Random vs Planned Customer Service Experience

Every customer service experience action should serve a purpose in the overall customer service experience you want to deliver.

The idea that your customer service experience actions should have a purpose suggests that it requires real planning in order to deliver the type of customer experience that makes a difference to your customers.

Many people are often surprised to learn that I often recommend creating enough freedom in your customer service experience plan to allow for random acts of service to take place. Most often it’s these random moments of customer service that makes the biggest impact in creating overwhelming customer loyalty.

What is a Random Customer Service Experience?

Random customer service happens when our customer service people just do what comes to mind when working with customers. No scripts are followed, there’s no plan for following any set procedure in working with a customer. Customer service actions are free to take place based on customer circumstances and the results are influenced based on what’s happening with each individual customer scenario.

What is a Planned Customer Service Experience?

But we can’t expect random acts of customer service to always happen and to always end up with a positive overall result in our customer experience. It takes a dedicated effort with planned customer experience in mind. Ultimately we need to know what we want to achieve from our customer interactions and how we can put our people in a better position to deliver those results.

Maybe it’s outlining general principles that your customers appreciate. It may be a specific type of action if a customer problem takes place. It might be identifying a process for your people to follow every X number of customer interactions. The idea is that at some level, you have to think about what you want from your customer encounters and outline your expectation from your customer service representatives.

The plan should lead to eliminating a bad customer service experience from happening and instead creating the type of environment where you can expect the best customer service experience to be the norm.

What is the purpose of your customer experience?

It’s critical that you as a customer service leader always keep in mind the overall goal that you want to achieve. It can’t just be, deliver great customer service. Instead, identify a measurable result that you can use to tell if your great customer service actions are working. The key is that it has to be something you can measure:

Reduced customer complaints
Increased customer renewals
Lower customer waiting time
Faster customer case resolution

As long as it’s a goal that you can measure, you’re on the right track. It then comes down to creating and communicating the plan to achieve those customer service goals.

What is the purpose of that customer service action?

You have a goal for what you want to achieve with your customer service experience. That can be easy to define. But what about the purpose behind your customer service experience mission? Why do it? Why does it matter? What do you hope to achieve by successfully delivering on those customer service experience actions and meeting the experience goals you have?

It doesn’t matter is it’s a retail customer service experience or an online digital service experience.

Defining your customer service experience purpose will inspire the right type of service action and focus on the best customer service experience goals.

Describe customer service experience

Look at who’s making a difference. Learn from the best customer service experience examples.

There’s a BIG difference between the Zappos’ of the world doing fantastic things in behalf of customers and making gobs of money while doing it, and the typical call center for some random company that is struggling along the way. Both take customer service action, there’ s some element of customer service experience in both places, but at Zappos, they’re united in their purpose of making customers happy, making the experience of shopping online perfect. What’s your terrible call center place doing? Not that.

So have a purpose behind your customer service experience goals. Clearly define the why you are going to serve your customers. Establishing your customer service experience mission and the real purpose to why you care about service will help you stay true in the service experience decisions you have to make.