Customer service feeds into a customer experience that will lead the customer to return to your company or may drive them away. Neglecting to create customer experience policies and processes makes the experience different for every customer and causes confusion among your employees. You can likely think of examples in your own life of times when your experience was so different from a friend’s experience that it was like you and your friend went to different companies. This is a sign of no or poorly implemented customer experience policies.
In a recent interview with Ty Givens, the Founder and CEO of CX Collective, Ty and Adi discuss how to establish an excellent customer experience and how to create consistency when it comes to that experience.
In this article, we will share how you can build an effective process to ensure consistently great customer experience across the board. If you want to know more about this topic, be sure to listen to the podcast episode here. Ty provides additional information that you will find valuable in improving the user experience.
How to Build an Excellent Customer Experience
1. Establish the brand voice.
Determine how you want your employees to communicate with customers and create an overall voice for the brand. Doing this helps you to build an internal culture that supports the overall voice and attitude toward customers.
Consider how big brands like Disney interact with customers and create a customer experience. They have a very specific voice and way of communicating that works across countries and cultures. Now take a look at your brand and consider how you want to communicate to customers. What is the impression you want to make on customers when they interact with everyone from your business?
Another example that Ty provides is Chick-fil-A. Customers of this restaurant chain always comment on the staff’s politeness. The staff are not just polite by accident, this is part of the brand. This is yet another way to set your business apart and create unique interactions with customers.
2. Create policies to support the brand voice.
Now that you know your voice, you can create policies to support using that voice. This isn’t just a general “The customer is always right” policy. This involves determining all of the ways a customer could interact with your staff and creating policies around those interactions.
This could be as simple as writing a policy that states the receptionist must answer the phone in a particular way and say “that would be my pleasure” when the customer asks to be transferred. Or it could be more complicated like the ins and outs of a return policy. This will have to include what happens if the customer wants to return something outside of the clearly defined days listed in the policy, or what happens if the customer doesn’t have a receipt, or other common issues that the employee will encounter.
3. Document the systems that these policies support.
If you already have a business, then your employees are using systems to help customers. Document these systems and see how they can be modified to better incorporate the policies and the brand voice. This will help your team implement the policies.
4. Review the systems and policies every six months.
The last thing you want is for a policy or system to become obsolete. Review the policies and processes every six months to ensure they are useful, modify them to include new software or answering systems, and update them to better match the brand voice.
Are you excited to use systems to improve your customer experience, but aren’t sure where to start? Get in touch with the experts at Business Success Consulting Group. We are here to help!