Tag Archive for: customer experience

Using Good Conversation to Empower your Business

A good conversation is the best way to create a loyal customer, an engaged employee, and overall, a great company. Having a good conversation leaves people feeling satisfied and confident. It boosts self-esteem and has been likened to the same high experienced when eating a favorite food or even having sex.

What makes a good conversation?

A good conversation isn’t just about the words that are said. It’s about how things are said. It’s about body language and facial expressions. Good conversations communicate so much more than just words. More than that, a good conversation can leave us delighted!

Next time you see two people talking, take a moment to look at them properly. How are they interacting? How does one react to the other? What nuances can you pick up on without even hearing what they’re saying? A good communicator knows that a good conversation is an artful balancing act between active listening and constructive speaking.

Also read this article: Retail Customer Service: Reality of Retail Industry

A good conversation is made up of a few straightforward elements:

  • Empathic and Active listening (constructive responsiveness): don’t just nod your head, but understand and participate in the conversation, this is about making others feel interesting and important.
  • Honesty: being truly invested in a conversation is reflected by whether you are showing genuine interest.

The art of carrying a good conversation is a valuable tool when it comes to a company as well. It isn’t just about creating a strong rapport between a salesperson and a customer in order to close a sale either. It’s also about encouraging communication between team members and the company and their employees.

Good communication, internally and externally, leads to a great experience for everyone.

Having a Good Conversation inside a Company

Customer Engagement starts with a conversationFor an employee, being able to have a good conversation with a manager is vital to their job satisfaction and, as a result, their performance. A good conversation allows an employee to express their concerns, needs/desires and suggestions in such a way that managers can understand them and meet them. Similarly, the manager can give voice to their own requirements and opinions, representing the company in this relationship. This two way street provides both parties with the opportunity to actively listen to each other as well as offering useful solutions for any problems. The aim of any good conversation is to leave all parties feeling validated and satisfied that they’ve both been heard and had their requirements met.

The result is a strong relationship between the employees and the company. The open line of communication lets the company empower their entire staff, turning them into engaged employees. Engaged employees are motivated to drive sales because they believe in the cause, thus increasing the bottom line and customer satisfaction. All because the company knows how to have a good conversation.

Encouraging this ongoing communication has internal effects. Employees who communicate with the company are more likely to connect with coworkers as well. This improves internal efficiency! Being a good communicator allows team members to get ahead of any issues and this strengthens the company as a whole.

Building Customer Loyalty through Good Conversation

As human beings, we like to know our needs are heard and met. As customers, this is amplified through expectation. When we got to business, we expect to receive the quality and service that was promised. We want our choices to be validated.Good conversations on the stairs

Customers are companies’ most valuable assets. We all accept that without customers, companies can’t do business and cease to exist. That’s just a simple fact, and until someone discovers how to create a business completely non-reliant on customers and breaks economics as we know it, that’s the way it’s going to be.

As a result, learning how to have a good conversation with a prospective customer is a solid way of creating a lasting relationship with that customer. Even if a sale isn’t made in the first meeting, the foundation for an ongoing relationship has been made upon which to generate future sales.

“Make a customer, not a sale,” Katherine Barchetti said. And she was right. A loyal customer is a returning customer. They’ll advocate your brand and will keep buying your product, simply because they trust you.

So, good conversations…what do we think?

Great customer service experience comes from the ability to connect through good conversation. If we need to improve the way our companies
communicate with our employees and our customers, then it’s time to put some effort into mastering the art of having a great conversation.

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The Value of an Engaged Employee: Why every company needs as many as they can get!

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An engaged employee will deliver a great customer experience. Why? Because they’re interested in what your company is all about.

Have you ever walked into a bookstore, looking for a particular book, only to be told ‘eh, I dunno, over there somewhere’ when you’ve asked where you can find it? Most of us have experienced something like this in our lives, whether in a supermarket or a hardware store. It’s always disappointing.

To illustrate the point, let me take you to a small town outside Melbourne, Australia. I used to run a cafe in the area and made a lot of use of the supermarket there, small, but serviceable. There was a whole host of different characters that worked at the store, and after a while, you knew which ones were the ‘good’ ones and which ones to avoid.

I was hunting for cinnamon one day, only to discover that their entire spice collection had disappeared over the course of the week. I asked one of the employees for help. He just shrugged, mumbled that he didn’t know, and went back to stacking the shelves. Result? I shrugged and went to the bigger Woolworths supermarket the next town over.

The following week, I was back in the same little supermarket for black poppy seeds. Of course, they didn’t have it. Frustrated, I found ‘Sam’, who I knew was one of the ‘good’ employees and asked him. Sam promptly apologized and told me he’d check out the back. No luck, he apologized, but he’d keep looking and would run them down to the cafe if he found any. I went back to work, figuring I’d not see poppy seeds this side of closing time.Engaged Employee... and cake!

Less than twenty minutes later, however, Sam came into the cafe with five packs of the things. Since the local supermarket didn’t have them, he’d run down to the big supermarket and got them for me. I was both impressed and pleased as punch – no need to change my muffin recipe after all! Sam recited the little supermarket’s motto to me cheekily: “Let’s deliver.”

Sam was an engaged employee, and while he may not have been a rocket scientist, he was a genuine person who actually gave a damn about his work. To him, it didn’t matter that they didn’t pay him much, or that he often had to fill late weekend shifts when he should really have been at home with his Playstation. Sam likes doing what he does: not stacking shelves and organizing fresh fruits and vegetables, perhaps, but helping people. He made an effort to learn your name, and how you were connected to the community. For Sam, life at the supermarket was straightforward: people need something, you supply it. What’s more, you supply it with a smile.

I won’t say that this redeemed the local supermarket in its entirety. There were too many useless people working in there to make it truly a great place to shop and one engaged employee offering a better customer experience did not outweigh most of the downsides… but for the sake of convenience, and – after this experience – for the sake of Sam, I would often take the plunge and do my best to ‘shop local’.

What is an ‘Engaged Employee’?

Creating an ‘engaged employee’ isn’t something that just happens. An employee can start out being engaged, enthusiastic and ‘part of the team’, but that can change. Similarly, employees can become engaged over time. Everything depends on circumstance, and how the company treats, trains and helps their team members. We touched on this a few months back during a discussion about the importance of HR policies. In that article, we brushed up on talent retention issues and how an evolving HR policy is vital to a company’s survival:

“People stay with companies they value. The more an employee is allowed and encouraged to engage in the job, team, and company efforts, the more she sees the value. People stay with managers they trust. The more managers and employees engage in continuous communication about expectation, the more trust develops in their relationship. People stay with companies that offer opportunities for personal, even professional growth.” —  5 Links Between Talent Management and Employee Engagement, TalentCulture

Employee engagement is about trust, communication, and value. A company wants its employees to value its…well, its values; an employee wants their company to value their efforts and time. An engaged employee will be the one who has reached that level of immersion with company policy and message: they believe in what the company stands for and what it’s selling, usually because it’s in line with what they themselves believe in.

Why is an engaged employee so valuable?

An engaged employee is an employee that trusts the company they’re working for and is enthusiastic about the brand they represent. This interest shines through in their work, and, as a result, in the way they treat clients and customers. What better way to get a customer to buy a product or service an employee eagerly admits they’ve used themselves?

For example, there’s an Australian real estate investment company that operates throughout Asia, Meridien Group, and one of their regular sales pitches includes the line: “This is a good investment. I know because I’ve bought one myself. My boss has bought six.”

The rapport that’s developed between the engaged employee and the company has now spilled over into the customer experience, into the relationship between the employee and the customer.

“Trust me,” an engaged employee can say, “because I trust this company and what it stands for.” That’s a type of enthusiasm no one can fake.

The Bottom Line?

Forget marketing budgets, massive social media advertising campaigns – forget all the prime time television slots you’re still buying. Build up your employees and they will do that for you. After all, if your employees don’t believe in what you’re selling, why on earth would your customers?

An engaged employee will go the extra mile, and not because you’ve asked them to, but because they want to.

An engaged employee will go the extra mile

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Validating Customer Experiences: Why you need to do it.

Validating customer experiences is a surefire way of winning that customer over, forever. Validation and customer experiences are inextricably linked. People have needs and desires. Those needs and desires lead them to choices and decisions. We need – or want – something, and we go out and get it.

What do we mean with ‘validating customer experiences’?

A few weeks ago, customer service guru, Shep Hyken, wrote an article on the concept of customer validation. This blog article talked about how validating customer experiences is a vital part of a well-delivered customer service.

If we looked up ‘validation’ in the dictionary we’d come across something like:

“…an act, process, or instance of validating; especially : the determination of the degree of validity of a measuring device.” [Source]

In his article, Hyken uses the term ‘validation’ to describe achievement when a good sale has been made. A salesperson providing the proper advice and aid is awarded a “I’ve done well!” feeling when a sale is made, and a customer – hopefully! – leaves with a “made the right choice!” feeling.

Validation taking place here goes two ways: the salesperson feels their effort has paid off, and the customer feels that their decision making process has met their need. This achievement, the validation, is the way to generating great customer experiences.

What we’re getting at then is that ‘warm fuzzy feeling’ we all feel when we’ve done something right.

Customer Experiences, and why they should be validated

The world revolves around human needs, decisions and validation. We’re all looking for validation, whether it’s about our own choices or someone else’s. That feeling we get when we’ve accomplished something we’ve worked for boosts our self-esteem in a way nothing else can – to that end, most of us want to ‘do good’. We’ll just ignore all the procrastination we do on Facebook and all the times we binge-watched entire seasons on Netflix, that’s gratification, not validation of effort (although, in all fairness, validation delivers gratification).

A good customer experience comes when both parties – customer and salesperson – feel like their efforts have been validated. As a result, the whole purpose of customer service is to reach that point of validation. A happy customer – validated! – is likely to return and purchase again. Continually delivering what a customer desires and constantly validating their choices will generate a loyal customer, and a loyal customer is priceless.

Check out this video from Temkin Group International for some more insight:

Are you validating your customers’ experiences?

Having established that it’s important to ensure that no one feels as though they’ve wasted their time, what are you doing to improve the way your customers feel when they make their exit? Even if they’re delighted and shouting your praises from the rooftops, our work is not done. It’s important that our customers all feel that way when they leave. That’s easier said than done, really validating customer experiences is hard work. There’s no set plan or structure that you can apply to all customers across the board. Every customer needs – and deserves! – a tailored customer experience that leaves them feeling validated by the choices they have made and the level of service they have received.

Think about that, the next time a customer comes to you for a product or service.

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The Top 3 Words that Your Company needs to Boost Customer Experiences

Companies always want to boost customer experiences. Better customer experiences means higher customer loyalty, and better sales. Customer service representatives get overwhelmed with the wealth of information available to them There’s a whole Internet of Things out there. There’s so much knowledge to be had and so many people offering it. What is the ‘right’ advice? Where do you get it? Once you get it, how do you make sense of it?

Let’s break all this information down to the basics:

1. Communication

This is about clarity and connectivity.

People don’t like being confused; they want to understanding:

  • What you’re offering
  • Where they can find it
  • When they can expect it
  • How it will arrive
  • Why they should use your company

In general, people crave simplicity: we don’t like to be forced out of our comfort zones. This is particularly true of people today: Millennials are more likely to check out what they want and whether they’ll buy it online than coming into a shop. By the time they set foot on an actual sales floor, 60% of them already know what they’re going to buy.

This connectivity comes from the clarity of your service or product, as it is presented to prospective customers. As a result, it’s not a bad idea to let the customer set the pace and choose how they’d like to be connected with you. For example, Millennials may prefer to connect to your product/service via social media platforms like Facebook or Snapchat, while an older generation would rather receive an email or even a phone call.

More than that, however, is the connection we forge as human beings: do you smile when I walk in to have my car serviced, for example? What sort of smile? What is your body language communicating to me, your customer? Do I feel welcome?

Good communication forges a bridge of understanding between people. This will allow both parties to avoid pitfalls like misunderstandings, badly explained expectations or desires, and a breakdown in the relationship. Communication is all about building trust and relationships, after all, and great communication will boost customer experiences to no end.

2. Consistency

Consistency and cohesion.

According to Google, ‘cohesion’ means:

‘…the action or fact of forming a united whole.’ [Source]

Customers are individuals, but a customer service team? They should be of one mind and one bo —er… nevermind, too creepy. Your customer-facing front line needs to be a team! This is the first step to great consistency, and through that to customer loyalty.

Google defines ‘consistency’ as follows:

‘…conformity in the application of something, typically that which is necessary for the sake of logic, accuracy, or fairness.’ [Source]

Now, conformity gets a bad rap, so we’ll just avoid that word. Let’s focus on the section about ‘logic, accuracy or fairness’.

For example, imagine you’re travelling abroad. You’re in a strange city, you don’t know how anything works, maybe the language is even different. Then you spot a Starbucks. You go in, you order, you pay, you wait, then you grab your caffeine and go. No drama, no panic – you knew exactly how it worked. Why? Because Starbucks, like so many global franchises, has mastered consistency. Their style of service is the same, whether you’re in New York, Hong Kong, or Sydney. That’s comforting because it means you’re always at home.

Small business with only one location aren’t exempt from this concept. A customer should be able to receive the same style – and hopefully good level – of service every time they purchase a product or utilize a service from that company, whether it’s today, in a year, online or offline.

3. Commitment

Last, but not least, and arguable more important than communication and consistency: commitment.

What’s that quote? Something about not bothering to get into the ring unless you plan on fighting? That.

Establishing trust is not something that happens over night, and any commitment to such a relationship will shine through! It’s important to look at any customer service strategy as a long term investment, one that is going to require time, people, effort and finances. No one’s asking you to marry your customer, but if you’re looking to boost customer experiences, you’re going to have to go all in as a company. Half measures will not do it.

This will also help build your capability, supporting your authority on your chosen subject matter(s), thus making you and your brand more trustworthy in the eyes of current and future prospects.

What to take away to boost customer experiences…

There are several big aspects of customer service you’re not allowed to miss, not if you’re really looking to boost your customer service experiences. There are also plenty of smaller ones; the important thing is to remember that many of the ‘small’ ones often fall under the ‘big’ ones. Next time you find yourself stressing out about the latest article talking about how you’re not communicating enough, or your not doing enough of something else — think about, maybe you’re already doing it, a little bit.

All three of the things – communication, consistency, commitment – are vital skills for good customer service. And remember:

Good customer service will boost customer experiences.

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Global Reach, Local Roots: How our quest for the world impacts our customer service promises

Global reach, local roots: yes, globalization is a thing. It’s been a thing for a while. It used to be a thing we just learned about in school. Then it turned into a real thing. Ten years ago, before cloud computing and integrated email systems, it wasn’t so easy to claim to be a ‘global’ company with ‘global reach’. The big conglomerates did it, of course, like Coca Cola, Google, Apple, Microsoft, but for the smaller fish, that wasn’t entirely achievable. We tried, of course – expanding into global markets is all part of the game.

What is Globalization?

First things first, what is globalization? A quick Google defines it as:

Globalization is a process of interaction and integration among the people, companies, and governments of different nations, a process driven by international trade and investment and aided by information technology. This process has effects on the environment, on culture, on political systems, on economic development and prosperity, and on human physical well-being in societies around the world. [Source]

Great. Now what does that actually mean? In a nutshell, globalization breaks down political, cultural, and economic barriers through the development of technology. Think Pony Express.

Before the invention of the telegraph, the best means of communicating along the length and breadth of the USA involved riding ponies between relay stations. At the time, it was the best way to communicate across the country.

Now, not being able to access information or communication instantly is too painful to contemplate. Before email, offices relied on faxes, “snail mail”, and, wait for it, memos.

(Would all Gen Z readers please stop laughing, those were hard times! Also, I’ve included useful links explaining these things in case you think I’m speaking in tongues.)

Now, of course, it’s no longer just email – we’ve got Skype, Slack, Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger – and a whole host of other tools that we use to instantly communicate around the world.

The improvement in technology has allowed companies – and individuals – to view the world in a whole new way. We are no longer stuck waiting for correspondence, or for data to be transferred; we can communicate with anyone, anywhere, pretty much at any time, and this has transformed the way we do business.

And Globalization affects Customers how…?

The simple answer is: while businesses have changed the way they do business, consumers have also changed the way in which they buy products and services. Never before has such a wide segment of the population had such easy access to information. We’re now able to compare and contrast products and services in a way we never could before.

We do our homework:

In the Middle Ages, things were different. If you wanted a table, you went to the carpenter’s guild; you needed new clothes, you’d go to the weavers. It was fairly straightforward and choices were limited, not only because we didn’t have the Internet to double check prices or check if there was another weaver/carpenter in a neighboring city we could go to – but simply because we didn’t have the option to travel to another city. When you needed something, you stuck to your own market place.

Thanks to globalization, markets have expanded and we can now access imported goods, or go onto eBay and get it direct from the source (more or less). The power has shifted from the seller to the buyer. Consumers now have the ability to research their needs and find the products/services that best feed their requirements and their capabilities.

This has resulted in a necessary shift in how we approach customer service.

It’s no longer about the sales pitch:

Smartphones - Increasing Global ReachBefore, it was about selling a product. We’d walk into a electronics shop looking for a new MP3 player (again, Gen Z, bear with me here), the salesperson would materialize and talk us into buying the player that they believed would best meet our requirements at whatever price was set. Now, if we’re going into a store to buy an MP3 player – i.e. the latest smartphone – we’ve usually got a better idea of we’re after.

We’ve been online to research the differences between the latest models between brands, we’ve debating the pros and cons of Android vs. Apple with our friends. We’ve checked out reviews to see what our peers think of the technology. We’ve done all of these things before we’ve gone into buy it – assuming we go anywhere, we might as well order it online right?

Customer service representatives have to adapt to these changes. They’re no longer necessarily facing their customers – they might be dealing with people using messengers, email, social media – and they’re no longer dealing with an uninformed crowd – these people know what they want and why they want it.

We know why we want something:

A few years ago – okay, nearly half a decade ago – I walked into a local electronics store in Canberra, Australia. I wanted a new Sony Vaio laptop. I knew all the specs that I wanted. The salesman tried to talk me out of buying it but I’d done my homework and I knew what I wanted. The fact that the salesman was trying to talk me out of my decision simply because “I’d be paying a lot for a fashion accessory” (I know, I know… let’s just leave that can of worms unopened, okay?). When I told him why I wanted it I got a blank look. In his defense, I was wearing pink, had just straightened my hair, and I didn’t look anything like the gaming, computer-savvy female that I actually am.

Point being: not only do we now know what we want, we really know what we want and customer service reps have to recognize that most of us now walk into a store armed with that knowledge. A customer who walks into a shop is already 60% sure of what they’re going to buy and how much they’re going to spend on it. [Source]

Has Globalization destroyed the Customer Service Experience?

No.
Has it transformed it? Most definitely. The most successful companies in this modern age will be those that recognise the changes in consumer behavior and adapt accordingly. Instead of flooding the floor with salespeople, they may choose to set up online sales systems and delivery services. Consumers are more likely to engage online than physically come into a store to ask for information, and as a result companies now have websites, increasing number of social media accounts, and live chat options to field complaints and comments.

We are currently witnessing an evolution of the customer service experience. This evolution will integrate more technology, more 24 hour communication options, and a different approach altogether for the traditional customer service representative.customer service desk international

Is that it?

There are also problems with becoming a global company – customer service can suffer if you’re not prepared to take on the whole hog at once. If you’re going to take on the world, then you’re taking on the world, not just a small part of the world. The Internet has made that impossible – short of some censorship issues in certain areas of the world, all information is now accessible the world over. We can no longer count on the fact that a negative review in Australia will not be seen in the USA.

The world is a smaller place, and that’s both a good thing and a potential downfall.

Global Reach is great…what next?

I guess we’ll see. At AQ, we’ve learned that change is important to survival: if you’re not adapting you’re going to fall over. Yes, we’ve got a global presence with offices all over the world – this gives us intimate access into those markets – but we’re also aware that a global presence is only part of what it means to be a successful global company. Similarly, we recognize that the world is a great place, all in all, but you can’t forget your roots either – focusing only on a global approach is just as important as maintaining local markets and connections. Global reach, local roots.

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