Are You Focussed On Systematic Awesome Customer Service?
In the current economic environment, you could be excused for thinking that the only way to compete is to reduce the people cost in your business. We see article upon article talking about artificial intelligence, the drive to automation, and a constant push on reducing cost to compete with digital alternatives.
There is a lot of truth in this, particularly if you are in a commodity-based business. If however, your business is unique, you should endeavour to make it more so. There is a much greater necessity to absolutely focus on doing the right things for customer delight. If I am your customer, I want you to help me faster and better. I want a great experience.
Awesome Service Meets Gin
Matt Jones is the Creative Strategist at Four Pillars Gin, and presented at the 2018 Mindshop Conference.
- There were a lot of interesting takeaways from the session, and what follows are a collection of my notes from his presentation, which you may find interesting.
- We create bias within ourselves, which involves instincts, feelings, experience and design. As individuals, we are all building bias toward or away from products and services we have experienced, based on the experience of buying and owning those products.
- Therefore if you are in business then “You are in the experience business”.
- In a VUCA world, where we are overstimulated, overwhelmed and overloaded, we tend to shut down to cope. We are being told “Trust your gut” – which means don’t do analysis, or look at data, do what do you feel. This can be dangerous.
- Trust isn’t a knowing, trust is a feeling. As business leaders, we are always trying to build trust. Building trust with emotion and experience is much more powerful.
- Today’s consumers feel an incredible sense of impatience, are a new level of demanding, evolving into narcissistic cyborgs. We want convenience rationally, yet we want to be delighted emotionally.
- Amazon’s vision “to be the earth’s most customer-centric company” [From my own experience, I’d really appreciate some more user experience designers to make their complicated process flows much much better. Ditto Google whilst we are at it: JD].
- Question to ask yourself as a business owner: Why would people mourn you? What is it that is fundamentally irreplaceable about your customer experience? Purpose simplifies and focuses: what is the true value I will create for customer
Matt closed with a presentation of how 4 Pillars Gin have applied the above principles. He talked about strategy and simplicity – being in the business of making, rather than marketing (however the marketing is rather special!) and how shocking is the new good.
The takeaway questions for you:
- How good on a -5 to +5 scale is your customer experience?
- What are the top 3 strategies you could put in place to significantly improve that experience?
- Which one of those 3 will have the greatest impact – and you could implement in the next 90 days?
