All week long, we’ve been writing about the importance of deepening relationships with customers by delighting them when they do business with you.
On Tuesday, I showed you how to map your waypoints along the customer’s before, during, and after paths of doing business with you.
Now, how can you baseline, improve, and systematize the experiences at each of those waypoints? I’ll give you a couple ways.
Start With Shareworthy Service
After Best Buy made my mom cry, I became obsessed with what made customer experiences memorable in good ways. After deconstructing hundreds of shareworthy experiences from all manner of industries, I found there were really only fourteen facets to every good shareworthy experience. Furthermore, you could group these fourteen into two major silos of seven each: Professionalism and Kindness.
So, gather together as a group (you MUST do this as a company, not have it dictated from top-down ownership – you need your company to own these ideas together) and brainstorm ways to use the fourteen facets of shareworthy service at each waypoint.
Start by identifying what you’re doing now at each waypoint (establishing your baseline).
Attenuate each waypoint using the 14 facets. Figure out ways to improve each experience along the way using the same techniques used by Apple, Disney and Nordstrom’s (they employ the fourteen facets – even if they don’t call them that).
Ask:
“How could we make a customer’s experience at Waypoint A more playful (one of the fourteen)?”
… and …
“How could we utilize privilege (another of the fourteen) to enrich customers’ experiences at Waypoint C?”
Work through the list of fourteen as a team. It’ll be a paradigm-shifting experience, I promise you.
Then, take it to another level.
Finish With Your Company Values
Do you have the three words that best exemplify your company’s values?
If not, please do this exercise before you continue.
Once you have your three words, do the same exercise from above – attenuating each customer waypoint – only this time use your company’s values.
Your team knows these values, right? Right, So ask:
“How could we utilize [company value A] to enrich a customer’s experience at Waypoint B?”
Isn’t This A Lot Of Work?
Yep. We’re building systems that can be consistent and scaled and bindered and be easily trained to new employees.
It is a bit like spreadsheet-work, but it ensures you’ll be able consciously decide how customers are treated at every step along their path with you.
Why wouldn’t you want to have this kind of control? If you have an answer to why you wouldn’t want to do this with your team as soon as freakin’ humanly possible, I’d love to hear it.
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