What Works

“Exceptional customer service.” I’m sure you’ve heard those words uttered during a training session for a retail or service industry job at some point in your life. Heck, those words might even be in your own values statement or team member handbook. Goodness knows I’ve got nothing against exceptional customer service–it’s just that it’s a little… vague. And more than that… We tend to associate “customer service” with fixing problems. There will always be problems to fix for customers but what about the rest of their experience with us? What if we used the relationship we want our customers to have with our business as the basis for designing their WHOLE experience. Last week, we talked through how critically examining your relationship to yourself as a business owner can help you develop a healthier relationship with your business so that it can take care of you instead of you always taking care of it. This week, we’re taking a closer look at our relationships with our customers. Sure, we could talk about delivering “exceptional customer experience.” But the ideas that always pique my curiosity are the ones where I learn how a business owner is thinking really creatively about how they design their customer experience. Customer experience starts long before you ever make a pitch. It begins when a potential customer first learns about your business and brand. That first impression sets a tone that will likely carry over into their experience of buying from your business and using your product or service. Customer experience carries on through the buying cycle as a potential customer learns more about your business and how it helps people like them. They experience your business in a new way when they actually make a purchase and get onboarded into your world. Customer experience is, of course, baked into how they use your product or service, as well as how they’re “off-boarded.” But customer experience doesn’t stop there! It continues on after they’re done with their initial purchase–the ongoing nurturing they receive from you impacts their experience, too. And then, when make a follow-up offer, that’s ALSO part of their customer experience. Being really intentional about how you design the customer experience from start to finish means you’re being really intentional about the relationship you want to build with the people who are buying from you–and even the people who never do. What I really love about customer experience design is that it can be so creative! There truly is no one-size-fits-all process. Our different values, types of customers, ways of serving, skills, strengths, differentiators, points of view… they each contribute to making our customer experience uniquely our own. During the course of this episode, we’re going to look at 4 ways you can make your customer experience remarkable and help build a more intentional relationship with the people who buy from you. I’ll share some things you can consider as you think about your own customer experience and you’ll hear examples from thoughtful business owners who made customer experience design a priority. You’ll hear from