They say moving house is one of the most stressful experiences of life, apart from birth, death and marriage. I can certainly vouch for that having just been through the experience after seventeen years in the same home. But there were definitely some experiences that were better than others.
The worst – by a long way – was changing our broadband provider, which circumstances made unavoidable. I won’t bore you with the details, but I gleaned several lessons from the experience which are worth sharing.
Firstly, don’t ever forget that your customers are people with specific requirements. We had specific services from our previous provider that we wanted to replicate as much as possible. Unfortunately, what we have ended up with is some distance away, and I am still not sure that this was unavoidable.
In any event, when the engineer came to instal our broadband I was certainly expecting more than his job sheet permitted him to do. When I expressed my dissatisfaction with this, he simply said, “That’s typical. Our sales people often get things wrong.” Not the kind of message that you want your people to relay to your customers!
Secondly, ensure that you have your telephone number clearly visible on your website. I spent a totally unreasonable amount of time trying to ascertain a telephone number so I could speak to someone. I often got into a loop from contact pages that gave me all sorts of options and frequently asked questions (FAQ’s) that did not answer my specific questions but still left me with no idea of how to get to a live person. Yes, in some instances there were ‘Chat’ facilities for instant messaging, but invariably these were unsatisfactory. A customer can usually say what they need much more quickly than they can type it, while your staff can similarly save more time and provide better, more efficient service verbally than by typing, so do us both a favour. Just because the technology exists doesn’t mean it is best for business to use it!
Perhaps the biggest, most important lesson, however, relates to how you outsource. In this instance all the initial conversation was handled through a third party, independent sales company. This may sound fine in theory, but it means that initially you have no relationship with your own customer. Effective outsourcing always demands better systems than in-house systems. It is no different here. If you don’t have that initial contact that allows you to address the first point more effectively, you face an increased risk of having a dissatisfied customer.
The key to providing a superior customer experience, that ensures satisfied customers, is to remember that your customers are people. There’s more than an element of truth to the old adage that “good business requires you to think like your customer.” You have to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and ascertain what their real wants and needs are. Only then can you meet them. And, even if you don’t, it gives you a better chance of retrieving the situation, because you can demonstrate that you understand and care.
In my experience on this occasion this was severely lacking. Make sure you don’t lose that personal touch.
Bay is the founder and director of Zealise, a company created to help larger small to large business organisations to properly value their people and thereby inspire them to optimise their self-worth and so engage them that they transform organisational performance and bottom-line results. Bay is also the author of several books, including “Lean Organisations Need FAT People” and “The 7 Deadly Toxins of Employee Engagement.”