Customer Communication

Ready Aim Fire or Ready Fire Aim

cxsimplicityMarch 9, 2016Leave a Reply

When it comes to bringing a new process to market, people generally fall into one of two camps: meticulous planning, testing, re-planning, and re-testing; or getting it out there whether it’s ready or not. Knowing your strategy when it comes to implementing customer experience initiatives will help you overcome the drawbacks of the strategy to which you subscribe.

Ready. AIM. Fire. – If you fall into the ‘Ready, Aim, Fire’ category, it is likely that you carefully plan and consider all implications prior to implementation. You test the new process to death. You believe that there is worth in getting it exactly right, even to a painstaking level of detail. The drawback to this approach is that sometimes it can take longer than necessary to make a change. The benefit to this approach is that you are very careful about providing the best possible experience to your customers.

Suggestions for improvement: Decide what things you can live without, for now. You can refine the process once it is in place instead of delaying the launch. Consider the risk of NOT providing the solution to your customers sooner rather than later, and weigh that against the implications of it not being “perfect” (if there’s such a thing).

Ready. FIRE. Aim. – If you fall into the ‘Ready, Fire, Aim’ category, it is likely that you’re ready to start making things happen whether they are ready or not. You believe that you can get it right in the field and a less-than-perfect implementation is better than delaying the implementation for additional planning. The drawback to this approach is that your customers could be frustrated by a lack of planning and smooth functionality. The benefit is that you can begin getting feedback immediately and truly mold the process/product to the customers needs.

Suggestions for improvement: If you currently get a little trigger happy with new ideas, make sure you’re vetting them and spending your effort on those that resonate the most with your customers. A little extra planning might help you save time in the long run.

One method isn’t necessarily better than the other, but it may help in certain circumstances to test out the one you are not accustomed to using. You should do what your customers can tolerate. Can your customers tolerate the status quo while they wait what seems like forever for a solution? Or can your customers tolerate an imperfect solution while you work out the details after implementation?

In my experience, customers tend to tolerate imperfection when they can see that improvements are coming on a regular basis and an effort is being made to make it the best possible experience. If one method isn’t working, maybe you need to shake it up and get things out there in a new way. Make sure you have a solid feedback loop in place to listen to your customers and adapt to their response.

Anticipate Dissatisfaction

cxsimplicityFebruary 18, 20161 Reply

Some things that make customers dissatisfied are intuitive, obvious things. If you ship them the wrong item or don’t show up on time to a service call, the customer is going to be unhappy. But there are other things you might not be aware of which is where your feedback process comes in handy. You can gain insight into the obvious and not so obvious drivers of customer frustration. Once you’re able to tune in to the current customer experience and compare that to customer needs and expectations, you can start anticipating areas of potential dissatisfaction. And once you can anticipate an event that causes dissatisfaction, you can start to set up internal alerts to get ahead of the process failure before it impacts your customer.

All areas of potential dissatisfaction are worth your focus and effort, but to get started, I suggest picking a problem for which you feel it would be relatively easy to set up an alert. Ultimately, you either want to focus on the problem that occurs with the highest frequency (allowing you to impact the most customers) or the problem that makes the customers most mad (biggest pain point). But to get your feet wet with a proactive approach to dissatisfaction, try one of your ‘low hanging fruit’ items. This way you can figure out the approach that fits best with your operations and culture.

What I mean by an alert is that you want to create some type of indicator with-in your process that triggers a notification to a person that will intervene when something is about to go wrong…BEFORE it goes wrong. Proactive quality control allows you to save the customer from experiencing the failure that will cause them to be dissatisfied.

Here’s an example. Say you have a business that schedules service appointments on a customer premise. Your organization has a process to notify customers of the details of their appointment because customers get frustrated when that information is not effectively communicated. You could set up an alert that is triggered to a customer service team if the appointment is 24 hours out and no notification has been sent. Then, your customer service team can take proactive action on notifying the customer before it’s too late. Another scenario: the service person assigned to help the customer is going to be late to the appointment. Can you anticipate that and take corrective action by sending someone else? Whatever the process may be, think about how you can (a) trigger the alert and (b) take corrective action.

Also, instead of reporting on the number of failures after the fact, you can report on the number of alerts that were triggered before a customer impacting error occurred. Both reports would show the same information and both would allow you to coach to the proper process, but proactive method does not allow the customer to become dissatisfied.

It may not always be feasible to correct a process so that the errors never occur, but with a proactive approach you can stand between your errors and the customer ensuring they have the best possible experience.

Show Off Your Skills

cxsimplicityFebruary 16, 2016Leave a Reply

The inspiration for this post comes from a trip to the pediatrician’s office with my 6 month old daughter. I swear she is capable of faking an illness, Ferris Bueller style, just so that I will bust her out of daycare to go on a field trip, but that’s neither here nor there. She is quite the social butterfly wherever we go, smiling at everyone that glances in her direction, even when she’s “sick.”

When we get there, I free her from the confines of her car seat and sit her on the exam table while we wait for the doctor to enter. As soon as Dr. Kim comes in, my daughter brings her A game, and I don’t mean that she turns the (fake) illness on. The exact opposite, in fact. She starts demonstrating every trick that she’s learned since the last visit: putting her feet in her mouth, rolling over and pushing her chest up as high as it will go, talking, blowing raspberries, and the list goes on. She’s showing off! Any chance she gets, she wants to show the world all this cool stuff she can do because she’s put in the time to learn those things. It’s hard work being 6 months old, and you better believe she’s sharing her accomplishments with her audience.

We should all be doing the same thing with our customers, showing off our company’s skills. Make it obvious and known what your organization is good at. And remind customers to be impressed. I don’t mean arrogance, but genuine excitement about the value you provide, whether it relates to a product or a process. Demonstrate your skills and call them out. When other customers brag about your skills, share that too! Be proud of the things your company does well so your customers can be proud to do business with you.

Or in the words of Stewart, say “Look what I can do!”

Becoming Transparent

cxsimplicityFebruary 12, 2016Leave a Reply

Becoming transparent to our customers is a challenge we face when the systems behind what the customer sees are anything but pretty. You want to give customers step by step guidelines of what to expect in a process, but to what level of detail do you go? How do you execute a complex internal process while still being transparent with the information customers need?

Well, the ideal answer is to make the process less complicated. Think of the process in terms of how the customer would see it. If you were to share every step with them, would they say, “That doesn’t make sense…why do you do that? You should do xyz.” Generally, while we may not want to acknowledge it at times, we know what they would say. Once the process is simplified, its easier to communicate and likely cheaper to execute. However, sometimes those simplifications require a large investment that isn’t always feasible in the near term.

That brings me to the less ideal (more realistic) answer which is to work around the internal complexities to deliver only the information that the customer wants and needs. You present your customer with the simplified version of the complex process.The best way to get started is by mapping out the internal actions and determine which of those actions is a “milestone” worthy of sharing with a customer. Some ways to determine the best times for updates:

ask your customers directly
look at contact data — how often do they ask you for updates at certain points?
go through the process yourself and with test users and document when there is confusion

If the process is executed over a longer period of time, make sure you find out from your customers how often they desire to be updated. If you can customize the update intervals based on certain customer segments, great. If not, try to get a general consensus of a timeline so that you update them before they seek the update from you.

Lay out the end-to-end process (the customer facing version, that is) on the first interaction. When customers can clearly anticipate the steps and intervals from the start, they’re less likely to call and ask you what’s next. Your process and communication may not be perfect, but it is important to start somewhere to begin building a culture of transparency with your customers. Customers trust the organizations that give them all the facts and keep them informed.

CX Simplicity

Category: Customer Communication

Ready Aim Fire or Ready Fire Aim

Anticipate Dissatisfaction

Show Off Your Skills

Becoming Transparent