The customer experience is king

As consumers living in our society we can usually tell when we’ve received poor service, but when a number of people were asked recently to describe good customer service, their answers were a little surprising: 30% said ‘doing what you say you will do’; 25% said ‘doing it quickly’; 20% said ‘repeated experience of good service and they can trust your word’; and only 8% said ‘pleasant, friendly manners or the ‘Have a nice day’ culture. So ‘doing what you say you will do’ is what we define as ‘good’. Really? Have customer expectations been managed so far down the scale that merely ‘doing what you say you will do’ is classed as good? So what could I get away with before I’d be downgraded to ‘standard’, I wonder?

These days, if you are in any sort of competitive environment for scarce resources – for audiences, customers, creative talent or funding, for example – your only differentiator might be the service you provide to those coming through your doors. It is not enough to boast the best shows or the biggest auditorium if your box office cannot /will not serve customers in the way they expect to be served, or advertise a particular type of coffee in your bar if the coffee machine is constantly out of order. ‘Customer experience’ is the new ‘customer service’, and your customers’ experience must be nothing short of excellent every time. And that’s about more than simply what is on stage or hanging on the walls. Merely satisfying customers isn’t enough to earn their loyalty. They need to experience exceptional service worthy of their repeat business and recommendation.

There are four components that go to make up excellent customer service, and they are all inextricably linked:

1. Skills and knowledge of all staff

‘Everyone in the organisation serves someone who serves the customer.’ Your customers’ experience at every touchpoint is everyone’s responsibility; organisations that train frontline staff only, or tolerate competing targets, cannot provide an exceptional customer experience. How will the well-trained box office staff pull outstanding experiences out of the hat for your customers if the accountant delays the necessary upgrade to the latest integrated system, if the IT manager doesn’t get around to fixing the bugs in the current system, or the HR manager prioritises the annual conference over recruiting for box office vacancies?

2. Repeatable processes

The more that is standardised, documented and shared, the more likely your customers are to have excellent experiences again and again. Does this mean every staff member repeating the well-worn and meaningless ‘have a nice day’ script? Certainly not. What it means is having agreed and accepted ways of dealing with customers, ways that all members of staff understand and follow. The customer is not always right, but trying to prove they are wrong is always wrong! Staff need a framework, a code of acceptable conduct for dealing with customers. In addition they need to be given their ‘sphere of influence’, the boundaries within which they are empowered to make decisions on the customer’s behalf in the knowledge that these will be backed up. After all, there are few things more humiliating than creating a very special customer experience, only to be overruled by a manager and suffer the disgrace of being viewed by the customer as the monkey, not the organ grinder.

3. Infrastructure

How many times have you been on the phone to a box office, only to hear the age-old excuse ‘the computer system is running slow today’? It seems this has almost taken over from ‘nice weather for the time of year’ as a conversation filler. If you have a box office computer system, it must be able to cope with the maximum number of users at any given time. The best trained and most highly motivated staff cannot provide exceptional customer experiences with antiquated computer systems or a website that serves to confuse rather than attract.

4. A passion for serving others

This must go right through the organisation like the proverbial stick of rock; it is not limited to customer-facing employees. In every organisation, in every department, serving customers must become a passion for everyone. In the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm.” After all, if your staff do not experience excellent service from their managers and colleagues, what message are they receiving about what is acceptable and appropriate? Reichheld makes the clear connection between an organisation’s treatment of its employees and its attitude towards customers: “I have yet to encounter a company that has achieved extremely high customer loyalty without fostering similarly high loyalty among employees…customer and employee loyalty spring from the same root: principled leadership.”(1)

What needs to happen in your organisation to ensure you provide your customers, internal and external, with the best possible experiences every time?