Maybe you don’t need CX
Customer Experience is a very important part of advancing your brand. In fact, as I like to say, CX is the delivery of your brand. When you think about your Brand Promise, your Marketing team spends a lot of time and energy developing and designing it.
It turns to the CX function in your organization to deliver on that promise.
That takes an awful lot of investigation into your Customers’ insights, identifying the gaps between what you’re telling the world you’re all about and what your Customers are actually getting in the real world. Then it’s turning your Process Engineering efforts toward those identified gaps and going to town improving how you do what you do so that what your Customers are experiencing is what your Marketing team is promising.
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Your Customers have figured it out. Have you?
My local grocer has a problem. All of us who shop there are aware of it, and even compensate for it. But it doesn’t seem that they even realize it.
Ours is a pretty urban location in the midst of a university neighborhood. Sure, there are a few families with their 2.3 children each, but most of the households either have no-kids or are comprised of college kids themselves. Few people here ever shop big. Even if we only go shopping once a week, we’re not buying a ton of groceries most times we go there.
So, we appreciate those half-sized grocery carts. Growing up, whenever I went shopping with Mom, we always used those regular-sized buggies. When we were smaller, we’d even want to ride inside them. These days, they make them with cutesy faux-cars attached to the front so kids can play like they’re driving around the store while Mom or Dad gets the work done. But I can’t remember the last time I needed that much space, and I appreciate the simplicity (and appropriate size) of those smaller ones.
The grocery store in our neighborhood seems to have about four of them. And all of us who shop there are always wrangling for them amongst each other. […]
System problems and policy problems
I’ve been thinking lately about what causes CX to go south. Well, okay, I do that a lot anyway.
Naturally, considering my Framework, I concentrate a lot of my efforts on identifying processes and systems that are causing misalignment with a Brand Promise. After all, as I’ve written previously, CX is really just an excuse to do Process Engineering, right?
In a ton of instances, the problems your Customers are having with you are a result of bad (or poorly executed, or both) processes. But then again, no process is fool-proof and guaranteed always to work properly. And that’s not even to mention what happens when people get involved. So, sometimes, it’s genuinely a process that’s ill-conceived, and other times it’s a process that’s simply not adhered to (and if it were, perhaps the problem would be solved…if not, see the previous issue of the process being bad itself).
But there’s another potential issue: What happens outside the processes? That’s when we get into the problems with your policies. […]
Small Print or Bigger Person
Your mom may have told you to always read the fine print. Or maybe it was a college professor or something along those lines. If you’ve ever interacted with an attorney of course you’re familiar with the admonition.
By and large that’s always a great idea, even when working with a trusted and Customer-centric brand. After all, it’s important for both parties to understand what’s expected of the other, and it’s not necessarily a sign of mistrust to get certain things down on paper, just to be sure.
And, after all, let’s be honest: If a brand didn’t live up to its written word, wouldn’t you hold them accountable? So, to some degree we owe them a degree of latitude as well: We oughtn’t expect something they’ve never promised. It’s nice to know you’re working with a brand and partner you can trust, but nevertheless, as they say, good fences make good neighbors.
Still, though, you have to wonder: How many companies do you work with who hide behind their contract instead of standing behind their brand? […]
Communication is cheaper
I recently had to return a pair of shoes I’d purchased online. I realized immediately when I tried them on just after they were delivered that the size was wrong. Fortunately, the return process was super simple from a Customer’s perspective: The company had included a return label that I could slap right on the exact same box (that we wisely chose not to let the dog get hold of) in which came the original order and all I had to do was swing past any FedEx office to get it back on its way. Then, once they’d “received the return” they’d get my replacement, properly-sized, on its way back to me.
The “received the return” part is in quotes on purpose. […]
Customer screw-ups are your fault
Some of your Customers are idiots.
Hey, full disclosure, that includes me.
In fact, in some circles, I’m known as the “LCD,” or least-common denominator. As the joke goes, Z is the dimmest bulb in the group, and as such, if I get something, everybody should be able to understand it.
Self-deprecation aside, the much-more-straight-faced point I’m making here is that we as brands need to develop our systems for the lowest-common-denominator Customer. I don’t mean to treat our Customers like idiots, but…well, kind of to do that, yeah.
As I consider this concept, I’m taken back to a situation I recently wrote about where I had a difference of perspective from a brand I was dealing with. As per their policy, they characterized what’d happened as my having made an error. The point of my previous article was: Even if so; so what? Forget who’s gotten what wrong…the brand should hold some interest in making sure I’m satisfied as a Customer…that’s what goodwill gestures are all about.
But there’s another side to this; a more transactional perspective. And it’s something that brands are even more loath to consider (mostly because it takes more work): By and large, your Customers’ errors are your fault. […]
