Making an Impact
In this issue:
Experience or Expense?
This is the section where I share with you the good, the bad and the ugly sides of the customer experience, the impact everyone can have on it - in either direction, and the resulting impact on image, reputation, brand, customer relationships, your whole organisation and your bottom line. We have all been customers at some point, and we all give customer experiences to others, whether it's in work or out of it - so our neighbours, friends and relations can all be viewed as our customers too.
I have a growing list of just such experiences which I am looking forward to sharing and in some cases, venting! You'll see that I do rather get on my soapbox about some of these!
Pains Taking Results
The wonderful BBC series 'Life' recently came to an end on our screens. It was narrated by the incomparable Sir David Attenborough, and revealed to us some never before seen behaviours and creatures, species by species, from around the world. The shots and footage they managed to capture were never less than stunning, leaving you glued to the TV and transfixed by the amazing wildlife action as it unfolded.
At the end of each 50 minute programme, they then showed you 10 minutes about how that particular programme was made.
In one programme they were trying to film killer whales coming into shore to hunt seals, and in particular, one very daring female killer whale that was stalking juvenile seals as they basked oblivious to the close danger. It was essentially a seal crèche, a shallow rocky enclosed area with a narrow inlet to deeper water and the open sea.
As the inlet and crèche itself were in such shallow water, the female killer whale, who was accompanied by her cub, hadn't yet dared to actually enter the seal crèche for fear of becoming beached and stranded. However, despite having young offspring, it was obvious to the film crew that she would indeed dare to enter the crèche and take one of the seals at some point – it was just a question of when.
So for two months, the three film crew lived, slept and ate on the rocks overlooking the crèche. They spent every day watching the mother killer whale weighing up the seals in the crèche and swimming up and down close in to it. They took hundreds of practice shots, under and above water, to gauge the best angles for when the moment came that the whale did decide to swim over the threshold into the crèche and seize her prey.
Two of the crew risked their lives by swimming in the crèche when the killer whale was close to the entrance, in order to make sure they were going to be able to get the best shots possible, were that to be the moment they had been waiting for.
They worked into the night in case she chose to enter under cover of darkness. Every waking moment was dedicated to ensuring they would capture that one vital shot sequence when it came, and that it would be perfect.
Then after more than two months of waiting, the moment did arrive. The film crew were fully prepared and waiting. The killer whale swam into the seal crèche and seized one of the seals. The footage was incredible of her reversing out of the crèche through the narrow inlet, dragging her prey out backwards, as there wasn't enough room for her to turn round.
This sequence ended up as less than a minute in the final programme, but it was unique, and well worth the pains it had taken to capture it for the quality of the footage it delivered, and the experience it gave us as the viewer.
In another of the Life programmes, we saw the lengths a camera and production crew went to, in order to film monarch butterflies in Peru. The butterflies had swarmed to gather within a few square miles of forest in their annual migration.
The crew had to haul a huge amount of kit and equipment with them into the forest to get to the swarming site. They then spent weeks building and testing a rig, so that a camera on a trolley would pass by one of the clusters of butterflies high up in the trees at just the right angle, to ensure that the shot sequence ran along the perfect trajectory without disturbing the butterflies. The crew members were bitten by ants and baked in the South American heat in the process, and were driven to tears and anger at times when the equipment broke, wouldn't work, or they just couldn't get the angle right.
All these crews spent months of pains taking work, dedication, care, tenacity and minute attention to detail for the sake of just a few seconds of video, in order to deliver to we customers, an amazing experience, beyond our expectations, highly memorable and of exceptional quality.
Both these crews went to the most arduous lengths and took great risks to ensure that the product they were delivering to us was the best possible experience they could give us.
Significantly, they relied very heavily on each other to put the same huge amount of effort into achieving their goal, and to have the same standards of quality and dedication. Without that like-minded team attitude, they could not have produced the high level of product and customer experience that they did. They did indeed go to extraordinary lengths.
What lengths do your teams go to, in order to produce your customer experiences, products and services? Are they all as dedicated as each other to what you're trying to achieve, with the same standards and understanding of quality, professionalism and attention to detail, to enable them to work effectively as a team and perform to the highest levels, that will ensure you get the results you need and want? Or are there perhaps some mismatches within your teams, and maybe even a mismatch too in understanding of some of those aspects, which are preventing you from producing as high a level of performance from your team and experience for your customers as you would like and need?
With pressures to deliver through all stages and aspects of the customer experience, and simultaneous priorities to deal with, it's often difficult to see exactly how a team is functioning, and what it could do to improve that performance, and so importantly, improve the customer experience (internal or external) of them, in order to make all the difference to the customer, to the team itself and the individuals within it, including the manager!
If every team within your organisation could improve its performance and the customer experience it gives, in just one of the aspects that the Life teams excelled in, what impact would that have on your whole organisation, not only in terms of direct output, but in image, reputation, referrals and attractiveness to potential customers and partners?
Interesting too, that in the Life programmes they dedicated a sixth of each programme to, in effect, marketing themselves to us - showing viewers, their customers, the lengths undertaken to make the programme, in order that we customers would appreciate the outcome even more. Importantly too, by explaining this to us, it also showed us how much they cared about quality, their customers and the experience they were delivering to us.
If any teams within your organisation have put that much dedication and effort into producing a particular experience for your customers, are your customers aware of it? Are your teams taking time to promote their achievements to your customers and partners? Not to make them feel they should be grateful of course, but so that they appreciate how much you cared about giving them the best experience possible, and so that those customers will want to give them good referrals and promote them to other people too? As in the Life programmes, this can be done in an informative and subtle way. It doesn't have to be all guns blazing!
If they hadn't dedicated that air time to showing and explaining the pains that they went to in producing just a few seconds of footage that flashed by on our screens, we might not have placed nearly as much value on the outcome, as I'm sure many people did, as a result of seeing how the product experience was put together.
In turn, in the customers' eyes, this also puts more value on the team itself too, and improves its image and reputation and the amount of positive referrals it gets. At the same time, doing so makes the customer feel more valued, cared about and appreciated too, because of the pains taken to produce that experience for them.
As well as producing the end result, are you taking time to appropriately communicate, promote to your customers what has gone into a particular experience that you're proud of, so that they know how much time, dedication and effort your team has placed on providing them with that experience, and therefore how much value you place on them?
Do they know how many pains you're prepared to go through to achieve the experience for them, so that if at any point they also have a painful experience of you, they will balance that against how much you have cared about them in previous situations, and the pains you have gone to for them?
Observation Post
Misguided Information
Why is it that so many appliance user guides are more like misguides? Many have obviously been translated from another language and clearly haven't been checked by a native English speaker, as the sentences often aren't sentences, and don't make sense, or leave out vital words. So you have no idea whether you're programming the right thing in, or about to reformat the whole of your hard drive!
Then you have to get back in touch with the retailer to ask them to guide you through the process, in case you're about to do something you shouldn't. So in the end you have to get someone to explain it to you anyway! Or worse still, you bought it from a supplier on the other side of the world, who then proves difficult to get hold of to even be able to ask the question.
It may be an extra expense, or it may just be a question of a different process, but if the manufacturer checked their manuals with a native speaker of the various languages they've translated them into, it would save more expense in terms of time, effort, perceptions, image and cost for the retailer and customer at the other end. It would also show that the manufacturer cared more about the customer's experience of their product, and were taking care to ensure that the first impression of using it was a delight and not a dread.
Making Your Mark
Taking Pains
Think of a particular customer experience your team has delivered to your internal or external customers. Were there any aspects of it where they could have taken greater pains to, for example, deliver better quality, pay greater attention to detail, find other ways to produce a better result? If so, how different would the experience have then been for your customers, and what additional positive impact would it have made on them and their perception of your team and organisation?
Now think of an experience that you did deliver to your customers or partners, where your team did invest an extraordinary amount of dedication, care, effort and time into delivering that experience, not because anything went wrong, but because you wanted to get it absolutely right. Did your customers ever know the pains you went to, so that they could fully appreciate what you had done too?
Was there a way in which you could have informed them and by so doing, also promoted your team to them? Not so that they felt you expected them to be grateful, but to give them that insight and understanding of how much you cared about the experience you were giving them, and cared about them enough to want to go to those extra lengths to deliver it. It may be worth taking extra pains to look if you could perhaps build that into future feedback to them, to give your team that extra positive profile, image and referral opportunities.
Of course, the other question to ask yourself out of this maybe is, how and why they put more effort into delivering that one particular experience to your customers, than they maybe did into delivering others?!
Speaking Events
I speak at a range of different corporate conferences, both all-staff and management, on the customer experience and my strategy of 'Whole Organisation Marketing' - helping all your people live and deliver your customer experience and brand promise, and promote/ celebrate your organisation through everything they do. The emphasis is on improving the whole customer experience, referrals, reputation, your brand, effectiveness, the amount of customers and partners you keep and attract, and your bottom line success.
I also speak at industry and professional body conferences and events. For example, I have spoken for the Institute of Customer Service, the Institute of Sales and Marketing and the Chartered Institute of Housing.
See the showreel on my website from one of these events.
If you would like to know more about these or the other types of events and conferences I speak at, or indeed have one you would like me to speak at, then do get in touch. If you would like to find out more about the workshops and development sessions I run for organisations, which include ones to develop individuals and teams to improve the customer experience, then just give me a ring or drop me a line. You can see a summary of my workshops on my website too.
Thanks for reading, I hope you found it useful and thought provoking. If we haven't spoken or met already, I hope we get to do so in the not too distant future. If we have, then I look forward to chatting to you again.
See you next time.
Mob: 07787 573539
carolyn@carolyndallaway.com
www.carolyndallaway.com
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