Want to Make Customers Happy? Try Being Your Own Customer First

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PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

"Please listen carefully as our options have changed." That maddening automated admonition is a common, tiny instance of a common, huge problem. There are far too many companies that add irritants to interactions with customers and create obstacles to a satisfactory customer experience or foster cultures that make them hard to do business with.

Everybody knows how bad this is from personal experience. And common as such companies problem is, it's also easy to find stories about successful companies that act otherwise. So why do companies continue to inflict inconvenience on customers? The reason isn't bad intentions. It's bad service design.

Consider how difficult many companies make it to talk to someone on the phone. Are the companies clueless or malign? We don't know, but we do notice that the phone trees that irk us most belong to airlines, cable, and phone companies -- bottom-dwellers on most customer-satisfaction lists.

Win, Win

At Professional Warranty Service Corporation, a Virginia company that manages service for homeowners insurance policies, a person always answers the phone -- maybe CEO Gale Sommers, if it's ringing and he's nearby. "It's faster for the customer and usually faster for us," he says, revealing a little secret: When you make things easier for the customer, you generally make them easier for yourself, too.

We call that service elegance -- when you don't have to break a sweat to deliver great service. The best way to achieve that kind of elegance is to start by making things easy for customers, then work backward to your own activity. If you design it the other way, optimizing internally first, cost will almost automatically become your main focus and you'll end up tying customers in knots.

Mobile Mini, the world's largest provider of mobile storage containers, found that out the hard way. Hoping to get scale economies, the company set up a national call center. It did make some things simpler for customers -- some billing questions, for example.

But it created bigger hassles than it solved. The major issues for mobile storage customers are banged-up containers and delivery and pick-up. Both of these issues happen to be hyper-local -- especially since containers are often brought to construction sites that don't have established addresses.

Location, Location, Location

Mobile Mini moved quickly to correct the mistake, devolving service back down to the local level for most issues, and discovered that what was easier for customers also was easier for them--because it eliminated the need for the central switchboard to pass customers back to the local offices that should have handled their question in the first place.

But the company did something more. It now asks every customer one question: How easy are we to do business with? Then it takes what it learns to identify and eliminate nuisances one after another.

You should do that, too. Start by talking with people who have the most interaction with customers -- they're the ones who will likely hear about what's working for customers, and what isn't.

Those people may not be in the customer service department. They could be salespeople, who often have the kind of well-established relationship with customers that invite the sharing of that kind of information.

Empathy Engine

Try being your own customer -- or ask someone trustworthy to go through a common practice or process that a customer would. Empathy is the heart of good service design, and there is nothing like first-person experience to rev up your empathy engine.

Finally, be willing to throw out the baby and the bathwater, if necessary. Don't cling to a process because it's familiar or because it's entrenched, and don't disregard something because you've never done it. French postal service La Poste instituted such innovations as customer-led classes, hours of operation that took local needs into account, and letting employees figure out staffing and schedules.

What's good for your customers is good for you, too -- in more ways than one.

The post Want to Make Customers Happy? Try Being Your Own Customer First appeared first on inc-asean.com.

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