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is exponential. Well, here are 68 ideas that can help any company amaze their customers.1 8-HEF HYKENt WBW EtWK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF 7Hi'AJiLOSMErzr Fi'VOLVTZOW
is exponential. Well, here are 68 ideas that can help any company amaze their customers.1 8-HEF HYKENt WBW EtWK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF 7Hi'AJiLOSMErzr Fi'VOLVTZOW
HOW
WOW
68 EFFORTLESS WAYS
TO MAKE EVERY
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
AMAZING
ADRIAN SWINSCOE
Adrian Swinscoe
HOW TO WOW
68 EFFORTLESS WAYS TO
MAKE EVERY CUSTOMER
EXPERIENCE AMAZING
PEARSON
Harlow, England • London • New York • Boston • San Francisco • Toronto • Sydney
Auckland
Singapore
Hong
Kong
Tokyo
Seoul
Taipei
New
Delhi
Cape Town • Sao Paulo • Mexico City • Madrid • Amsterdam • Munich • Paris • Milan
CONTENTS
Publisher's acknowledgments
About the author
Introduction
PART 1 THE CUSTOMER PERSPECTIVE
SECTION 1 ATTRACT
Introduction
1 Be at the start of your customer's journey 2 Don't interrupt customers 3 Develop trust at a distance 4 Are you being interesting and interested? 5 Trust drives transactions 6 Become part of your customer's story 7 Customer behaviour is changing: check your assumptions 8 Data insights are good but immersion and observation are better
SECTION 2 ENGAGE
Introduction
9 Understand the relationships you have with your customers 10 What it takes to build trust 11 Customers trust people like them 12 To really engage you must be willing to fail 13 Doing what's right for the customer is often an article of faith 14 How to be more interesting 15 Empathy is key to engagement 16 Bad corporate behaviour impacts customer experience and engagement 17 Innovating around relationships 18 Data, privacy and the impact on customer relationships 19 Design a great customer experience by including your customers 20 People will pay more for better service
SECTION 3 SERVE
Introduction
21 Every customer hates waiting but the experience can be improved 22 Speak my language 23 Nature abhors a vacuum 24 Bad reviews can be good 25 Remove the grit 26 The primacy and recency effect 27 Lots of small changes add up 28 Make it simple 29 Behavioural science and lessons for customer service 30 Identify and deal with silent complaints 31 Consistency in quality and delivery is key 32 A name not a number 33 Make your service proactive 34 Make promises, keep them but you don't have to beat them 35 Improve your service by making it easy for customers to help each other 36 The longest lasting emotions in customer experience 37 Make sure delivery is not your Achilles'heel 38 Reduce effort 39 Is customer service going to get worse before it gets better? 40 What's your brand's customer service persona?
SECTION 4 KEEP
Introduction
41 The hole in the bucket syndrome 42 Differences in perception exist and matter 43 Most loyalty schemes don't create loyalty 44 Marginal cost but high perceived value 45 Make your customer the hero 46 What drives loyalty? 47 Complaints are key to retention 48 Where you earn loyalty
SECTION 5 REFER
Introduction
49 If you don't ask then you won't get 50 Proactivity drives advocacy too 51 How you can build your own customer referral community
PART 2 THE BUSINESS PERSPECTIVE
SECTION 6 COMMUNICATE
Introduction
52 Be honest about your surveys and keep them short 53 Always feed back and report on results 54 When's the best time to survey your customers? 55 Be careful when interpreting data
SECTION 7 MOTIVATE
Introduction
56 Work hard and be nice to people 57 The link between customer experience and employee engagement 58 Engagement is not something that is done to people 59 Design the employee experience too
SECTION 8 LEAD
Introduction
60 What's the best organisational structure to deliver your customer experience? 61 Becoming more agile and responsive to customer needs 62 Unlearning old ways can help transform customer experience 63 Using behaviours rather than targets to improve your customer experience 64 Leadership behaviours and customer experience 65 Humility and the benefits of admitting that you got it wrong 66 When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure 67 What have you done today to make the lives of your team easier? 68 Don't believe the hype
Final words
Notes
Index
PUBLISHER'S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright
material
Figures
Figure 1.1 from Government Communication Service, Customer journey
mapping [pdf], available at
https://gcs.civilservice.gov.uk/guidance/campaigns/customer-journey- mapping. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence (OGL) v3.0. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.Uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/.
Tables
Table on page 77 from Cabinet Office and Institute for Government (2010)
MINDSPACE. Influencing Behaviour through Public Policy. London
Cabinet Office, page 8, © Crown Copyright 2012; Table on pages 78-9 after EAST: Four simple ways to apply behavioural insights, The Behavioural Insights Team, April 2014, Behavioural Insights Team, © Behavioural Insights Ltd 2014. Not to be reproduced, copied, distributed or published without the permission of Behavioural Insights Ltd; Table on pages 112-3 after Know Your Customer Service Persona, www.aspect.com/customer- service-personas, Aspect; Table on pages 135-6 after A client seminar called 'Delight from dissatisfaction', Mark Blackmore, Director of Lammore Consulting Ltd.
Text
Extract on page 61 from PLAIN (Plain Language Association InterNational).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adrian Swinscoe is a consultant and adviser to a number of firms helping them improve their customer and client experience. His clients range from large publicly quoted organisations to fast-growing, entrepreneurial firms. He's a huge fan of organisations that do great things for their customers and enjoys using research, stories and human insights to help create change and better results for his clients. Overall, he's a lover of simplicity and an advocate of the human touch with some really useful technology thrown in. Outside of work, he's a keen but distinctly average rock-climber and loves to develop and share ideas via his blog and his column on the Entrepreneurs section of Forbes.com. You can learn more about Adrian at www.adrianswinscoe.com
INTRODUCTION
The British Museum in London has in its collection a customer service complaint letter1 that is more than 3,700 years old.
The letter, written on a clay tablet, originates from the Old Babylonian period (southern Mesopotamia) circa 1750 BC and is written by a man, Nanni, to a merchant, Ea-nasir.
In the letter Nanni complains that there have been problems with two shipments of copper ore that he has ordered from the merchant.
One was the wrong type and the other was delayed and delivered to the wrong location.
Different time.
Familiar problems.
Now, whilst we don't know how Ea-nasir responded to Nanni, what we do know is that how we deliver great service and deal with our customers' problems has always been important.
However, in recent years we have seen the emergence of a new kid on the block . . . customer experience.
But, what is customer experience?
Definitions abound but I would describe it simply as'the sum of all experiences that a customer has with a company'.
Moreover, it's come to the fore because as competition increases, customer behaviour and preferences change, and technology develops, the distinct differences between products and services are diminishing.
Therefore, what we are left with and what can help companies distinguish themselves from their competitors is the service that they deliver to their customers and the overall customer experience that their customers have by interacting with them.
Customers are increasingly judging the companies they do business with on the customer experience they deliver.
In 2011, research by Oracle2 found that 89% of customers they surveyed reported that they had switched their business to a competitor following a poor customer experience.
This was
mirrored by research from American Express3 in the same year, which found that the majority of customers around the world have abandoned or have not made a purchase because of poor customer service or a poor customer experience.
Moreover, Walker, a customer intelligence consulting firm, in another piece of research, found that it will become increasingly important and that, by 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator in the business to business space.4 Thus, customer experience is and will increasingly become a key competitive battleground; one that will define, at the very least, the first half of the 21st century.
Intuitively, most leaders, executives and entrepreneurs get this but because customer experience covers so many areas of their business they often struggle to define and articulate the Return on Investment (Rol) on new customer experience initiatives.
However, two recent studies help make the business case.
The first comes from Watermark Consulting5 who in 2015 compared the stock returns from 2007 to 2013 of the top ten and the bottom ten ranked and publicly quoted companies in Forrester Research's annual Customer Experience Index.6 What they found was that over this period, the top ten companies (the customer experience leaders) beat the performance of the overall S&P 500 Index by 35 points, whilst the bottom ten companies (the customer experience laggards) trailed the S&P 500 Index by 45 points.
A difference of 80 points!
The second comes from Peter Kriss at Medallia who published an article in the Harvard Business Review called'The Value of Customer Experience, Quantified'.7 In it he explained about his research that aimed to quantify the value of delivering a good customer experience as opposed to a poor one and compared that across a couple of different types of business model.
I was lucky enough to get a chance to speak to Peter and interview8 him about his
research. Here are the highlights of what he told me
■ His research compared two very different companies, each with over half a million customers. One operated a transactional business model
and the other had a subscription based business model. ■ He then looked at how much more their customers would spend if they had a great experience compared to if they had a poor experience. ■ What he found from his research was that, in the case of the transactional business, spending by customers was 140% higher the following year after delivering a great customer experience versus a poor one. ■ In the case of the subscription based business, customer retention went from 43% to 74% following a great customer experience versus a poor one.
So, having established the importance of customer experience and its business case the only thing to do now is to go off and deliver a great customer experience.
There are lots of books on customer experience and customer service that can help and many of them are good.
But, in my opinion, many of them also contain lots of'fluff'and all sorts of offers of the'answer', e.g. if you follow our method you'll be assured of success.
The problem with that is that I don't believe there is one'answer'.
There is only what is right for your business and your customers and the problems that you face.
HOW THIS BOOK WORKS
As a result, this book aims to deliver a practical set of insights, tips and strategies based on what it takes to deliver a consistent, differentiated and world-class customer experience. The 68 insights are designed to be practical and easy to implement and are based on research, experience and over 150 interviews that I have conducted over the last 4-5 years with leading authors, entrepreneurs and customer service/experience experts and practitioners. However, the insights and strategies are not meant to be an exhaustive set of strategies, neither are they applicable to every business. Rather, they are meant to be a'Pick n Mix'range . . . you get to pick what you like and implement what works best for your business.
The insights are organised into a number of sections (see below) that both follow the customer lifecycle as well as addressing a number of internal dynamics and challenges that many businesses will have to face if they are to deliver their own great customer experience. Whilst the insights are meant to stand alone, within each section I have tried to place them in a logical order that is aligned with the customer journey but also allows the insights to build on each other as the book develops.
Moreover, each insight is organised as follows
An introduction - which lays out the insight and makes the case for it.
Insight in action - where a case study or an interview helps bring the
insight to life and shows how it can be applied in practice.
How to use it - which takes the insight and suggests where to go next
and what to do with this insight. Finally, this book is less about channels, technology, systems and processes as many of these will change over time: it is more about relationships and people. People as customers and people that work inside organisations.
Enjoy.
PART 1
THE CUSTOMER PERSPECTIVE
SECTION 1
ATTRACT
INTRODUCTION
Attracting new customers is one of the hardest, if not the hardest, parts of being in business and with so much choice available to customers it's getting harder and harder.
Traditional advertising and marketing aims to use broadcast methods to raise awareness and attract attention.
This, largely, talks'at'customers.
However, these days that is not enough as the majority of customers no longer believe what many businesses say about themselves.
As a result, customers are doing more and more online and offline research about their buying decisions and are becoming ever more discerning about who they do business with and what they want.
Therefore, it is not enough to create the'coolest'new ad anymore and the size of your marketing budget is not always the best indicator of success.
Rather, the best companies understand that in order to attract customers they have to engender their trust and be a company that customers believe can help them and that they want to be aligned with.
This section will share a number of insights, case studies, interviews and tips covering a range of issues surrounding a business's ability to attract new customers in the modern world including topics such as knowing where your customers start their journey, why it's essential for companies to be able to build trust at a distance, how the art of buying has changed and how companies need to respond to the changing behaviour of their customers.
INSIGHT 1
BE AT THE START OF YOUR
CUSTOMER'S JOURNEY
Use this when you want to start attracting customers earlier in the buying process.
Prior to the internet, if we wanted to buy something new that we hadn't bought before then we would either look in a catalogue, talk to friends and family, go to a trade show, take a trip into the biggest local town or city - In my case, this was Edinburgh as I grew up in the Borders of Scotland and when I was young, this was a big deal - or wander down the street and talk to the owner of the local general store as they, at the time, seemed to know pretty much everything about everything.
This is how our buying journey used to start.
Nowadays, the way we buy is very different.
For many people, one of the first things they do when they start thinking about buying something new is to go onto Google, Bing, Yahoo! or some other search engine and start finding out more about what they want, does it exist, who makes it, what do people think about it and what are the options, etc.
It might feel how we buy has fundamentally changed but, in reality, it hasn't.
Yes, we have more information at our fingertips these days, but we're still looking for information, talking to people to find out more, looking for pointers of who to trust, who to talk to, where to find what we are looking for, etc.
Despite the sea changes that have happened over the last few years, it still surprises me that many businesses still think a customer's journey starts when he or she steps into their offices or shop, or at a first meeting.
Those that do
are missing a huge opportunity to connect with their customers at the start of their buying journey.
INSIGHT IN ACTION
As an example of a business sector that has gone through huge changes in recent years, let's look at the car industry, which according to a 2013 report
from McKinsey1 shows that
■ Traditionally, the average number of different dealers (whether new or used) that a customer would visit before buying was around five.
This number has now fallen to as low as one dealer in some areas as more and more customers do their buying research online (over 80% of new- car and almost 100% of used-car customers) and make up their mind what sort of car they want before they even visit a car dealer. ■ Whilst almost 90% of customers said that they would browse dealer websites or car manufacturer websites in the early stages of their buying and decision making journey, they would also use a variety of other online sources - manufacture and dealer websites, social media, blogs and forums - to gather information and compare offers.
Therefore, car dealerships can no longer rely on traditional methods of advertising and location to deliver the sales opportunities that they need to survive and thrive.
Successful players know that to thrive they need to put their customers'hat on and think about their journey.
They need to understand that their customers'journey now starts before they get to the showroom and they need to provide answers to customers'questions via their website, their blog and on social media so that customers can find them.
They know that they need to stop'selling'and start helping and serving their customers.
They know that one of the most powerful things that they can do is to display reviews and feedback from their recent customers as a way of building trust and confidence with their new customers.
They also know that customers increasingly expect the retail experience to be seamless across channels - mobile, online, in-store.
HOW TO USE IT
Many customers are starting their buying journeys earlier and earlier and are conducting much of their buying research online. Firms need to realise this and work out how they can help their prospective customers with the early part of their buying journey. To get started preparing to do that, here are some key questions for you to
ask
■ Where does your customer's journey start? ■ Are you there at the start of your customer's journey to help? ■ What are they going to want to know around their purchasing decision, what are their fears, concerns, etc.? ■ What's your niche or speciality?
Do you want to be the best, the cheapest, the most trustworthy, the greenest, the most ethical, the most of anything?
Can you be that person?
Can you display those qualities?
And, it's not just about saying that you are the best, the cheapest, the most trustworthy, the greenest, the most ethical, the most of anything.
You have to prove it. ■ Can social media tools like a Facebook page, a blog, a Twitter account, a Linkedln group, an Instagram or Pinterest page help?
Answering these questions will give you some of the clues as to what you need to do to meet or, at least, be around your customers when they start their journey.
However, don't stop there.
Once you've figured out what you need to do to make sure that you are there to help at the beginning of a customer's journey, keep going and map the rest of the customer journey.
To help do that, you
could use a customer journey map tool2 like the one below
Figure 1.1 Customer Journey Map Template
Assemble a teamJ
Hot spots are where'
we can either win over or greatiy disappoint people >
Lay down big
journey steps - try not to have too many. Agree 3-4 1 moments of truth' hot spots
Map out actions
that matter to people at each step - what delivers a great experience - j
Agree what must
be tackled as a priority
Type of journey
Hot spot
Journey \
steps /
Experience \
at each / stage /
Key issues/\
opportunities?
This tool can
identify key needs, likes & dislikes & current experience, helping to plan the best'experience' and where communication is most appropriate.
Note: Journey
maps can be
simple or complex
« One overall or for each customer type * Simple or detailed steps • Complex choices e.g. different channels
INSIGHT 2
DON'T INTERRUPT CUSTOMERS
Use this to save money and to stop annoying customers.
At a recent marketing conference I saw some statistics which claimed that
■ 86% of people skip ads on TV; ■ 44% of direct mail is never opened; ■ 91% of us unsubscribe to unsolicited marketing emails; and ■ over 200 million people around the world are on'do not call'lists. These statistics are backed up by research in 2015 by Aimia Institute3 which
found that
■ 74% of UK customers state that they feel like they are receiving too many marketing emails and; ■ 69% of UK customers have closed down customer accounts as a result of poorly targeted marketing campaigns. It's not just a UK thing as research in 2015 by Marketo,4 a marketing software firm, found that 63% of consumers across the US, UK, France, Germany and Australia expressed annoyance and frustration with brands that continue to bombard them with generic advertising messages and do so repeatedly. What these findings suggest is that customers don't like to be interrupted and value their own time more than listening to a business's marketing message.
INSIGHT IN ACTION
How many adverts do we see every day?
Hundreds?
Thousands?
How many do we remember?
How much junk mail do you get in the post?
Have you ever faced the situation where a real letter has got lost or even thrown out with the junk mail?
Do you receive emails from companies that you have never done business with?
Have you recently received a cold call from someone trying to sell you something and they just launch into their pitch without even asking if it's a good time to talk?
Have you ever received an automated phone call trying to sell you something?
Have you done business with a company only to be added to their marketing list and then they start bombarding you with marketing offers and updates?
These are all interruptions and most of them don't work.
Yet, the worst thing is that many companies ignore these signs and are wasting resources on ineffectual marketing campaigns and tactics.
Gary Vaynerchuk, a successful social media and wine entrepreneur as well as a sought after and entertaining speaker and best-selling author, sums up the situation very well and provides an alternative when he suggests that:5 ■ rather than spending