Great Customer Experience Means Consistent Customer Service

I am Yankees fan and have been my whole life. Not just for these new “Judge & Stanton” years or even the “Jeter” years, but through the 70s and the woeful 80s as well. I have been able to see many great players, but one I wish I saw was the great Joe DiMaggio.

The reason was how he approached each game.

According to the legend, someone asked him, “Why do you play so hard every single day?”

He replied: “Because in the stands there may be someone who is seeing me for the first time or for the last time and they expect my best.” Now I’m sure this is a paraphrased version, but as business owners, it is important our teams are always approaching customers or potential customers with that same mindset.

Great Customer Experience means Consistent Customer Service

Does your company approach every interaction with the thought that this may be the first or last opportunity we have to make an impression? It seems that in the age of the Internet, many salespeople are forgetting this concept simply because someone cannot see them. In reality, with consumers’ ability to jump from site to site online, it is even more important to have an opportunistic approach with all of your communication channels.

You need to open your ears to what the customer is asking versus only being focused on getting to your product pitch. A wise friend once said, “You are selling the customer on your product, not selling your product to the customer.”

If your goal is to listen, to solve problems and to be of service, then your team needs to be playing the game correctly and with passion.

If the focus is educating the customer not only on the product but how you will deliver it and be of service, then you will distinguish yourself from others who are just trying to manipulate customers into buying a product.

Delivering Excellent Customer Experience

How can you make sure that your team is delivering excellence every single day?

Here are a few steps.

• Decide what experience your customers will receive.
  Shut your eyes, visualize the experience and then reverse engineer the actions each individual will perform. You cannot do it by hoping your team will deliver excellence. You have to create the end result, then build out what your team needs to do.
• Create a process for your team to follow on what you want them to do.
• Without a process, you cannot train your team for excellence. DiMaggio practiced every single day so when a situation arose in a game all he had to do was focus his energy and passion since he had already practiced the play and knew the structure of how it would unfold. Are you setting up a structure for your team that can drive their passion? Do they know what you expect?
• Decide who will do the training for each of these processes.
  Someone must be in charge of training your team. This should be someone who possesses the skills of a trainer such as patience, organization, communication, and clarity. Once this person or persons is selected, then a schedule must be set to train your team on these processes.
• Follow up on results and make adjustments?
  This is a critical piece for your team’s success. Do you have a process to monitor your team and their results? Once you have the results, what are you doing to improve performance?

A major flaw with most companies is they have a process for how something should be executed and their team is passionately executing the process, but they are not taking time to refine the process through customer and employee feedback. If you’re not refining your processes for customer service based on feedback and results, you will lose customers over time.

I am sure DiMaggio would study pitchers for a hitting advantage and also study batters so that he knew where he should position himself to have an advantage in the field. DiMaggio would not be a Hall of Fame player without his commitment to process, practice, listening to feedback from his coaches and delivering excellence to all his “customers” who came to see him.

Your goal is to get your team to play hard every single day because every interaction with a customer may be the first time of many that they do business with you or it could be the last.

Your call.