It is no longer good enough for companies to provide good customers service — rather, companies need to create memorable interactions with customers that help establish a loyal relationship and promote brand advocacy.

Creating a memorable customer experience is based on the creation of an ideal experience that your customers would want to have throughout their relationship with your company. These interactions take place on a number of channels such as in person, over the phone, through email, and on social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

Successful customer experiences are scalable and can be managed consistently across multiple channels. Your customers experience must be unique. And, for it to be successful it needs to be clearly defined so that each one of your employees understands how to deliver the experience you want to create for your customers.

10 tips to improve your customer experience

Here are 10 ways that you can improve and refine your customer experience and improve your relationship with customers:

1. Make your customer experience clear: A great customer experience must be scalable across your company, consistent, and be easily understood and implemented by your employees. Have you defined the key elements that must be delivered to every customer? Review your customer experience documents and ask your employees if they understand what is expected of them.
2. Make your customer experience simple: If your customer experience is too complex, your employees will have difficulty delivering a consistent experience. Keep it simple. Do your employees understand what is expected of them? Are there too many rules? Consider relaxing the constraints on your employees so they can focus on creating an experience that creates a positive customer outcome rather than simply following a list of rules.
3. Define customer experience by channel: Customer experiences will vary by the channel that customers use to interact with your company. In person and online experiences are different and this needs to be reflected in how companies approach their customers on each channel.  Does your ideal customer experience vary by channel? If not, clearly outline the experience you want to create for each platform and point of interaction with your customers.
4. Address the emotional need: The focus of customer experience management needs to be on addressing your customer’s emotional need. Do you understand your customer’s emotional needs? What are you doing to ensure their emotional need is addressed?
5. Make sure all levels of your organization are involved: Creating a truly great customer experience is a company wide effort. There needs to be a consistent experience across the board. Does your company have an internal feedback process in place? How do you know your customers experience is consistent? Implement a regular review process and collect feedback about the customer experience.
6. Get your employees to buy in: If your employees do not buy in, your customers experience will suffer. If employees are not buying in, it is often a sign that your customer experience is too complex, or worse, isn’t relevant to the customer. What are you doing to ensure that your employees are buying in and creating the experience your customers want?
7. Talk to your customers: Ask your customers what they want. Be direct — ask them what your company can do to improve their experience. These conversations will help to build relationships. What can you do to better understand your customer’s emotional need? Create feedback channels that will help you capture and respond to your customer’s emotional needs.
8. Test your customer experience: Before launching any new customer experience initiatives, ask some of your customers to test drive your approach and provide feedback. You will be surprised what you will learn and uncover some of the oversights that you have missed. Plus you’ll avoid the expense of a false start that doesn’t really resonate with customers.
9. Narrow your focus: If you do not understand your ideal customer, then the experience you have created for them will be off target. Who are your customers? Do you have an ideal customer profile? What do your customers want to get out of their interaction and relationship with your company? Offer incentives to customers to get their opinion through surveys and focus groups.
10. Measure the experience: Measure, measure, measure. If you do not have the tools in place to measure your customer’s experience, then you will not have the ability to refine the experience and gain new insights. What tools are you using to measure your customers experience? Develop a system to measure your customer’s experience.

Bill Hogg: Leadership Expert | Professional Speaker |Performance Excelerator TM

Bill is the “just do it” guy who has walked in your shoes. Senior leaders hire Bill to navigate change and influence and inspire higher performing teams that deliver superior results – exceptional customer service, higher performance, productivity and profits.  Bill provides dynamic keynote presentations, transformative workshops and world class executive consulting. For additional information email bill@billhogg.ca or visit us online at www.billhogg.ca where you can sign up to receive an article like this each month.

Copyright 2012 – Bill Hogg & Associates All Rights Reserved

At the height of the fire, Edison’s 24-year-old son, Charles, searched frantically for his father. He finally found him, calmly watching the fire, his face glowing in the reflection, his white hair blowing in the wind.

“My heart ached for him,” said Charles. “He was 67 — no longer a young man — and everything was going up in flames. When he saw me, he shouted, “Charles, where’s your mother?” When I told him I didn’t know, he said, ‘Find her. Bring her here. She will never see anything like this as long as she lives.’”

The next morning, Edison looked at the ruins and said, “There is great value in disaster. All our mistakes are burned up. Thank God we can start anew.”

Three weeks after the fire, Edison managed to deliver the first phonograph.”

Written by Jim Clemmer.

So if you are not a micromanager, you may ask, how do I hold my people accountable?   Understanding the difference between holding employees accountable, and micromanaging can drastically change the outcomes of how you are viewed as a leader, and how your employees react to you as a manager.  Micromanaging can be toxic to an employee or the team environment overall, accountability, on the other hand, is a more productive way to assure your employees are getting the job done.

Set the right expectations for the tasks at hand in the beginning of each day and just stand back. Let your people take initiative!  If each employee knows and understands what they are accountable for without your breathing down their neck all day, it allows them to be more creative in meeting their goals and can make them feel empowered.  General Patton once said “Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.”

Last but not least, make sure you are getting feedback from your people.  During your meetings ask for people to speak up.  If they are not talking to you, you can be sure they are talking to others, and most of the time it will be negative.  One way to get buy-in from your people is to solicit feedback.  A great way to solicit feedback is to hand out questionnaires that will let people speak their mind.  People want to be heard, so let them speak!

My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging.

2.  ”Encourage and inspire people today. Don’t let someone’s future failures be from lack of encouragement!”

3. “Never let your past successes be a reason not to give your best today…Keep pushing for more.”

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