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.
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. “Amazing companies don't just deliver Moments of Magic. They consistently and predictably deliver Moments of Magic. While it is easy for anyone or any company to be above average some of the time, it is the great ones that are above average all of the time." – Shep Hyken. They figure out how to astonish both their internal and their external customers – because the reality is every employee affects the paying customer's experience. If they astonish their internal customers first, they pave the path for them to then go on and astonish their external customers. Everything counts and contributes. Internal astonishment always precedes external astonishment. “If you're not serving the customer, you'd better be serving someone who is." – Ron Zemke and Karl Albrecht, authors. They make sure their own people go through the five stages of their brand promise first – so they can then create opportunities for customers to do the same. The five stages are: The faster they can move their employees through these five stages, the sooner they can get their customers going through these same stages as well. "It might not seem obvious at first, but once you think about it, you realize that truly great service companies are always employee-centric before they become customer-centric. In order to create a customer-centric company, you must first create an employee-centric company. What's happening on the inside of an organization is always being felt on the outside by its customers." – Shep Hyken.
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