| How To Improve Your Customer Experience By Asking, “What’s Missing?” | |
Years ago my pastor told me I had a gift for spotting what’s wrong with a situation. I had just told him that while all members and regular attendees could easily locate restrooms, the bookstore and nursery, first-time visitors would have an awful time locating these areas of the church because everything is hidden. “We needed signage,” I told him. “We have to be welcoming to first-time visitors. We have to make it easy for them. If we don’t, how can we turn first-time visitors into repeat guests, then to regular attendees and ultimately convert them to members?”
I’m a natural at customer experience improvement work because I can look at any aspect of the customer experience and see what’s missing. Largely, my work is about noticing what’s missing and bringing it to the attention of my clients.
In this article I am sharing 2 ways I recently helped 2 companies improve the customer experience simply by pointing out what was missing. My intent with this article is to inspire you to look for ways to improve your own customer experience by identifying what is missing —and correcting that aspect of your experience.
1. Reduce customer effort.
One of my newest clients is a small but growing shipping company. This week I listened to a random sample of phone calls coming into the company’s customer service group. One hundred percent of the calls I reviewed were customers calling to check the status of their shipments.
After reviewing the calls, I called an immediate meeting with management and explained that customers should never have to call to check their order status. I directed my client to setup an infrastructure that would automatically inform customers, by email or text, when orders were processing, shipping and delivered.
The missing piece here is that customers had to work too hard. I explained to my client to that their customers should get an email update telling them when orders have been received, shipped and are out for delivery. Customers should not have to call for updates on routine transactions. Don’t miss any opportunity to reduce customer effort in your organization. Reducing customer effort often leads to reduced customer calls and emails and has the added benefit of cost savings. The most significant benefit to reducing customer effort, of course, is an improved customer experience.
2. Be easy to do business with.
After a training session with a client, I took photos with several attendees. My phone was used for many of the photos and I promised to share copies of the photos. At the airport I sent an email to one of my attendees and attached three photos. The email immediately bounced back because the file size was too large.
When I received the bounced email notification, I recalled something I heard when listening to customer calls for this company. Several customers stated that they had attempted to email photos of product damage, but the emails were rejected. Now I knew why the emails were rejected.
My client is a warranty company and in order to help customers they first need evidence of product damage. The evidence is almost always a photo. But if I couldn’t even send three jpeg photos taken on my phone, how could customers upload their photos showing product damage? I called my client, explained my upload issues and urged the company to work with their IT department to allow larger file uploads. Being easy to do business with means you look for bottlenecks and obstacles and remove them so your customers have a smooth and easy experience.
It’s Your Turn
Consider your own customer experience and ask yourself what’s missing? Your answers to this question, with proactive action, will lead to a smooth, easy and delightful customer experience.
About Myra Golden
A well-designed customer experience can give an organization maximum competitive impact, but bad customer service can be a company’s worst nightmare. Veteran customer experience expert Myra Golden helps companies improve the customer experience. Myra understands the psychology of the customer experience and shares her expertise in her customer service interventions; tackling everything from performing mystery shop visits and quality checks to removing bottleneck steps to positioning employees to make emotional connections with customers.