Learnings for better customer experience

“Your customer doesn’t know how much you know until you know how much they care”

Customers are affected by very small things much more than anything else. Customers are also human being and understand if something major is not working but when small things doesn’t work out the whole customer experience goes for a toss. Small things/ problems are perception driven and how we handle it defines our success in providing world class experience.

Customer experience or service is not only about solving the issues that occur to the customer, it is about listening to them, finding root cause, making sure that it doesn’t happen again and giving feedback to other functions to improve.

For this you need to spend time with customers rather than being engrossed in the product. We need to talk to them understand them, feel their pain points and then incorporate it in our offering, thus build great product and companies.

“Great Customer Service is not possible without a great product”

We should always get to the inherent need of customer through series of iterations and get to the final tipping point of the need and incorporate that in the product. For example, A person needs shoe polish to polish his shoe, but by polishing shoe he wants to take care of high value shoe, but he also wants to look good and feel good by doing so. This end point becomes the tipping need and hence if I make a shoe polish with inherent characteristic of a feel good factor it will instantly hit with the customer and hence a great customer experience.

Some of my learnings from working in this field are –

• Customer experience Vision
• Listen to what customers are speaking
• Culture of Awesomeness
• Continuous feedback to other functions
• Pay attention to little things
• Data driven proactive support
• Leveraging Technology
• Gamify the idea of customer service
• Weed out wrong hires

This is based on the inherent assumption that things explained in the first part of the article are taken care of and we have an awesome product and all my executive knows it will. Then we can use the above learning to take the customer support to the next level.