Amaze every customer every time
52 Tools for Delivering the Most Amazing Customer Service on the Planet
Description
To consistently amaze customers, focus on creating a culture that prioritizes their satisfaction by first ensuring your employees are delighted and engaged.
This approach requires harmonizing five key elements to foster an environment where staff are motivated to deliver exceptional customer experiences. Achieving this makes your business stand out, as amazing customer service stems from a philosophy, not a department.
As Shep Hyken suggests, anyone in the organization can inspire excellence in service, regardless of their role. Henry Ford also highlighted the crucial role of customers in sustaining businesses, emphasizing that they are the true source of wages, not the employers.
Table of contents
01What is customer amazement and why is it significant
Customer astonishment is achieved when you consistently provide customer interactions that surpass the average. It's not just the superior interactions that astonish, but their regularity and predictability. To astonish customers, you must consistently exceed their expectations – and your team is the key to accomplishing this.
To astonish your customers, you must first astonish your employees. They will then carry it forward. A prime example of a company that astonishes its customers by first astonishing its own employees is Ace Hardware. With over 4,600 Ace Hardware stores in more than 70 countries, most of which are locally owned and operated, Ace Hardware has consistently ranked highest in the J.D. Power customer satisfaction survey for the past six years, outperforming larger companies like Home Depot and Lowe's. This could be why Bloomberg Businessweek ranks Ace among the top ten US brands for customer satisfaction, placing Ace Hardware alongside Apple, L.L. Bean, and the Four Seasons luxury hotel chain.
So, what is Ace's secret to its success in such a competitive field? One hint lies in its mantra: "Helpful." This single word encapsulates Ace's culture and articulates its organizational aspirations. Ace Hardware has operationalized being helpful and has built an employee-centric business around this ideal. Ace astonishes its employees first and then trusts them to astonish the customer. The end result is a dynamic positive feedback loop where employees continually improve at finding new and better ways to astonish customers.
Specifically, Ace Hardware employees utilize seven astonishment principles to consistently astonish customers. They constantly seek opportunities to create a Moment of Magic – where they deliver such exceptional service that it becomes a "Wow" experience for the customer. Opportunities arise all the time. They seize these opportunities and do something a little better than what the customer expects. They also watch for the Moment of Truth – which is any time a customer interacts with any part of their business operation. If they can turn each and every Moment of Truth into a Moment of Magic, they'll be astonishing the customer every time. Every Moment of Truth will be an opportunity for your customer to form an impression of your company so make them good. They are aware whenever and wherever a Moment of Misery appears – which is what happens when a Moment of Truth is mishandled. Mistakes happen and things go wrong, so they recognize this and accept it – but they don't let a Moment of Misery endure. Their job is to treat every Moment of Misery as an opportunity to create a Moment of Magic by recovering well. If they can do that, they can still astonish the customer. They do everything they can to avoid Moments of Mediocrity – customer interactions which are neither good nor bad but just average or satisfactory. Many companies today are content to deliver Moments of Mediocrity. If they're delivering average, nothing-special experiences to their customers, they risk losing their business to a competitor who astonishes them. They understand that to astonish customers every time, they have to manage their Moments of Truth and transform them into Moments of Magic – nothing else will do. They must approach each and every customer interaction with the goal that they'll go above and beyond the call of duty in order to astonish.
02The tools for generating customer amazement
Leadership Tools
In customer service, everyone can be a leader, irrespective of their role or business size. Personal responsibility for customer satisfaction and pride in work can make customers see you as the business owner. This perception can be cultivated in the entire team if the actual owner or manager sets a good example of treating people well. Empowering employees to exceed customer expectations is vital, even if it involves making mistakes during their learning process. When mistakes happen, the emphasis should be on understanding the error, preventing its recurrence, and moving forward. Trusting your team in this manner can result in 'amazed' customers.
Learning from both successes and failures in customer service is also important, as it helps identify what to repeat and what to avoid. Besides focusing on internal practices, monitoring competitors is beneficial. Instead of seeing them as threats, consider the possibility of collaboration to grow the market. This could involve meeting with competitors and even offering to send them customers if you can't serve them well. This strategy allows you to utilize your strengths and potentially receive reciprocation from competitors.
Listening to customers and adapting to their changing expectations is crucial for exceptional service. Understanding the lifetime value of a customer can guide service decisions and motivate employees to exceed customer expectations. Identifying key success factors, like Ace Hardware's "Five P's" (People, Product, Pricing, Place, Promotion), can help concentrate efforts on areas of strength. Excellence in these areas, rather than perfection in everything, can lead to differentiation and customer amazement. This approach promotes continuous improvement in strong areas and hiring skilled individuals for weak areas, keeping the business competitive.
Culture Tools
Creating a strong service-driven culture that delivers extraordinary customer experiences is a collective effort that hinges on treating employees as well as you would your customers. This approach motivates employees to provide exceptional service, underpinning the belief that the best place for customers to shop is also the best place for employees to work. By prioritizing employee satisfaction, businesses can ensure that their staff, in turn, goes above and beyond for customers. A unified company mantra, such as Ace Hardware's "Helpful," can align everyone's efforts towards this goal. This alignment encourages employees to embody the company's values in every customer interaction, creating powerful and positive outcomes.
Teaching employees to seize every opportunity to impress customers by adopting a "Yes" attitude can transform them into advocates for your business. It's crucial for employees to understand that they represent the company in every interaction, making it essential to turn every customer interaction into a 'Moment of Magic' rather than a 'Moment of Mediocrity.' Negative experiences can undermine the collective efforts of the team, highlighting the importance of a cohesive effort to deliver consistently amazing customer experiences.
Changing the vocabulary to refer to customers as "neighbors," as practiced by Ace Hardware, can also significantly influence company culture and customer relationships. This sensitivity to language underscores the importance of every team member in shaping the customer experience. To truly stand out, it's essential that every employee is committed to and acts in support of delivering unparalleled customer experiences, demonstrating that amazing customer service is a responsibility shared by all.
Related books
