for the customer. They weren’t armed with excuses…they were armed with solutions and friendliness.
The service was personal and it was designed to find an agreeable solution for the customer and have them leave feeling like the store cared about them. The customer was important to the general store owner. It wasn’t until mass production that this world changed. When companies started to believe they could get could simply get more and more customers easily, the game hanged. Companies started to feel they could get more customers just by making a certain product or doing something a certain way. This was the point where the company took control and the customer became secondary. This became the basis of the Industrial Revolution…which we all know is long gone and dead today.
Fast forward to today and we are seeing a huge shift away from “product centric” and “commoditization” to trying to figure out a way to retain the valuable customers we have. Why? Because the customer is back in control and they have lots of choices they can make which can make or break a business quickly. We are back to the General Store mentality…the customer is actually right and has an opinion that needs to be heard.
Unfortunately, we are out of sync today. While the customer may be in control, companies and employees still haven’t gotten the memo about this change. They are still treating customers as if the company is in control and the customer needs to do what they want them to do.
This is a path to extinction!
One of the keys to building “totally awesome customer experiences” is to teach employees how to listen, how to ask “helpful” questions, and to giving them a specific process to truly understand what is going on with the customer. For example, one of the first places to start is the “emotional” side of the conversation. When the customer has an issue, the first part an employee needs to address is the emotional side of their concern. This is showing empathy and demonstrating that you truly care how it is making them feel or how it is impacting them in some way. This isn’t technical or understanding the problem with the product or service, it is helping understand where the customer is coming from emotionally.
I can almost guarantee you that if you are having issues with customers and they aren’t having an awesome experience, this is one of the issues going on in your company. Giving employees a process and training in this area can make a dramatic improvement almost immediately after training.
Another key area is how they try to uncover the true issue that is going on at the time. This is where teaching your employees good listening and questioning skills is absolutely critical. If they are able to dissect the issue with care and great questions, the customer will feel like they truly want to help them get to a solution and will be extremely cooperative and forthcoming in offering helpful information. This moves the conversation from a “battle” to “collaborative”…which is a huge step.
For example, what if your employee simply asks, “What went wrong?” This will create a plethora of unfocused comments. But if the employee asks, “What specifically happened at the particular time the problem occurred?” This is now focusing the customer on a very specific question and a specific item where you can start to get deeper into what actually happened.
The bottom line is that your employees need to be trained to SHUT UP, listen, and then ask some “emotional” and “helpful” questions. This will reduce the emotion and allow you to come away with a solution (collaborating with the customer) that is a win-win for everyone. When this happens, the customer not only gets their problem solved but they now have even more respect and admiration for your organization going forward. This is what causes them to TELL OTHERS how awesome you are to deal with how helpful you are in solving problems.
If you just did this ONE THING in your company, you could dramatically improve your customers’ experience. IT WORKS…and it can completely change the mindset of your employees to one where they feel they are truly helping their customers. And the morale of the company increases because the employees aren’t thinking in terms of “doing battle” any longer but they are now thinking in terms of a “collaborative win-win” discussion. This will leave them happier and much more positive in the workplace.
Will you take on the challenge as a leader in your organization? Will you start investing in helping your employees have a much more successful and positive outcome with their customers? Will you arm them the processes and tools that allow them to design solutions rather than simply sending them in to do battle? These are the questions and commitments leadership needs to make if they want to become more CUSTOMER OBSESSED and improve their customer experience by at least 100%.
If you want to know more of how this can work in your company, shoot me a message and I would be happy to explain just how this works…all for the price of a cup of coffee. After all, I would love to see your company improve your customer’s experience by 100%…wouldn’t you?
