Put great effort into customer interactions to keep them fully engaged

– be consistently above average every single time!

This quote by Henry Ford is so profound, “It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employees only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages”. Customer-centred culture is not accidental; it happens as a consequence of deliberate choices made by people in the business. Therefore, to make it purposeful such that everyone in the organisation lives the culture, you must be consistent about creating the culture that will become second nature to every employee. The lesson here is that to succeed in your customer experience, you must work on your culture before you address anything else.

How you wow your customers and keep them engaged every single time is critical to your success in the marketplace. It will make you stand out from the crowd and referrals will come to you as a matter of course as your customers willingly become advocates. The companies that are performing so well in the marketplace have figured out the pivotal role of the customer in reaching out to others and selling their brand’s reputation to family and friends. They have found a way of creating customer evangelists and reaping referrals so that whether times are good or bad, whether your company sells physical goods or services, you easily stand out.

Recalling the Gin 5 brand, one can easily recognise how customer experience can make a difference in any business. Their willingness to change direction and produce sanitisers for their clients was a demonstration of their caring nature, albeit with the infusion of a business principle where they used the name ‘Gintizer’ to enable customers to recognise the brand. When it comes to delivering customer experience, everyone in the organisation must be involved. The key is that everyone must be prepared to step up and be a leader. We must know what it takes to amaze a customer and be prepared to make it happen.

Kasapreko also adopted that strategy and delivered sanitisers to a market that was calling earnestly for them during the COVID-19 crisis era. Knowing what to do to amaze customers gives you a clear advantage in any economy and any marketplace. What you need is a toolkit that will enhance your ability to gauge customer sentiments to enable you to understand where they are coming from so that you can empathise with them and proactively address their needs. No matter how great your product is, getting and retaining customers requires a deliberate effort at keeping them satisfied at all times.

Therefore, to keep our customers happy and satisfied all the time, we must be prepared to undertake a journey of sorts that makes the customer see how determined we are to keep them happy. Here are a few talking points in this direction to help us craft our customer engagement professionally and accurately. First, be proactive and be prepared to solve the customer’s problem before they start. Second, do the unexpected – be on the lookout for opportunities to do what you know the competition won’t do. Third, leadership – accept that leadership is not about titles, positions, or flowcharts.

It is about one life influencing others. Fourth, culture – develop an articulate voice, one that speaks for the customer. This means actively designing the right experience, and working to understand customer needs before they tell you. How you align your backend processes to respond to customer needs is key to this. Employees must be aligned to the goal of reaching out to the customer and addressing needs timeously.

Be proactive

In his book 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, Stephen Covey describes how a proactive approach helps to acknowledge a mistake quickly so that instant actions can be taken to resolve it instead of waiting for it to become a more serious issue. Being proactive with customers is about solving problems before they start. Imagine this scenario in the restaurant where the waiter fills your glass before you asked; if this is the case with you, then you have experienced proactive service. My brother’s experience in Papua New Guinea, where all the hotel staff pronounced his Ghanaian name correctly each time he encountered them rings a bell.

It’s great to be in a mode where you solve problems promptly; however, it is more fulfilling if you can identify problems and address them proactively. So, if a customer orders a meal from your eatery, how would this customer feel if you took the trouble to call and ask if the meal arrived in good time? Don’t you think that customers will develop trust for you when they know that you care and are prepared to go to lengths to address their challenges? When you take time to gather customer feedback and objectively review cold, hard facts in the form of metrics however daunting can be really powerful.

Dealing with metrics empowers you in various ways as they provide great insights and can help you determine such things as what it means when your Net Promoter Score (NPS) drops during a six-month period. According to GOOGLE, The Net Promoter Score is an index ranging from -100 to 100 that measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company’s products or services to others. It is used as a proxy for gauging the customer’s overall satisfaction with a company’s product or service and the customer’s loyalty to the brand. Additionally, we have a churn rate – measuring the rate at which customers stop dealing with you.

Is this rate going up just a little each month? Knowing this early helps you respond to whatever issue is causing the attrition. Finally, know what is causing the dip in your customer satisfaction (CSAT) after product delivery. These are all questions that the metrics will prompt; how you respond to them is critical. The idea of being proactive has been around for a long time. The key thing is that in most cases, people have not formalised how you respond to them. Shep Hyken, the customer service and experience expert, puts it aptly when he advises that we respond before we hear the expression “Hey my water glass is empty – where is that waiter?

Do the unexpected

The truth is you may not always get the highest level of service right. However, to wow the customer, you must try and take advantage of every opportunity to treat your customer right. Doing that will enable you to build intense loyalty and enthusiastic evangelists for your brand. These are moments of truth that leave memorable experiences in the mind of customers, and they in turn are willing to share the out-of-world experience when they get the opportunity. My daughter usually hails an Uber ride to work in the mornings and he is happy to provide the service in crucial moments. A driver we worked with years ago during a project in Cape Coast comes to mind.

The first day we got there, we dropped off in front of Aggrey Memorial. We saw a cluster of cars and one of the drivers approached us and offered to take us to our destination. He was very conversational so we got acquainted with him very quickly. As it turned out during the conversation, he learned that we would be making a few more visits to Cape Coast so he gave us his contact and offered to be our chauffeur anytime we were in Cape Coast. We enthusiastically agreed to his offer and boy made commuting easy for us. This offer meant that we hardly thought twice about transportation within the metropolis. All we had to do was call him when we were approaching Yamoransa Junction and he would be there waiting on our arrival.

This gentleman, the cab driver, did something his competitors most likely would not do. Knowing what others know and wouldn’t do and taking advantage of that knowledge sets you apart. It makes you stand out and become amazing. This driver, to us, was consistently better than average, was always on hand to pick us up, and would do the rounds with us in Cape Coast. It seemed much like an Uber ride with flexibility. It’s all about creating moments of magic that the customer does not expect. Taking advantage of an opportunity to surprise the customer will be a game-changer in winning their loyalty.

There is significant power in the unexpected. The other day, my power run out and I needed to top up. Mine is one of the metres that can be topped up using mobile money and the ECG App. This happened to me on a Sunday and I was very agitated and panicky as I dreaded the looming prospect of sleeping in the dark one whole day. I decided to call the contact centre for help and boy, I was blessed to get a patient lady who asked me to stay calm (noticing my anxiety) and calmly talked me through the solution. She solved my problem in just a few minutes allaying all my apprehensions promptly.

Leadership

John Maxwell, the renowned leadership Coach and Guru, sums it all up in his famous quote “Everything rises and falls on leadership”. The fact is when it comes to delivering a wow customer experience, everyone in the organisation is a leader. It doesn’t matter what your job title is. According to Shep Hyken, as a leader in customer engagement, you have a rare opportunity to be a great role model for the customer and for the people with whom you work (internal customers).

When you assume the responsibility of leadership, it is as if you have declared to yourself that you want to be so good people will think you own the business.

Your goal is to have others emulate you. There is a short exercise we do during some of our training workshops. It’s called Trust and Fall. It has 2 objectives, the first is to demonstrate the importance of trust when working in teams. So you choose a partner to stand behind you and you drop backward, confident that your partner will hold you quickly and prevent you from falling. The second is to use the activity to revive tired minds after a lunch break. An important quality of a good leader is trust. Building a culture of trust keeps the environment healthy. Where there is no trust, everyone works sitting literally on tenterhooks.

Another quality of the leader is the ability to listen to your customers and learn what changes they expect. Social media today has become a major vehicle for knowledge-sharing and engagement. As a leader, you are better placed when you are amenable to adapting to the changes happening around you. An impressive consequence of the last 3 years during and after the pandemic is that our older folks are confidently using virtual platforms for meetings. The lesson here is that in today’s fast-paced world, it is imperative that we adapt or lose relevance.

As a leader, know that your company can’t be good at everything. The key is to be the best in what you choose to be known for.  Mechanical Lloyd, for years, has been known for BMW cars even though they have three vehicle sales divisions covering Ford, BMW, and Massey Ferguson vehicles, and a fourth service division. Their visibility as a brand is associated with BMW. They have a partnership with BMW, where they run the brand’s Regional Training Centre for West Africa. This basically means that BMW facilitates pieces of training for BMW dealerships at their training centre in Accra.

Culture

Culture is about behaviours and ways employees communicate in the workplace. It is essentially a guide to help employees function effectively. Without it as a guide, employees will be left to their own devices. This will make the workplace chaotic as the delivery of a good customer experience is left to luck. Where a defined culture is lacking, employees tend to be more transactional. They do not create interactions that grow into relationships. Employees benefit from organisational culture by expressing feelings they want customers to have when they interact with the brand.

Managing culture is essential to keeping everyone engaged. Culture shapes the language of the organisation as it presents a template for one to know oneself and who and what you are, and how you want customers to feel. Culture and branding influence customer experience variously, most important among these are people, purpose and image. When employees have clarity about the lifetime value of customers, they are better able to make the right calls when interacting with them. The mission is to retain that customer as opposed to quickly serving them so that you can take your next break.

Keeping the customer’s loyalty must start at the inception of the engagement. Avoid the easy way out and think of how to keep the customer satisfied. Every organisation has its own distinctive culture. Culture is the character of a company’s business model. A healthy culture is reflective of the company’s business model. It portrays the company’s ethics and morals. When the culture is right, teams usually work enthusiastically in a conducive environment. A company with a conducive work environment will motivate its employees to work collaboratively in improving their client’s needs. Employee satisfaction is a function of how customers are treated.

Customer empathy helps in discovering the customer’s need and responding appropriately. In the latest data from PricewaterhouseCoopers, a mere 38 percent of the respondents said that their employees interact in an empathetic way to understand their consumer needs. Most companies fail to train their professionals to be able to express compassion in every possible way. Every professional must recognise their company’s clientele and prepare their mindset to engage them positively.  Business owners should create an infrastructure to help employees leverage customer insights.

Customer experience is generally about taking good care of the customers’ needs. Therefore, managers must be equally committed to employees and customers.