Awesome Experience = Rising Revenue

This document is a transcript of a presentation delivered by Morrison Creative to a group of business entrepreneurs and invited guests attending a business showcase in May 2008.

Customer service is something that is absolutely crucial to your organisation's success.

I don't know about you, but I am always amazed at the incredible lack of customer service that we receive in the UK. It's fairly poor. When ever I go anywhere, I'm always going on about what could have been done to make my experience better; what could have been improved; what shouldn't have happened. It's an occupational hazard. It spoils my shopping experience, so I just don't go shopping any more, because I'm always gob-smacked at how badly staff in the service industry treat customers.

GOING, GOING, GONE!
I'm not however, surprised, about a recent statistic from a study at Durham University. The study showed that 68% of customers move to a different supplier/provider purely because of the way their first provider treated them. That's over two thirds of your customers moving to a competitor, not because of your product, but because of the way it was 'packaged'. Gone because of something that is totally within your control. Gone, so have to find a customer to replace the lost customer and hope that the same thing doesn't happen to your new customer. That's no way to do business!

However, on the other hand by getting customer service right, some companies, using the principles touched on in this special report, the principles Morrison Creative use when working with clients, some organisations have raised revenue by as much as 40% without any advertising, purely by word of mouth customer referrals. As they say in the United States, 'it's a no brainer'. So how come some organisations get it so wrong and how do you make sure you get it right?

BAD ASSUMPTIONS
From my experience, organisations who struggle with customer service and customer retention do so because they have made some poor assumptions about their clients. Usually, one of three general misconceptions:

1. That customers understand and judge the core part of your business in a similar way that you do. Wrong: customers don't hold the same view of your business as you do. They generally have no idea about what it takes to produce the core part of your business. They don't do what you do day in day out. They don't understand your business like you do. You'd be quite surprised how they view your business.

2. Customers' opinion of your expertise is based solely on their sound judgement of the goods or services that you're selling. Wrong: your customers make judgements about your business based on all sorts of different, odd and usually emotional reasons. They may well use a logical argument to later justify their judgements, but don't be fooled, their judgement is not based on sound judgement of the goods or services provided.

3. The non-core areas of business are far less important than the core area of business. Wrong: If customer don't view your business like you do and don't make sound judgements of the quality of goods and services, then what do they judge you on? They judge you on how they were treated. They judge you on the experience you gave them, so the non-core areas of business are critical to ensuring that your customers believe you're good at what you do.

YOUR MOTEL STAY
Let me give you a simple example. Imagine you're driving home late at night and tiredness starts to set in so you decide to stop at a motel to get some well needed sleep. You pull off the main road at a service station and surprisingly you see three motels on offer. Great you have a choice. But how are you going to choose? You sit in you car and take a look at the three motels.

Motel number one has a sign that is almost working. It flashes on and off intermittently and when it is on you can see that parts of it are missing and it's in fairly poor repair. You suddenly notice that underneath the sign is an old dented car that's appears to have been there a while. The grass has started growing up around it.

The second motel has a rubbish skip out the front. It's full and the rubbish bags are overflowing. Some of them are split and the contents is strewn across the pathway up to the entrance, where an intimidating man stands smoking in the doorway.

The last motel is well lit, the grass outside is well tendered and it even has flowers in the window boxes by the door. As you look into through the well lit glass frontage, you can see someone one visible at the reception desk. A well dressed gentleman waiting patiently to welcome the next guest.

Which motel are you going to stay at? If you're anything like me, you're going to go the one that looks less threatening. Motel number three. You made a judgement based purely on the outward parts of the business. You basically said to yourself, 'if these motels look after their guests like they look after their grounds then I don't want to stay in motel one or two'. You haven't even seen the rooms. You have no idea what each of these motels are like on the inside. You don't actually know what their core product is like, but most likely it matches the outward appearance. And that's exactly how YOUR customers think. They look at the peripheral indications of your quality. They use the non core areas of your business to decide whether the core area is any good.

NOT JUST THE PRODUCT
It's not just your product or service that you need to worry about. You need to get the non core areas of your business right too. What I term the 'Critical Non-Essentials'© . Those parts of the business that are not essential to performing your core business functions, but are absolutely critical to your overall success. You could run your business without worrying about those parts. You may still be able to scrape together some business, but without these extra 'critical' parts it will always be a struggle to grow. The 'Critical Non-Essentials'©. That's all the things that make your customers feel good about doing business with you.

NOT CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
Most organisations realise that customer satisfaction is important and they aim to achieve good customer satisfaction. What they don't realise is that customer satisfaction is worthless. Your competitors can satisfy your customers. Customer satisfaction is the absolute minimum that your customers expect. If you don't satisfy your customer they will definitely go somewhere else. In fact they probably wont even come to you in the first place. What you need is not customer satisfaction, it's what I term 'customer awesome!' It's that moment when your customer goes, 'wow, I didn't expect that!' It's about surprising your customer so much that they just have to tell someone. Creating an experience so unexpected and so awesome that your customer just has to share the story.

Unfortunately, when it comes to levels of service your customer is not comparing you with other people that sell shoes (if you sell shoes) or other photographers (if you're a photographer). They are comparing you with any other organisation they have ever interacted with. Anyone who has ever made them feel. You're competing against Hilton Hotels; you're competing against Orange mobile; your competing with top class restaurants; you're competing with Nike, the goddess of victory; you're competing with Disney and their mission statement is 'To make people happy!'

A STORY TO TELL
So how do you compete on that level? Well it's not just by treating your clients well or giving good service or providing good products, although you do need to do all these things. It is no good having an awesome experience if your product is clearly sub standard. Your customers will notice the inconsistency. However, if you have a reasonable product or service then you need to make sure that your 'Critical Non-Essentials'© give your clients a great story to tell about you and your organisation. Such a great story that they will want to tell people whether they are ask or not, because they know people will want to hear.

Giving a great story can not only give you loyal customers, but it can create customer evangelists for your company that not only give you repeat business, but drum up new custom for you as well. Effectively, volunteers for your marketing department. It's all about your customer experience.

TWO INGREDIENTS
A great story comes from examining every part of your customers journey and make sure it's an awesome experience and there are two ingredients that can help that happen. Getting these two right doesn't guarantee success, but without these two you are guaranteed to fail.

1. Get the right people, who are passionate about your vision of customer service in the right jobs and let them get on with doing what they are good at, what you employed them for.

2. Provide the right tools and systems to make it as easy as possible for those people in the right jobs to provide consistently great service.

RIGHT PEOPLE
In order for you to consistently deliver a high quality customer experience you need to have people that believe in your vision and are passionate about making it a reality. People that are with you. This is where companies like McDonalds fail so badly. Where ever you go in the world, if you order a Big Mac, it's going to be exactly the same. You'll get the three buns, you'll get the lettuce. You'll get the two burgers and you'll get the little dollop of pink sauce. Exactly the same, anywhere in the world because Ray Croc has provided the tools to do it. He has systemised every part of the process so that any unqualified 16 year old can do it. Unfortunately any unqualified 16 year old does not share the vision of great service at the customer end. They don't really care about what they're doing which is why the food is the same, but the experience is shockingly poor. You need the to put right people in the right place. People who want to deliver what you have asked for. To do this some companies need to spend more on recruiting the right people and less on training the wrong people.

RIGHT TOOLS
Once you have the right people, who are behind your vision then you need to provide them with all the right tools, systems and support to consistently deliver on the promise. To deliver excellence time and time again.

They need to know exactly what good service looks like. They need to know how they are expected to deliver it. They need the freedom to be able to solve problems and issues that arise that don't fit into the normal agreed patterns. They need to be given not only the responsibility, but also the authority to perform. We've all been on the phone trying to solve a problem and the person you're talking to says, 'I can't make that decision, I'll have to ask my manager', or 'you'll have to call this other number and talk to them'. I've always wondered why they don't have those powers. If you have the right people in the right jobs doing what they are good at, with the right attitude then they're going to do what's right. Give them to tools to do it! In their book 'Now discover your strengths', Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton quote a study in which they asked employees whether at work they had the opportunity to do what they do best every day. In companies where employees strongly agreed with this statement, customer satisfaction went up 44%.

AWESOME SERVICE = RISING REVENUE
If you get the right people in the right positions and you give them to right tools, responsibility and authority to deliver on your promise, you can give your customers an awesome story to tell. You can have your customers spreading the word about your product or service. You can create customer evangelists. You can hold on to your 68% of clients that usually leave and you can gather your competitors 68%. And guess what? Your revenue will go up. Some companies have seen revenue go up by as much as 40% just by giving their customers awesome service. Now that's a story worth telling!

If you want to find out more about how to make your business stand out and create customer evangelists for your organisation, contact Morrison Creative on +44 (0)845 257 1936 or ben@morrisoncreative.co.uk.

Date: 23/06/2008
Category: BUSINESS ADVERTORIAL