Level Up Your Customer Experience in Four Easy Steps
It is no secret that a great customer experience is one of the most potent differentiators an organization can have, and many factors go into creating one. An organization's culture must be wrapped around customer experience, and it must be infused into the entire team. Members surveys and feedback are essential for exceeding members' expectations. Team members must be adequately onboarded and trained with the necessary customer service skills. These are just a few components that must be present to be an organization known for its unparalleled customer experience. The book, "The Elements of Great Managing," by Jim Harter, offers a unique look at four other elements, called levels, that help organizations understand how to exceed customer expectations.
Level 1: Accuracy. The customer gets what they expect. At a restaurant, this means your order comes out correctly. Your Amazon order arrives on time and is accurate. At a health club, it means that items like billing are accurate, classes occur as scheduled, and the app works properly. It doesn't matter how friendly the staff is if accuracy isn't there, you are lost from the start.
Level 2: Availability. The next thing that customers must expect is availability. Bank customers expect convenient locations to be available for their use. A retail store customer would expect adequate parking to access the store quickly. In the health club setting, availability would look like convenient hours, a wide-ranging class schedule, and staff available to help and answer questions. Similar to accuracy, if there isn't the desired availability, no level of friendliness can overcome it.
Level 3: Partnership. Customers want to feel like you are on their team. They want to be heard and be organizations to be responsive. Airlines create reward programs with perks for frequent flyers to demonstrate strong partnerships. Stitch Fix, a clothing styling and delivery service, continually recognizes buying patterns to improve what the customer receives. Health clubs can do this by ensuring customers receive an engaging, warm welcome, surveying members to show that their opinion matters, and providing reward systems. Customers don't want to feel like it is "them and you." They want that feeling of "us."
Level 4: Advice. The partnership is the most advanced of these four levels. Customers want to learn and grow with an organization. While Home Depot is a retail store, they offer training programs for customers to improve at DYI projects. Accounting firms often offer customers financial planning classes and tools. If you want to nail this level at your organization, try adding specialized seminars, guided training apps, and a comprehensive new member onboarding program to teach a new member all there is to know about their new health club. Consumers want to learn from organizations that they interact with.
Combining these four levels of customer expectations with some of the items I mentioned in the intro will allow an organization to provide an experience that sets them apart from the competition. So my challenge is to look over your current organizational strategy and ask yourself if you are delivering an accurate product and service, providing top-notch availability, making your customers partners, and consistently offering advice. If you are, keep it up! If not, you need to strategize what you can do to improve at those levels.