Are you chasing customers away? I recently developed a seminar on the topic of improving customer experiences, so the topic is top of mind for me. My mental radar is on High for recognizing bad… no, make that miserable… examples of customer service and experiences. I wish I could say there are equal amounts of good and bad customer service and experiences, but sadly, the bad greatly outnumber the good, and even the mediocre.
Everyone claims to provide exceptional customer experiences, but it isn’t true by a long shot. A friend recently stopped by a family style restaurant with a colleague for a late lunch. They walked in the door only to be met by a view of the top of the hostess’s head. She was looking down at something that must have been really, really important. Why else would she choose to ignore customers with cash in hand? The restaurant was virtually empty with more than a few open tables where they could have been quickly seated.
After standing in the lobby several minutes, unacknowledged, the hostess finally looked up. My friend said: “Two, please.” The hostess responded: “Name, please?” to put them on a list! No one else was waiting and plenty of empty tables were available. But, somehow, the hostess felt compelled to put them through the paces of a customer walking in at a busy time. Her actions made absolutely no sense at all, and there was no excuse for the delay in acknowledging their presence.
The important point here: what impression did this experience have on the customers? Needless to say, it was not a good impression. Clearly, the customers’ experience was not exceptional or even mediocre. Some company policy or procedure had evidently taken hold of the receptionist’s brain, and no logical thought could escape to satisfy a customer.
Do your company policies and systems get in the way of making a customer’s experience dealing with you positive? When you write policies and procedures, do they just focus on making things easy for you and your staff? Are they about creating a necessary paper trail; or focused on making it easy for customers to do business with you? My guess is that your focus was on the internal, not the external; the much more important customers’ point of view. The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer, not chasing customers away. How are you doing?
