On a recent trip to an East African country, I slipped into conversation about service at African airports, with a jolly, free spirited middle-aged South African lady who remarked that in her many years of travelling, she only has a handful of ‘wow customer experiences.’
As we celebrate this year’s International Service Week, I choose to revisit that conversation and reflect on the single question—how can we consistently give customers that wow experience?
I have worked in Uganda’s financial services industry my entire professional life and served in various roles in the build up to my current one as Customer Experience Manager at Stanbic Bank Uganda. However, this note doesn’t contain instructions on how to get it right, but rather sharing personal lessons and experiences which I hope you can find useful.
Finding the X and Y to wow!
Where many managers prefer to assign or direct someone in their team to go deal with a problem, quite often, I have had to fold my sleeves and personally get involved in a situation—seven out of ten times, I have found that I would react exactly the same if I were the customer.
So, what this has taught me is that—to truly understand the customer, one must step into the client’s shoes and try to understand or look at things from their perspective. It is that point that you really harvest useful insight into what is wrong and how to correct things.
Fred Reichheld, author of the book “Winning on Purpose” puts it nicely when he suggests that the best way to create a successful business is by putting the happiness of customers above all else, including the bottom line—he goes on to prove through various examples that well-loved customers become loyal customers.
Sometimes it takes one to read a book to acknowledge common sense otherwise what Fred Reichheld says in his book should be something every business leader understands.
That is why I was recently genuinely concerned when I read a study by E&Y in which they asked top business leaders what strategic drivers they were using to protect or improve profit margins and majority of them indicated they were focused on how to ‘reduce high labour costs.”
Happy customers drive growth and with growth comes higher revenues and with higher revenues, labour costs are not a problem—the problem is in failing to plan with the customer as top of mind.
Therefore, to achieve a consistent wow service experience for customers, organizations and leaders will have to seriously consider the following, in no particular order;
1. Be purposeful about enriching the lives of customers as the number one objective. While this seems obvious, we often get caught up in shareholder value and obsessed with financial growth as more important deliverables.
2. Having faith to know that money will eventually come once we lead with customer purpose and not profits—this way, a business wins the customer’s trust and loyalty for the long haul.
3. Creating an environment that fosters open conversation and engagement between an organization and its customers helps create added value through co-creation, collaboration, and innovation—this creates a sense of shared ownership.
4. Invest in seamless feedback channels as communication is the most vital part of any relationship and high customer engagement is necessary for future growth of the organization but most importantly it is a key driver for customer loyalty.
5. Finally, a substantial part in creating the WOW is being able to use insights from customer data to inform key business choices, decisions, and product development directions. Customer data should not only focus on customer transactional behavior but the overall customer behavior right from the engagement patterns to the purchasing patterns. The results from the data need to be personalized to address the specific needs for each customer for it to make sense.
