Customer Expectations - Then and Now

After British Airways lost his father's luggage, Hasan Syed didn't just tweet his complaints at the company. He paid for a "sponsored tweet" to broadcast his frustration directly to British Airways 302,000 Twitter followers.

"Don't fly @BritishAirways,"

                                     Sept 2rd, 2013

Customer expectations change.  And these expectations change as customers experiences change. And today, when a customer experiences bad customer service, he or she can tell everyone in the world about that bad experience.

The term delighting your customer has taken on a cliché.  And everyone seems to agree with that approach.

Forget it.

Consumer's punish companies that provide bad service far more often that they reward companies for exceptional service.  

Customer that receive high mark for great customer service start early.

These companies build the customer expectation in the in the customer's mind.

These companies make sure that they build the right expectations. 

Then they deliver on those expectations day in and day out every time they interact with the customer. 

The new rule: 

Customer’s used to compare your customer service to your direct competitors. Now, customers compare your customer service to best in class providers from any industry.

If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.

If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.
                       

                        Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon

Companies that rank highly for "exceptional customer experience" take care to build customer expectations and then match those customer expectations to what they delivery.

Amazon, Nordstrom, Publix, Apple, FedEx and Costco all rank as "companies providing the best customer experience" year in and year out.

And all make sure they match customer expectations to customer experience.

True customer loyalty centers on how often people will recommend a company to someone else.  And if you ask them why they make this recommendation, most say the same thing - use this company and they won't disappoint you.

So the question  a company should ask is:

 What do customer want, do these match the expectations we have built in our customer's mind, AND can we meet or exceed these expectations day in and day out?

And does the technology we provide allow us to do these things,  or does it hinder us,  or prevent us from doing these things?

Companies' have to listen to customers. 

And customers speak in many different places today.

What do customer want, do these match the expectations we have built in our customer's mind, AND can we meet or exceed these expectations day in and day out?

And does the technology we provide allow us to do these things,  or does it hinder us,  or prevent us from doing these things?

Companies' have to listen to customers.  

Social media gives customers more places to talk to each other, to company, and to the general public than at any time in history.

This means collecting both structured and unstructured data (text messages, video, location, etc). 

The amount of unstructured data created now exceeds the amount of structured data many time over each day.  

Companies have to know what customers are saying about their companies and their products on a wide variety of social media - Facebook, Flickr, websites, Twitter, YouTube and everywhere else.

And this means investing in technology.

 That technology will include:

·         investing in big data, analytics

·         modeling

·         campaign tracking to understand your customers

 You also have to know where your customers are and in what channels. And why they are in those channels.

Customer's expect that a  relationship with them rather than a transaction.  Companies do that by creating:

·         targeted  messages

·         providing a one on one experiences

·         showing that the company knows the customer.

Companies win or lose customers every day by how they interact with the customer. Each time you interact with your customer, you either exceed,  meet or fall short of that customer's expectation.

And these thousands of daily interactions determine whether your company succeeds over the long term. 

Strategy doesn’t do this, management doesn’t do this.

The day to day interactions make or break company’s ability to meet customer expectations.  And the technology a company provides either helps or hurts this ability.

Not meeting customer expectations drives a consumer to using price as the decision point in selecting you. 

Social Media Overview

Controlling the Message

A key fact that companies simply have to deal with - they have lost control of their ability to control their message to the public.

Today, with social media, anyone can become a publisher. broadcaster, critic or advertiser of bad customer experiences.  

And now, anyone can reach literally hundreds of thousands of existing and potentially customers at minimum cost.

For example, movies are made or broken on opening night on Twitter.

Facebook currently has over 1 Billion active members, Flickr  publishes  over 3.6 billion pictures, and Twitter users post over 200 million tweets a day. YouTube's 600 million users upload more content in 45 days than all the TV material created in the first 70 years of TV.

And if someone doesn't like your product, or your company, he or she can let the whole world know why faster than you can respond.

Meeting customer expectations is no longer a criteria for success but for survival. Exceeding customer expectations and creating customer champions in the social media market place is a criteria for growth.

Customer Expectation Questions to Consider:

·         How do we listen to our customers, collect information from our customers, and use this information to make decisions?

·         How does our customer experience compare with that of leaders in other sectors?

·         More importantly, how do our customers compare our experience to their expectations?

·         Unless your comparing yourself to one of the top 10 industry leaders, this represents the minimum bar to measure yourself against.

·         Customer's now operate in an always on, 24/7  environment, how will we handle those non-business hour request?

·         Are customer expectations set by our industry or by experience in other industries?

·         Do you measure customer expectations on a continuous basis? The best do.

·          And are you improving every year? Are you measuring that improvement?

·         What will our customers expect in the future, and what will it take to delight them?

·         What do your customers really say about you?

·         Are they delighted to do business with you?

·         More importantly, are they willing to recommend you to their friends or associates?

·         How do our technology plans support our customer expectations?

·         Does your technology make it easier for your people to meet or exceed your customer expectations?

·         Or is just a cost center where you try to minimize cost and provide just enough?

·         Do we do business with our customers the way they want us to do business with them? Do we communicate with them the right way?

·         In the right channels, with the right information, at the right time, with the right products?

CASE STUDY LL BEAN REAL TIME OPERATIONS

LL Bean

Real Time Operations

LL Bean consistently ranks as the having the best customer service of any company in the world.  Part of the reason for this outstanding customer service centers on the investment in LL Bean's call center technology.

The company's contact center system is “geared around bringing as much information to the rep as possible, so they don’t have to spend a lot of time memorizing things.”  This includes the customer's past order history, payment history, and preferences.  The goal is simple - make LL Bean easy to do business with and maintain as helpful approach as possible.

Bean’s customers frequently say things like, “‘I bought this really lovely jacket two years ago and I would really love another one. And they might not be able to find it in the catalog they have. So we have access to their ordering history so we can find it pretty quickly – which makes it easier to give them what they need.”

The cataloger has also made its order entry system more visual, she adds. “The images we use on the Web are now available on the order entry system, so the rep is looking at the same thing that the customer is, whether it’s in the catalog or on the Website.”

LL Bean trains it's agents extensively, and relies on a pool of people around it's call centers for temporary staffing that has worked their for years during holiday seasons.  But it also believes that using technology, on a real time or near real time basis, eliminates the "tribal knowledge" requirement, increase effectiveness, and allows more flexible staffing.

Multi-Channel Merchant

Survey Shows LL Bean Top in Customer Service