We begin this article with a couple of first-person, 100% true stories to illustrate the ideas I will explain below:
Some time ago, I went with my young daughter to buy clothes at the store that a Spanish brand has opened in the center of Madrid. The store occupies a completely renovated building and is great, in fact it has become a place of pilgrimage for young customers.
We saw that there was a party in an area of the store, a kind of presentation of new clothes, many customers were coming in and out of the event and we wanted to "snoop". At the entrance, a sales clerk stopped us and this was more or less our conversation
"do you have an invitation?"
"no, how can we get it?"
"an e mail has been sent to regular customers with the invitation."
"we are regular customers, but I don't remember the e-mail, maybe it's as spam" (it was true).
"yes, but you have to bring the printed email, without that you can't pass, sorry".
I don't know how our faces looked, but I don't think they were happy.
Around the same time my car broke down. Something in the radiator or the oil pump, I don't know. The thing is that the garage called me indicating that the thing could be serious and, glups... although the fine valuation demanded to disassemble part of the engine, the breakdown could suppose an approximate maximum cost of 2.000 €! In the end, after two days of tense waiting, the joke was "only" 800 €. As the mechanic explained to me later, with all the detail and piece by piece, they had managed to repair part of the damage and limit the impact quite a lot. The repair was guaranteed for 6 months.
Despite the final amount to be paid, my face was much better than in the previous situation.
In the first case I think we will not go back, at least for a while, to buy in that store. In the second: I have already recommended the shop to more than one person.
I consider my reaction in both cases to be perfectly normal and predictable. The person in the first case could have let us pass or given another explanation: we are regular customers, there was plenty of space, it was not a rush hour and that event was taking place in full view of the rest of the store and I suppose that more customers would want to pass by (... let's keep in mind the needs of this segment of the public).
In the second case, I don't know if the mechanic knows the psychological mechanism by which an initial bad news makes a later not good news better (the classic "bad news first") but he applied it to perfection.
Every day we see this kind of thing: companies that have invested time and money in state-of-the-art technology, excellent products, luxury contact channels, customer intelligence, well-trained employees... but they overlook the fact that on the other side there are flesh and blood people, with normal needs and reactions, and whose experience and behavior as customers depends, without a doubt, on that emotional, personal, or whatever you want to call it, factor.
This factor is often considered obvious or "included by default in the specifications". What we see is that, with a complex value chain and many people involved, if we do not contemplate the "emotional impact" in the design, its management is subject to chance and we can find surprises.
Let's look at a few real examples of the kinds of things that are affecting us:
Selling.
- Buying the first time is becoming a thing of the past. We do more research before buying, especially because of the volume of information we handle. Are our salespeople prepared for this, and do they see a visit without a closing as part of the sale or as a lost opportunity?
- The purchase decision can be linked to two factors: motivation to buy and ability to buy. The first is more complex to handle, the second (capacity) tells us about the customer's economic capacity but also about how easy it is to buy (process). They know this very well on the Internet, but in the physical store, why do we insist on asking the customer to make all kinds of efforts (cognitive, physical, time...) to close the purchase? With less motivation, greater ease can precipitate the purchase decision. If we make it easier to buy, we will sell more.
- If we have lower prices than our competitors, the customer may have doubts about the quality of the product. A simple comment from the salesperson, at the key moment, talking about value and not price, blows that barrier out of the water.
- Giving information about price and features of our competitors, while defending our product, increases customer confidence and preference. do our salespeople have this information?
Providing service.
- After conducting thousands of surveys and interviews on customer expectations on a service call, it always comes out the same, in all sectors: people need accessible service, courteous treatment, answer when requested, do what is requested as soon as possible, have well-trained employees, be clear about what can be expected from the service, keep commitments and promises, solve at the first time, follow up on requests. That's all there is to it. These don't sound far-fetched, do they?
- The recall and evaluation of a service interaction is based on what happened at the peak emotional moment and at the end of the interaction, the rest is forgotten. Let's take care of the end of the contact and know how to manage the emotional peak to achieve a good memory. The good memory of the interaction is vital, it is what builds the customer experience.
- "Educate the customer": this is a very common term. Normally when we want the customer to do something that interests us, if he doesn't see the benefit it won't work.
- The mood and attitude of employees directly influences the attitude of the customer. Moreover, if you want to get a quick assessment of what customers think about a service, ask employees for their own personal (honest) assessment of that service. There is a high correlation between the two opinions. By the way, mood and attitude are managed from the very moment of recruitment. We are not all good at the same things and a genuine service attitude is not easy to learn.
Important keys
- It is not a question of inventing the wheel and there are no recipes either: the way is to understand who our customers are and what they need, through an appropriate methodology.
- We are talking about working on design, processes and employee capabilities . Certainly not major investments: it is almost always a matter of orienting and fine-tuning what we already have.
- The customer experience exists out there even if we ignore it. The choice is whether we want to manage it to contribute to the business or let it happen at random.
- It is always better to start with small changes and move steadily towards more ambitious goals. This motivates us more and allows us to learn: we are people.
