Did you know that 70% of customer experience initiatives fail to produce a positive return on investment? Why? Customer experience initiatives fail almost universally because they are simply too big.
In reality, “customer experience” doesn’t actually exist.
It isn’t a thing you can touch or see. Customer experience is the culmination of dozens—or even hundreds—of specific touchpoints. What does your website say? What do your Google reviews say? How does somebody greet the guests when they walk into the restaurant? And on and on and on.
In truth, “customer experience” is just a nickname. We’ve all agreed to use it as an artful term to describe this colossal list of decisions that we make every minute of every day that impact customer attitudes and market share. When you are asked, either internally or externally, to improve the customer experience, that is an impossible quest because there really isn’t any such thing. It’s not one thing—it’s ALL the things.
You may be thinking: “But if there are dozens or hundreds of different customer intersection points, which ones should we focus on?”
Well, between the work that we do at Convince & Convert and the work being done by my friends at Podium, we’ve concluded that there are three keys to a Coveted Customer Experience. Three things that your customers, my customers, and your competitors’ customers care about disproportionately, above and beyond the rest of the criteria. Thus, these are the three places where you should direct your attention in your customer experience optimisation efforts to have the maximum impact and put you on the way to delivering a Coveted Customer Experience.
→First, your customers want you to be Quick.
→Second, they want you to be Clear.
→Third, they want you to be Kind.
Coveted Customer Experience Pillar: Quick
Speed expectations are unrelenting. I started in digital marketing in 1993 when domain names were free. And across that epoch, I’ve never, ever heard a customer say, “I’ve been thinking, and it’s okay if your company handled that more slowly.”
Speed expectations never stop. They are like an escalator, not stairs. What was fast three years ago is commonplace today. And of course, your younger customers have even more heightened expectations around responsiveness, as they know only a “right now” world. .
→Watch for Clarity Warnings
When it comes to customer communication, most businesses are tuned to look first and foremost for complaints. But you should also watch for clarity warnings. This is the first responsibility when trying to exceed customer expectations around lack of confusion.
A clarity warning is every time a customer says or writes something like: “I don’t know” or “I’m confused” or “How do I” or “What about…” Each of those phrases indicates an uncertainty gap. And the more you find those clarity warnings, analyse them, and categorise them, the easier it will be for you to begin to close the uncertainty gap with information.
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