Customer Experience Program: “Where Do I Begin?”
Through our blog and whitepapers we’ve discussed examples and methods on how to improve your customer experience but every program needs a starting point. Your starting point is typically with training and education.
Jay Goltz for the New York Times published a great piece on reforming your customer experience program. Goltz boils it down to what we know is the key to improving customer service: employee training.
Customer experience programs are not simply great ideas drawn on the whiteboard or brainstormed in the boardroom. Solid customer experience programs are formed through training and education. The retail industry is constantly evolving. Our customers are changing their shopping behaviors, the economy dips and rises, and new technology regularly unfolds, all of which require ever vigilant attention to our customer experience.
Goltz summaries the three essential areas of customer service: Desire, Hiring, and Training. We’ve spoken in depth on the internal company desire, staff training, and customer experience program development in several blog posts. As Goltz points out, they are all interrelated to form a whole customer experience program. You cannot do one without the other. Great service is dependant on staff training. Staff training is dependant on measuring your customer experiences through metrics (mystery shopping) and knowing what improvements are needed. You cannot hire great staff unless your company values the customer experience as the primary focus. Customer experience programs are full circle development that continues on through the life cycleyou’re your business.
The single most important aspect to take away from any customer experience article is the training aspect. It takes management training to understand where the customer experience metrics can be used to improve processes. Management needs a quality and knowledgeable industry leader to provide the proper metrics and mystery shopper program with valuable training on how to use the information. The training continues down the chain to the customer service staff. Superior customer service staff goes through continuous training that develops and hones their skills when dealing with customers. Training and education are the fundamental keys in having great customer service.
To go back to our original question “Where do I begin?”, the answer is simple. You begin with educating and training staff. Knowledge is powerful, especially when it comes to knowing your customer and establishing great customer experience.
“What’s The Frequency”
One of the Most Frequently Asked Questions that I hear about setting up a mystery shopping program deals with, “What should the frequency be? Should we choose once a day, once a week, once a month, or once a quarter?” My answer is always the same: it depends on your program goals and your budget. Let’s face it- all retailers want to meet or even exceed their goals, but not all have the budget to support daily or even weekly programs. So while my standard answer to the Most Frequently Asked Question may sound overly broad, it’s actually based on what I like to call the principle of “Maximization vs. Optimization.”
Most Customer Satisfaction Surveys Aren’t Useful.
There is a Harvard Business Review article entitled “The One Number You Need to Grow”. In it, the HBR teases us with the following nugget: “If growth is what you’re after, you won’t learn much from complex measurements of customer satisfaction or retention. You simply need to know what your customers tell their friends about you.”
The article’s author Frederick Reichheld tells the tale of a group of Fortune 500 executives at a customer service symposium swapping stories on what revs their customers’ engines and generates successful consumer loyalty. But CEO’s from high-profile brands like State Farm Insurance, Chick-a-Fil, Vanguard and others really pricked their ears up during a talk from Andy Taylor, the CEO of Enterprise Rent-a-Car, a talk that Reichheld describes as “riveting”.
According to Reichheld, Taylor and his senior team had figured out a way to measure and manage customer loyalty without the complexity of traditional customer surveys.
Measuring Progress is a Bottom Line Difference Maker
Clarifying employee expectations and creating reward and incentive schemes go hand in hand with increased sales. That’s what measuring company progress can do for you. But it’s “how” companies are deploying performance measurement programs that is changing the business landscape today.
Historically, gauging consumer “experiences” has been the primary responsibility of the customer service department.
But in my experience, customer service departments have become little more complaint departments. Or even worse, a place to go for customers to go and replace unwanted merchandise. Let’s face it, you can’t use the current customer service department model as a way to gauge the health and vibrancy of your company’s customer relationships – it’s an outmoded model that is spread too thin in terms of responsibilities and is not advanced enough to handle all the measurements that need addressing across the company.
Enter the mystery shopper.
L.L. Bean: Customer Experience Program Success
L.L. Bean was named number one in customer service by the National Retail Federations’s 98th Annual Convention and EXPO earlier this month. The retailer was voted number one by a survey of shoppers conducted by BIGresearch. L.L. Bean is a company who has paid attention to their customer experience program and measured it’s success.
ICC/Decision Services worked directly with L.L. Bean to conduct surveys and metric reporting systems to aid the retailer in understanding the customer’s needs. L.L. Bean’s success is a combination of proactively seeking independent research and surveys focusing on the customer. Armed with knowledge of what improvements where needed and where successes excelled, the retailer was able to create the number one customer experience program.
Retailers can look to L.L. Bean’s success as an attainable goal. To be successful, companies should look to independent research firms that have the tools to gather well rounded metrics and offer program suggestions to conquer areas of improvement. L.L. Bean’s success will reward the company in increased customer loyalty for years to come.
What is your company doing to measure customer expectations and experience programs?
What Gets Measured, Gets Done
Good businesses are always measuring progress – - sometimes in the unlikeliest instances. Years ago, retail magnate Marshall Field was walking through the original store that bears his name in Chicago. In doing so, he overheard a clerk arguing with a customer.
He stopped and asked: “What are you doing?”
The clerk answered: “I’m settling a complaint.”
Field shot back: “No, you’re not. Give the lady what she wants.”
Marshall Field, a notorious “floorwalker” at his landmark store, was way ahead of his time. He knew that giving customers “what they want” is the heart and soul of any commercial enterprise. He also knew that the key to boosting both his company brand and his bottom line was by constantly measuring progress, not just as a customer service barometer, although that’s obviously critical to any company’s success.
Measuring Up: There is No One Ruler in Gauging Customer Satisfaction
In businesses that are constantly trying to attract and keep a faithful clientele measuring customer satisfaction has become a barometer for success. Understanding a customer’s experience in a store—whether it is a service station, food market, clothing store, or bookseller– in relation to satisfaction with the product, store, workers, and other elements, can be assessed via various tools. The common triumvirate of customer satisfaction indicators is composed of mystery shoppers, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Web surveys, and customer focus groups. Alone each of these tools offers a unique perspective on customer satisfaction. Taken and analyzed together they create a total picture of the customer experience.
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