knowledgecity exceeding customer expectations

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KnowledgeCity®

EXCEEDING CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS

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https://www.knowledgecity.com

KnowledgeCity® Exceeding Customer Expectations

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Table of Contents

Introduction – Know Your Customer ................................................................................ 1

Identifying Customer Needs and Values .......................................................................... 2

Understanding your Customer ......................................................................................... 3

From Service to Loyalty to a Competitive Advantage .................................................... 4

Building Trust ..................................................................................................................... 5

Five Dynamics of Customer Care ..................................................................................... 6

Four Steps to Create Loyal Customers ............................................................................ 7

Points of Connection ......................................................................................................... 8

Customer Advocacy ......................................................................................................... 9

Conclusion – A Philosophy of Customer Care ................................................................ 10



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Introduction – Know Your Customer

RICHARD BRANSON

Business Magnate

The key is to set realistic customer expectations, and then not to just meet them, but to exceed them – preferably in unexpected and helpful ways.

“ “

Brick-and-mortar establishments, online sites, and huge mega-retailers are all competing for customers. How can you win in this environment? There is one secret weapon that will give you a critical competitive edge: giving your customers more than they expect.

External customers are those who purchase your products or services and are the primary focus of your business.

Internal customers are those people within your organization who also have a business relationship with you and need something from you to do a job. They should be treated with the same level of service with which you treat external customers.

Stakeholders are groups or individuals who have a business relationship with your organization, such as vendors, suppliers and consultants.

Think about the different types of customers you deal with every day and how they are treated. Exceptional service is not only needed for customer satisfaction. It also enhances your reputation in the community to create and sustain new customers.

Knowing your customers is just the beginning. Let’s move on to customer needs and values.

First, understand a few basic points:

Your customers’ perceived value is more important than any other measurable information.

Using personal responsibility to make a difference.

Creating an organizational philosophy/culture of care and service.

Gaining an advantage through the Connection Economy.

Before you get started, let’s define what a customer is. Customers are groups or individuals who have a business relationship with your organization.

Customers fall into three main categories:

External Internal Stakeholders



2


Identifying Customer Needs and Values

Customer service within an organization exists to perform activities to provide help for people in need, i.e., your customers. Do your customer service employees ask what the customer needs when they encounter them? If not, they may not be providing the highest quality customer service.

A good first step is to define what a customer need is. One definition is how a customer measures success when having an unmet need met. That may sound simple, but it is not always easy to put into practice. How does a customer measure success and value? The most important lesson here is to be able to clearly define your organization’s customer needs.

While customer needs are important, customer values are equally important. Customer values vary more than needs because every customer is unique. Determining and measuring customer values is not an easy task.

The best way to start understanding customer values is by creating an emotional connection with your customer. Does your company restrict how long customer service reps can be on the phone with one customer? Some companies have no restrictions, believing customers value personal attention above everything else.

Does your company have any barriers preventing your employees from providing a specific customer experience that exceeds their expectations? Are they related to the products and services?

Are the rules regulated or just unwritten and accepted norms?

If you find barriers in the rules and regulations, now might be the time to take a fresh look and suggest some customer-friendly revisions.

No matter how good your customer service is, if your products and services are subpar, you will find it difficult to please your customers. Let’s look at mission statements and buying experiences.



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Understanding your Customer

Every company stands for something, and this is reflected in its mission statement. A mission statement summarizes your company’s aims and values, usually in a short, succinct sentence. What does it say to your customers?

Some organizations debate whether their mission is to sell products or services to external customers or to sell the entire experience. Customers now have more options and demand more personalization in the buying experience. If your company is still relying solely on its products, it may be time to revamp that thinking and consider how important it is to provide the highest quality product or service coupled with the best customer service.

You probably already know a great deal about your customers. Now you need to learn how to exceed their expectations by giving them a valuable customer service experience. Remember, your products or services have competition. They are not necessarily unique. What makes you stand out from the pack is the experience your customers will value.

You are now knowledgeable about your customers’ needs and values and aware of the customer experience you provide. How do you move from stellar customer service to loyalty and obtaining a competitive advantage with your customers? Let’s find out.

To better understand your customer, consider following these steps:

Ask yourself why your organization exists. What problem does it solve?

Make a list of your customers. Think about all the people you interact with on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Break them into groups and categorize them in one of the 3 main customer categories:

• External• Internal• Stakeholder

Write down your customer’s needs and values. From your customer list, try and determine the needs and values of each group of customers. Make educated guesses. Conversations with individual people during your daily interactions will help determine actual values over time.

Examine your organization’s mission statement. Do you have one? Determine the focus. Is it customer-centric? If not, make suggestions to improve it.



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From Service to Loyalty to a Competitive Advantage

Finding customers who want to buy your products or services is one part of the sales equation. If a customer buys your product once and disappears off your radar, do you know why? To keep customers in a highly competitive business environment, a company needs to achieve customer loyalty.

Loyalty starts with providing something someone needs. If your product or service is top-notch, your customer will be satisfied. Customer satisfaction is the idea of expecting something and having those expectations met.

Does this mean you now have a loyal customer? Not necessarily. If your competition offers an equally good product or service, what would set you apart and create a loyal customer? A satisfied customer is a neutral measurement. It provides a standard service and does not foster customer loyalty.

Loyal customers will rarely spend their money elsewhere.

Loyal customers are emotionally attached.

Loyalty is a future predictor of behavior and revenue.

It costs four times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one.

The Harvard Business Review indicates loyal customers spend an average of 67% more than new customers.

Loyal customers spread the word about you to friends, colleagues and on social media.

Loyal customers are more forgiving when something goes wrong

Loyalty is not based on your products and services alone. You need to develop a competitive edge by building a loyal customer base. Today’s business environment rewards value created by fostering relationships and connections through the concept of the Connection Economy. The theme is to Serve-and-Connect with your customers. Simple as it sounds, it is not always easy to achieve. To Serve-and-Connect successfully, you should:

Of course, no matter how loyal your customers are, it is the trust they have in you that keeps them coming back. How do you earn trust? Let’s find out.

Get to know your customers. Stay in contact and have conversations often.

Listen and build relationships. Do something unexpected that will delight them.

Here are a few reasons why you should strive for customer loyalty:



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Building Trust

If you haven’t considered how important it is to involve everyone in the problem-solving process, consider how the organization functions and how employees view their jobs and their places in the company. Let’s learn more.

Trust is built on believing an organization will do what it says. Trust is not just one idea. There are two types of trust:

You want to keep and grow this relationship by letting customers know you hear and understand their disappointment. You want the customer to understand you will do everything you can to resolve the problem, even if you cannot give a specific solution or timeframe. Remember to always resolve to keep the customer informed in a timely manner.

Underlying the process is keeping your promises by being genuine and authentic. This form of trust can be easily destroyed at this stage and trust can be eradicated.

Loyalty and trust are critical to good customer service. What other elements of customer care are important? Let’s examine those in more detail.

Predictive Vulnerability and Emotional Openness

Empathy Commitment Professionalism Commitment

Predictive trust is the type of trust you build over time before determining who is reliable. It is easy to achieve by saying what you mean and meaning what you say. When you commit to meeting minimum standards, others will accept your words. If you say you will get back to someone by a certain date, keep your word, even if you don’t have an answer yet. If you don’t respond, customers will be upset and possibly confused by the lack of interest in their situation. This is not the relationship you want to have with your customers.

The second type of trust is based on vulnerability and emotional openness. It can take much longer to achieve but has a greater potential to create loyal customers. Vulnerability-based trust usually develops when something has gone wrong for a customer who is angry, upset or even argumentative.

How can you rebuild trust and secure this person as a loyal customer? The answer is to practice empathy, commitment, professionalism and commitment in the response.



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Five Dynamics of Customer Care

What do customers want? You have probably asked yourself that question many times. Here are five basic elements of customer care.

1. Responsiveness2. Authenticity

3. Knowledgeable4. Professionalism

5. Inclusiveness

Responsiveness is more than just listening to complaints or answering questions. This is the first thing customers notice. It is being available and open to your customers’ needs and wants. Treat them as welcome guests, whether on the phone, in person or online. Give them your full attention each time.

Authenticity Authenticity is being genuine during interactions. People want to feel they are valued and special, and their conversations with your business are more than canned scripts. They seek active, empathetic listening and cordial information exchanges.

Professionalism Professionalism boils down to respect and consideration of others. It is conducting yourself appropriately when dealing with customers and doing what you say you will when you say you will do it.

Inclusiveness Inclusiveness is the element that sets you apart from the competition. In the Connection Economy, customers want to feel they belong to something when they patronize your business. They want to connect to your organization on many levels.

Knowledgeable Nothing angers customers more than dealing with someone who seems to know nothing about the product, service, or how to deal with a complaint effectively. They want someone knowledgeable about the products and services. They want employees with basic knowledge who will answer questions or solve problems or know how to get the situation back on track.

Professionalism boils down to respect and consideration of others. It is conducting yourself appropriately when dealing with customers and doing what you say you will when you say you will do it.

These elements will make your customers feel their needs are important to you and foster a sense of belonging as well as loyalty.

Belonging is the first step to creating loyalty, but what other things can you do to create loyal customers? Let’s explore a few ideas.



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Four Steps to Create Loyal Customers

Think about the businesses you like to patronize, and then consider why you are loyal to them. What do they offer you that their competition doesn’t? Here are four steps to help you understand and improve your organization’s customer loyalty.

As you evaluate your answers, keep your customers and their needs at the forefront of your findings. Your next step is to use this information as you investigate all customer points of connection and how you can apply ideas to practice.

Make a list of the businesses or organizations where you are a loyal customer.

Next to each organization, state WHY you are loyal. How do you feel when you interact with people from the organization? Are you loyal because of a loyalty program? Do they send texts with special offers? Is their shipping fast and free? Have they ever exceeded your expectations? How? List ALL the reasons you are loyal. Can your business provide any of these features?

Practice active listening skills. Assess your active listening skills and write down two things you might practice immediately to improve them. It might be to stop listening with the sole intent of responding. Listen with the intent to gain information. Ask follow-up questions.

Make a list of the five dynamics of customer care and pick at least two to focus on. Remember, with every interaction, you have the opportunity to build or destroy a relationship. Next to the behaviors you choose to work on, write down HOW you will put them into immediate practice. Then, write down all the ways you can exceed customer expectations.



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Points of Connection

One of the most powerful ways you can discern what your customers experience is to become a “customer” yourself. First, consider every single access point of your organization. This includes the telephone, website, front door, social media, storefront, parking lot, marketing materials and even your email signature.

Start with a walkthrough at every point. What is the experience like? If you run into obstacles or difficult-to-understand directions, consider how frustrating it is for a customer. These points of connection are your first encounters for your customers. They can trigger a negative or positive emotional response and are as important as face-to-face interactions. Each one of these connection points has the power to create or destroy a customer relationship.

Remember it is often the little things that make the biggest impression on a customer. If online, is your website easy to use? Is it difficult to find the products you want by searching? Does the checkout make you go around in circles? Do you use top-notch security to ensure customer’s payment methods are safe?

For physical locations, everything from cleanliness, staff friendliness, parking availability, product availability and knowledgeable employees can make or break a customer bond. After you assess your access points, you may also want to consider other reasons customers might feel disconnected.

The most critical factor to consider is the value you are providing the customer. You should consider your customer’s perceived value. In the Serve-and-Connect economy,

your customers’ perceived value is

What THEY think of you, not what YOU think of you.

This is the formula for success in today’s Serve-and-Connect economy: Perceived value equals emotional experience and benefit minus cost and convenience. The secret to exceeding customer expectations is a positive emotional experience.

Is the Customer Service Department dead? Some businesses think so. Let’s find out why.

• When their basic expectations are not met at the outset.

• When there is a lack of information or expertise. Customers need their basic expectations to be met by someone with knowledge and expertise. Communicating with confidence and empathy at every connection point is imperative.

• When someone uses company policy as an excuse not to provide the service they need or expect. If there are policies and procedures that must be followed, find appropriate ways to communicate them with customers. Review current policies to determine whether they need revision.

Sometimes you go through the entire process and find the solution is still elusive. You have a choice of moving on or going back to the starting point and looking at each component. Maybe your data was faulty; perhaps you didn’t ask the right questions. Wherever the process veered off track, go back and try it again. Don’t consider problems insurmountable. Instead, view them as opportunities to hone your critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

This process will usually reveal the best answer at some point when you can test solutions, make adjustments, and approve a plan. Remember, there are often many solutions to a problem. If you choose one and it doesn’t work as well as you thought, consider alternatives and don’t be afraid to be creative with your solutions. Feedback is an essential part of the process.



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Customer Advocacy

Does your organization have a Customer Service Department? Most still do, but the new way of thinking about customer service is that it is the duty of every employee. Many companies now train all new hires using a business model where the essence of customer service belongs to all employees. Customer advocacy and exceeding customer expectations go hand-in-hand

The aim of great customer service organization-wide is to ensure customers always have a buying experience that exceeds their expectations. Yet, even the best companies run into problems. One thing they do to prepare for this is to encourage customer complaints. It may seem counterintuitive, but like the idea of learning from your mistakes, it can promote better customer service down the line.

One way to do this effectively is to employ a program called service recovery. These are the actions you take after a failure. There should be a strategic process in place, so staff is trained to ask for and document complaints. It can be uncomfortable at first but yield benefits later for customer loyalty. Customers experience positive feelings that you care enough to make things right and that you value their opinions and ideas.

As with any aspect of a business, it is not only important to assess, change and modify processes and procedures to achieve goals. It is also important to know how to sustain them to achieve customer loyalty. Let’s look at some final ideas about exceeding customer expectations.



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Conclusion – A Philosophy of Customer Care

Creating a philosophy of customer care takes work that yields great dividends. If you want loyal customers, put these ideas into action.

Create a Point-of-Connection Flow Chart for your organization. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and walk through every conceivable access point. It does not have to be a flow chart. You can make a list, do it by department, or whatever works best in your organization.

Identify the places where customer expectations are being exceeded. Who or what is delighting and surprising your customers? Make a big deal out of your efforts in some places and see how they can be multiplied or transferred to other areas.

Identify the places where customer expectations are not being met or exceeded. Now focus on areas for improvement. Is your storefront in need of a facelift? Is your reception area welcoming and warm? Does your website concisely and clearly provide basic information about your offerings? Are your email responses timely? Does your Facebook page invite engagement from followers?

Reflect upon your organization’s overall culture as it relates to customer advocacy. Does everyone take personal responsibility to make an emotional connection with customers? Is there a service recovery program? Do you actively encourage customers to complain, especially when you know they are dissatisfied?

Use this to make a change. Every organization will be able to identify areas for improvement. Pick something and implement a change. Take small bites or do a total transformation.

Customers are the reason businesses and organizations exist. Competition is fierce, but you now have a wealth of information you can put into practice to help you create loyal customers. Valued customers spend more money, advertise by word of mouth, and are more forgiving when something goes wrong. Don’t they deserve the best you can give?



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EXCEEDING CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS


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