Creating Winning Customer Service Experiences That Matter to Customers

After each customer interaction, the greatest question is, was the customer experience enough to keep that customer doing business in the future?

There’s a vast amount of research and special studies that take place looking into what makes a winning customer service experience.

Is a winning customer service experience about marketing? Is it a sales process? Is it just about the product? Is it the customer service people involved? What is it that makes customers choose your business over the competition. What makes your customers continue to use you, instead of choosing your competitor?

If you dive into the information available from the successful customer focused companies, there’s one trend that is common between them all. Even though these organization are not limited to one business sector, not one specific industry, there’s one thing that they all share. No, it’s not really a secret. It’s a basic principle that they all agree is fundamental to delivering winning customer service experiences.

It’s about consistency.

The most effective customer experience is a consistent one

Author Michael Gerber calls this key to delivering a winning customer service experience “orchestration”.

“Orchestration is the glue that holds you fast to your customers’ perceptions”.

Think about it from the customer’s point of view. What happens when you deal with organizations that seem to be completely disconnected internally. Organizations that seem to be unorganized. Organizations that create frustrations when they can’t seem to align the various departments that have access to your data. Organizations that have poor workflows for dealing customer support issues. Think of growing disappointment that customers have to deal with when your organization fails to orchestrate or align and deliver a consistent great experience to your customers.

Your customer experience example

From the first interaction with your company, a customer begins to form the perception of the customer experience. We’ve done a decent job at creating positive first impressions. But what happens after that initial customer interaction? What is the experience after that initial sale is made? Consistency is the key to ensuring that the customer knows that your organization is committed to delivering what they need each and every time.

If we fail to deliver once that initial impression is made, the customer will come away thinking that all we wanted was to “take their money and run”. It’s a common frustration expressed by customers and it’s a reason why customers are reluctant to buy. We’re constantly having to re-invent the sales process and come up with ever more creative psychological tricks to getting customers to buy now, but why? Because customers are afraid of the “buy” button. Customers don’t want to say “yes”, because they’ve had to deal with too many “no”s from businesses when they need something after the sale is made.

Creating customer experience consistency

How do we create consistent winning customer service experiences?

• Winning customer experiences are built by focusing every action to create the desired customer loyalty result.
• Winning customer service takes commitment to getting, training, and keeping service focused employees who can make people happy.
• Winning customers takes businesses that weigh every business decision against the needs of the customer.
• Winning customers requires consistently delivering the type of experience that customers expect.

Customers may not always be dealing with the same person, they don’t need to. Customers won’t always contact the same department, you don’t need to have just one group working with customers. What customers need is to know that regardless of who they work with, what department they have to interact with, the result for them will be the same. So build your customer service experience processes to win the customer.