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Tag: customer experience

Hiring People who Smile is One Step in the Right Direction

It takes a mere second and can actually make someone’s day. Smiling is probably the most underrated gesture we can bestow upon one another. Think about how many people you interact with during the day. Or maybe people you just walk by. How easy would it be just to smile at them? You never know what kind of day someone is having so why not try to make it just a little better.

A smile can also do wonders for your business and the customer experience. Many companies strive to achieve a great product or service but forget the other side. Customers want to buy a complete package that includes your product and the customer service that comes with it; this experience includes the sale, purchase, and post-sale. Your goal is not just getting your customer to buy and go, but that they will return and bring more customers with them.

The simple action of smiling can have a dramatic impact on the way you relate to a customer and the impression that this will give about your brand. No matter whether you interact with a client in person, by phone, live call, chat or email, a good attitude will always be useful.

 

What your smile can do to your customers

  • Studies have shown a good smile can increase confidence by up to 10%.
  • It helps build a good first impression of your business; a customer will always prefer to do business with someone who is happy.
  • Smiling improves your mood and therefore the attitude in which you face everyday situations, including your sales work and customer support.
  • A smile is contagious and humans tend to copy emotions, so a good attitude on your part can improve your customers as well.

 

The smile during phone support

Did you know that smiling on the phone can help you reflect a positive attitude? Customers can tell, even over the phone, what kind of mood you are in. A startup company that offers internet phone calls explained; “Most of our sales and support processes are managed by phone contact, so we can tell you from our experience that our customers know when we smile and that’s why we do it. In fact, many customers gave us great feedback about our customer service and it all starts with a smile.”

How do you measure the business benefits of a smile?

It’s no secret who does customer service the best—Trader Joe’s, Chick-fil-A and Southwest Airlines—and you will rarely see an unhappy employee. These companies go above and beyond to give every customer a memorable experience.

QuikTrip Corp., a Tulsa, Oklahoma based chain famous for its in-house analytics and memorable customer service, just clinched the 2019 CSP Intouch Insight Mystery Shop, their fourth win in the program’s 15-year history. The study includes both a covert and a revealed audit, with shoppers sizing up 10 participating brands on everything from greetings to gas-island cleanliness.

Chet Cadieux, chairman and CEO of QuikTrip, says, You can’t solve everything with math,” he says. “It just so happens that … you can use analytics to hire the right people to begin with. And if you hire friendly, sincere people, they’re generally, on most days, going to be friendly and sincere to the people they’re taking care of.”

84% of QuikTrip shoppers agreed that they were greeted in a courteous manner, placing the chain nearly 20 percentage points ahead of the average. Another measure of QuikTrip’s customer-service strengths is how well it scored on the question “Would you recommend this store to others?” Based on the Net Promoter Score, a metric that measures consumers’ loyalty to a brand by having them rate their willingness to recommend it on a scale of 1 to 10, QuikTrip received more 9s and 10s than any other retailer.

That’s significant, says Cameron Watt, president and CEO of Ottawa, Ontario-based Intouch Insight, which conducts the mystery shop on CSP’s behalf. In the CSP Intouch Insight Mystery Shop, shoppers are not necessarily regular customers of the brands they are visiting, Watt says. But the fact that QuikTrip scored so high with these shoppers is considerable, “because you create customer loyalty one customer at a time,” he says.

“If a person goes there and they enjoyed the experience enough at your brand, even though they usually shop at another brand, and they’d be willing to recommend you, I think that would be very highly correlated to your ability to drive customer loyalty,” Watt says.

For its part, QuikTrip is most interested in how its customers weigh the individual variables of the c-store shopping experience. Its internal mystery shop assesses employees’ ability to hit these needs, and a large percentage of their compensation is based on their performance in this measure. Consumers’ expectations for c-store service may be modest, but for a retailer to consistently hit the mark on friendly and fast with nearly every transaction is a triumph. Ensuring a high batting average means hiring right the first time.

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Customers Still Want the In-Person Customer Experience How to Capitalize on it

How can you make the customer experience better? It’s pretty simple actually…talk to your customers.

While the digital experience is important due to the rise of social media shopping and interaction, new research has found that putting extra effort into the personal touch – phone or face-to-face contact – is more successful at making the customer experience memorable and increasing sales.

Almost two-thirds of customers say they spend or invest more in products and services after they’ve had personal contact with someone at the company, according to research from BookingBug. And 50% said that being able to speak with a service or sales professional when issues arise is critical in making the decision. Plain and simple, when customers talk to someone, rather than corresponding through email or social media, they are likely to become a loyal fan.

It’s important to build both a competent digital experience and a feel-good personal experience. “By closely following customers along their dynamic journey between digital and physical worlds, businesses will engage more effectively, build trust with customers and ultimately drive increased revenue,” says Glenn Shoosmith, CEO of BookingBug.

How can you bridge the digital and personal experience?

Make your people accessible – online and on the retail floor. Customers still want to gather as much information as possible on their own…from your website, on social media, and by reading online reviews. But eventually, many of them will want to talk to or meet with a service or sales professional. Make that as easy as possible by adding the ability to schedule an appointment to every page on your website and on your social pages. And know your busiest shopping times so you have ample sales staff available. There’s nothing more frustrating than walking around a store hunting for an associate to answer your questions.

Customer service

Know their experiences. When customers get in touch with you, the service or sales professional should have an idea of what the customer has already experienced. Businesses can use tracking software to better understand what customers are interested in and the processes they have already gone through to handle their issue. Once they’ve asked to talk or meet, review what’s already been done, ask what questions they have, and move forward with information targeted at the needs they’ve shared.

Be prepared. The most important aspect of a personal customer experience is knowledge. Customers routinely give top ratings to experiences when the person they work with can answer everything they need answered – or, at least, know where to find answers and respond with them quickly. You can do this by providing ongoing training for all staff members so they stay on top of developments on your products, services, uses, technology and industry.

Managers also have the responsibility of understanding and managing workloads across all teams. Knowledge of their team’s attendance and performance trends, including nonproductive hours and overtime, can empower retail managers to become more successful in responding to workforce challenges, addressing individual employee needs, and building stronger customer relationships.

Keep in touch the right way. Just because customers have a personal interaction doesn’t mean they want to continue communicating that way. Make sure you ask how a customer wants to continue to receive information, handle follow-up or be contacted in the future. You’ll likely want to keep in touch with customers after calls or visits, but you’ll want to do that on their terms.

Great customer experiences lead to loyal fans and repeat business. In order to achieve this, brands need to invest in educating employees and making sure all members of the team are focused on positive customer interactions – whether that is digitally or in-person. Take care of your team and they will take care of you and your brand.

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How to Develop your Digital Customer Experience

In today’s crowded marketplace, brands are finding it more difficult to differentiate themselves from one another. When you have multiple brands in multiple industries offering the same products you do, you need to give customers a reason to choose you over them. Many brands today are working to find that differentiation in customer experience. In fact, experts believe that by 2020, customer experience will be even more important than price or product quality in differentiating one brand from another.
Companies need a digital customer experience strategy to ensure that they build the right experiences to suit their customers’ needs and expectations. It’s important that your strategy supports business objectives, accurately reflects your brand, and aids in prioritizing which customer goals to support and how to support them.


Organizations that aspire to differentiate based on digital customer experience need a clear, cohesive execution strategy. Customer experience professionals have the expertise required to create experiences that deliver value to customers and the business and should take the lead in developing a digital customer experience strategy for their firm. To start:


• Define your business and brand objectives. Your company’s mission and value statements should guide all activities and investments. A customer experience strategy that defines what the role of digital interaction points will be — and will not be — must be built on the foundation of the company’s overall business objectives and brand attributes.


• Identify and seek understanding of your target users. A digital customer experience strategy must define how the company will deliver experiences to its target customers through digital touchpoints. Therefore, a digital customer experience strategy must include a deep qualitative understanding of the audience members’ key goals, how they accomplish those goals, and their expectations of the brand.


• Prioritize and fund critical touchpoints. The world’s largest organizations market and sell to many customer segments, but an experience designed to serve the needs of all segments in the same way will not work. A customer experience strategy prioritizes the most important channels for delivering on customer goals, keeping focus on the activities that provide the highest value to the most valuable customers, the most important business objectives, and the brand.

How Can Digital Experience Management Help Your Business?
The digital experience used to revolve around strategic posts on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. But today’s companies are dealing with far more digital reach…managing email communication, website landing sites, checkout experiences, inventory, ad placement, and more. And all of it has to work together. Digital Experience Management (DXM) can manage it all.
In short, DXM helps customers “shop” rather than simply “buy.” It makes the entire shopping experience more memorable for them—and helps you know what’s working (or not) at the same time.


According to Dushyant Mohanty, Global Transformation Head – Industry Unit, Industrial Manufacturing, Energy, Banking & Financial Services, at Tata Consultancy Services, that means moving from being product-centric to being customer-centric. When creating a customer experience journey, companies should put themselves in the shoes of their customers to see if they are getting a solution that meets their needs, or if the company’s offerings are outdated.
In a digital transformation, the customer experience needs to be customized and in real time. That means adjusting as needed and using the correct customer persona. Mohanty points out that a digital strategy is more than just updating a few processes. For many companies, it’s a complete overhaul of their approach to service and customer experience. To make a real change, executives need to take a step back and look at things objectively to see if they are reaching customers and achieving their goals. The underlying technology structure has a huge impact on customer experience, as does the data strategy. Start with these as a foundation to customer experience.


In the end, it really comes down to having a growth mindset. Companies that can embrace digital transformation for customer experience are the ones that don’t simply do what’s always been done but instead look for new solutions to meet customers’ needs. Businesses need to always be evaluating their approach to customer experience to stay on top of new trends and technologies. A digital transformation can help companies become more customer-centric to guide their customers through the changing digital world.

digital customer experience
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