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Creating the Customer Experience – Practice

The idea of training customer-facing personnel in the Caribbean to create specific experiences might seem like a tall order, and a highly subjective goal.

Can a company charge its front-line workers with doing whatever it takes to create experiences it decides are important for its customers?

For example, what if a bank decides to create an experience of caring, careful and creative with its customers? How would it train its employees to produce that experience reliably?

Well, they could begin by allowing the employee to internalize the definition of the experiences: caring, careful and creative. They would need to do so by looking in two places — their own experience as customers in day to day life, and their experience as employees in the company.

Surprisingly, the latter is perhaps more important than the former.

Employees who don’t look for the experience of caring, careful and creative in their experience in the workplace are going to have a difficult time delivering it to customers. Workplaces that rarely produce the experience will simply fail, and should instead look to implement a culture change programme that results in a different customer experience altogether.

Without it, employees will not have what it takes to produce the experience with their customers, as they will be too busy trying to have some of it for themselves.

Once the experience is internalized, and distinguished clearly in the experience of employees, the company can go the next step and train them to deliver it. The assumption here is that employees who are overflowing with an experience need do little at some level, because their experience will naturally overflow into the customer’s experience. In this sense, customer experience is quite a contagious phenomena.

How do employees get trained to deliver a set of experiences such as caring, careful and creative?

Do they receive a set of rules to follow? Do they follow a script?

Some companies have tried this approach, but it is imply insufficient.

In addition to guidelines, what employees need more than anything else is time to practise.

Producing a specific experience is not as simple as merely mouthing the correct words, or going through the right motions.

Instead, it requires an element of emotional intelligence, due to the need to quickly appreciate the experience that another person is having in any moment. This ability to “read experiences” can be developed through consistent practice.

“Reading the experience” can perhaps be as easy as carefully observing the changes in someone’s face. Some interesting research into couples, and their communication, has revealed that a trained observer can predict with 90% accuracy, the future of the couple’s marriage, after only a couple of minutes.

They are trained to observe the minute changes in muscle motion that we tend to overlook each day.

Perhaps the same kind of training could be given to front-line customer-service workers, so that they can discover the clues that tell them the experience that a customer is having. This of course, would take some amount of practice in order to master, but it sure seems like an interesting place to start.

There are three sources of information that I can recommend on this topic– one is the book Blink by Macolm Gladwell, and here is an excerpt from the book: http://www.hachettebookgroupusa.com/books/68/0316010669/
chapter_excerpt24301.html

In the December 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review, there is an article entitled: Making Relationships Work by John Gottman. He is the psychologist who is the originator of the University of Washington study.

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Cancel cards prior to death

This came from an email that is making the rounds in South Africa.

Note to self: ‘Cancel credit cards prior to death!

Be sure and cancel your credit cards before you die! This is so priceless and so easy to see happening – customer service, being what it is today!

A lady died this past January, and ABSA bank billed her for February and March for their annual service charges on her credit card, and then added late fees and interest on the monthly charge. The balance had been R0.00, now it’s somewhere around R60.00.

A family member placed a call to the ABSA Bank:

Family Member:
‘I am calling to tell you that she died in January.’

ABSA:
‘The account was never closed and the late fees and charges still apply.’

Family Member:
‘Maybe, you should turn it over to collections.’

ABSA:
‘Since it is two months past due, it already has been.’

Family Member:
So, what will they do when they find out she is dead?’

ABSA:
‘Either report her account to the frauds division or report her to the credit bureau, maybe both!’

Family Member:
‘Do you think God will be mad at her?’

ABSA:
‘Excuse me?’

Family Member:
‘Did you just get what I was telling you . . . The part about her being dead?’

ABSA:
‘Sir, you’ll have to speak to my supervisor.’

The supervisor gets on the phone.

Family Member:
‘I’m calling to tell you, she died in January.’

ABSA:
‘The account was never closed and the late fees and charges still apply.’

Family Member:
‘You mean you want to collect from her estate?’

ABSA:
(Stammer) ‘Are you her lawyer?’

Family Member:
‘No, I’m her great nephew.’
(Lawyer info given)

ABSA:
‘Could you fax us a certificate of death?’

Family Member:
‘Sure.’ ( fax number is given )

After they get the fax:

ABSA:
‘Our system just isn’t set up for death. I don’t know what more I can do to help.’

Family Member:
‘Well, if you figure it out, great! If not, you could just keep billing her. I don’t think she will care.’

ABSA:
‘Well, the late fees and charges do still apply.’

Family Member:
‘Would you like her new billing address?’

ABSA:
‘That might help.’

Family Member:
‘ XXXXXX Cemetery, 1249 XXXX Rd, Plot Number 1049.’

ABSA:
‘Sir, that’s a cemetery!’

Family Member:
‘Well, what do you do with dead people on your planet?’

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“Nice Lady”

It struck me recently that here in the Caribbean we relate to people who provide us with good service with some gratitude, and perhaps with too much gratitude.

Rarely does the fact that we get good service from an individual translate into a feeling that the company, as a whole, provides good service. Instead, we take it to mean that they have one good person, and that the service he/she gives is not a function of the company, but is due to something else like their personality, demeanor or positive frame of mind.

Little wonder that hardly any companies stand out for the quality of their service in the minds of average Jamaicans. They all seem to be offering more or less the same average, low standard fare, with the occasional person standing out now and again, against more examples of poor service that ruin the reputation the company is trying to build.

When we find that good person, we feel like we have found a friend, and are grateful to them, instead of being grateful to the company. It’s a different dynamic than the one that pertains to U.S. companies, which are much less personal and more anonymous.

It seems as if its harder to build a brand when service is taken personally… but maybe it’s easier, when positive experiences become the norm?

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Basic Experience Creation

On a recent project, my partner and I attempted to come up with a set of practices that we considered to be basic to the delivery of a good customer experience. While these practices would have to be tuned to produce any particular customer experience, they seemed to be basic enough to be broadly applicable.

  1. Start Strong
  2. Listen for the Target Experience
  3. Manage the Customer’s Wait
  4. Create Flashpoints
  5. End Strong

I will explain each of these practices in an upcoming post.

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Saying “No Way” but Still Providing an Experience

In customer experience programmes across the region, a real difficulty lies in getting the job done, while creating the intended experience at the same time.

At the very low standards of service we experience across the Caribbean region, it’s safe to say that the average service professional, in the process of delivering service to a local customer, does a poor job of creating any conscious experience.

On the other hand, the very best service professionals I have ever encountered are able to take even a denial of service, and turn it into a positive experience. How is that possible?

Well, I am no surgeon, but the idea of undergoing surgery freaks most people out. Yet, as undesirable as it is, a patient who survives can indeed regard the entire experience as a useful and important one in their lives. Childbirth is similar in this regard.

Not that this is easy. It takes practice, skill and awareness, and also the will to serve people in this most sacred of ways.

There are not too many fresh graduates of high schools and colleges who are able to perform this particular trick. Instead, they learn from their management how to disregard experience, and to use force to get the job done. Then, predictably, the professional can blame the circumstances for the customer’s experience, and remove themselves from a position of any accountability.

They simply are providing the worst customer experience possible.

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Creating the Customer Experience Is Easy

Meeting customer needs is hard, compared to creating a particular customer experience.

Unfortunately, human nature is such that when customer needs are met, but the experience is one that is negative, what is remembered is only the experience. Emotion trumps reason every single time.

In fact, a skilled listener can tell a customer no, and still leave them with an experience that is positive, warm and caring.

Here in the Caribbean, this is a rare skill.

In fact, there seem to be many more who meet the customer’s need, but leave a negative experience — and this I have seen across the region, with some countries much worse than others.

At the same time, it seems that the company that is able to provide a good customer experience should do well, and it’s not because our local service is so bad region-wide.

Instead, the reason is that we take service personally. After a positive interaction, we talk about “how nice that lady was”. After a poor experience, we talk about “disrespect”.

In other parts of the world, they talk about the service that the company provides, but here it’s about the individual and what they did to us that was good or bad.

It’s personal.

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Customer Experience Programmes Falling Through the Cracks

Customer Experience programmes are some of the most difficult for large corporations to manage, and many end up falling through the proverbial cracks.

I remember when I first heard the concept a few years ago, and applied it to my company newsletter, FirstCuts.

I found myself undertaking an out of body experience that was difficult. I had to imagine what it was like for a subscriber to go through all the touch-points that they would encounter, regardless of whether or not I had control over them or not.

Luckily, I subscribe to many newsletters, so I had a way of thinking about the service I was providing in terms of what I would have liked to see someone provide to me. It still was not easy, however, and resulted in my having a to create a tool to understand the different experiences that a customer could have at each touch-point (The Service Inventory.)

The problem is compounded tremendously in corporations.

Unfortunately, the touch-points that a customer experiences don’t all fall into one nice department called “customer experience”. In fact, most customers’ first touch-point has nothing to do with service in many cases. Instead, people’s first impression might be through the company’s advertising, a speech given by the CEO, what their cousin told them about the company, or the fact that they couldn’t find parking when they made their first visit.

These are all critical touch-points that help to create the emotional bundle of experiences that customers are left with at the end of the day.

What makes this all hard for companies, and for the heads of customer experience departments, is that they must somehow find a way to influence the entire company to provide a different set of touch-points for customers.

And this is why customer experience programmes often fail — companies either reduce them to mere customer service, or they fail to get the entire company to buy in on the importance of looking at all the touch-points, from the CEO on down.

It takes a total commitment to deal with all the touch-points that customers experience, and the truth is that customers don’t care which department is failing to give them the experience they want at the moment, all they know is that the company is bad.

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Customer Service: Comments

In a comment on this blog, Crystal made some excellent points. Among them were:

Weeding out the wrong candidates is definitely a must because all the training in the world would not prompt an employee who is not customer service oriented to assist a potential customer. Unfortunately for a vast majority of the Caribbean this is not an option. Many businesses taking this route will be left with closed doors. It is difficult for them to attract employees much less the right employees. I have witnessed quite a few instances where customer complaints have resulted in a mere slap on the wrist or no consequence at all to the employee, all because business owners need these employees to keep their doors open. I believe that it would take an instance of outright theft for them to let an employee go.

There is some definite truth to this, as the difficulty of finding employees in Trinidad, and to a lesser extent, Barbados is well documented. Yet, the lack of service in Jamaica which has rampant unemployment, does not bode well for that theory. However, I would argue that the general service level in Jamaica is higher than it is in the other islands; this from personal experience.

Too often business owners in the Caribbean do not reflect the attitude that they want their employees to portray. Many treat their staff with disdain, mistrust and so they reap the benefits of their deeds.

I believe that this is the crux of the matter, and is reflected in the book “Why Workers Won’t Work” and other studies and reports. Incidentally, a summary of the book is available at our website.

Not to say that the employees are not a fault, many refuse to utilize the training given seeing the current job as a stepping stone and so they are not required to give their all.

Let us say that they are not taught how to give it their all, especially in a customer service relationship.

My wife suffered recently at the hands of a doctor who had no problem having her patients wait for hour without apology. She also “prescribed” J$4000 of Herbalife products when she came in with a stomach ache… none of which happened to be covered by insurance, but which she made a profit as a distributor in her multi-level marketing “business.”

Where does a doctor learn customer service skills? An accountant? A lawyer? Certainly not in school. Yet, they are called upon to use their undeveloped skills each and every day with an unsuspecting public.

In our small economies, I imagine that 90% of high school graduates will have occasion to work in a customer service capacity at some point, without a single hour of customer service training whatsoever.

The problem is that we are well able to pick bad service out when we see it, but terribly poor at seeing and stopping ourselves when we are the ones delivering it.

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Treating Suppliers and Vendors — an Indicator of a Culture

I recall doing business with a company that refused to honour a signed contract.

The CEO let me know in no uncertain terms that the signature of the Chairman held no water because “he didn’t know what he was doing,” and that “I should know that.” It was an ugly situation, and I have done no business with that company since then, but their advertising that is filled with messages about how great their company culture is still reminds me of the disparity.

I have always remembered this event, and it’s led me to conclude something about companies: that they are good as how they treat their vendors.

Why so?

Mahatma Gandhi said: “The best test of a civilised society is the way in which it treats its most vulnerable and weakest members.”

I say that the corporate corollary is “the best test of a well-developed corporate culture is the way in which it treats its vendors.”

Not shareholders, employees or customers… but vendors: suppliers, contractors and consultants.

The same company I mentioned above had a habit of beating down every price that I ever presented to it. I sometimes felt like a thief trying to get away with something, rather than a business partner.

They were proud of the fact that they put their customers first, and would very quickly interrupt a meeting with a vendor to meet with a customer who had a problem of some kind. After all, they put customers first.

However, I think they missed the point of the customer revolution, as do many companies. The point is not that customers come first, but it is that the company can treat every human being that it engages in business with respect, dignity and care. The revolution was meant to show companies that focusing on themselves only resulted in poor performance in the mid to long term.

In this sense, vendors are no less important than customers.

And, in a way, vendors are among the weakest members of a company’s stakeholders as they must wait for payment from companies that lose invoices, have inefficient bureaucracies, force cuts in prices to make greater profits, and treat suppliers like thieves.

The joke is that I am also reluctant to do business with the same company as a customer, and would think twice before recommending them to a friend. I have heard other vendors express the same sentiment about the treatment they received from the company, and I imagine that they, too, would feel the same way.

I imagine that if they understood that we are all connected, and that here in the Caribbean the small size of our economies means that we cannot hide from each other, our corporations would act very differently towards its suppliers.