Giving your crowd a top-notch customer experience is just as important as providing them with your service. Most people stick to brands that create great unforgettable memories. Isn't it great when a restaurant gives you a complimentary bottle of wine on your birthday? Compare that to being on hold for over an hour just because you can’t reset your password! Ugggh…
In July of 2015, Forrester wrote a report about Understanding the Impact of Emotion On Customer Experience, where they talked about the 3 most-known principles to help customer experience teams become experts in making connections with people they care about.
People remember bad experiences way more than good ones.
If your internet has been running great for the past few years, you are probably not even thinking about your service provider. But as soon as you encounter some connection issues, you’re probably searching online to see if there is an outage near you, you call their customer service, maybe even text your neighbors to see if they’re down too. And if they bounce you between different departments -- oh, let’s not even go there. For the service provider, it’s better to foresee when a bug might occur to fix it as proactively and efficiently as possible.
Emotions change experiences as they happen. So, think through the typical experiences of your customers and how they impact the way they might feel. Consider the different obstacles your customers might face in their experience. Is purchasing convenient? Is everything easy to find on your website? Human error is reasonable and to be expected. People can mess up their hotel reservation. Make sure they can make these small changes with a click of a button.
Memories of past experiences don’t match reality. So, give special attention to those memorable moments.
When -- because we know it’s not a matter of if, but when -- there is a problem, let your community know about it as soon as possible. Let them know what you’re doing to fix it with a timeline, if that’s possible, and offer them some sort of compensation. For example, if Square didn’t send payroll through due to some difficulties on their end, they apologize to you with 3 months of their service for free.
We can’t verbalize all of the emotions we feel. So, help customers express their emotions.
A lot of people aren’t good at verbalizing their emotions so it’s natural that this would translate to their interactions as a customer. It’s important to train your customer service teams to listen for the cues of what they actually want to convey. A technique called metaphor elicitation which uses personality clues to help you understand your customers, might be able to assist with this.
Clearly putting thought into a customer's experience is vital to your brand and makes the leap from customer service to customer success. Think about how you can put a big smile on their face while also planting a meaningful memory. The sky's the limit when it comes to surprising them with awesome swag that can elevate their experience even further and give them that touchpoint to when they felt heard.
Comments