The Unforgettable Customer Experience Taster

THE SO SOLOPRE LOPRENE NEUR UR

The UnforgeTTab UnforgeTTable le CUsTomer experienCe Win Customers. Keep Customers. by Richard Kimber

The solopreneUr’s gUide

The Unforgettable Unforgettable Customer Experience Win Customers. Keep Customers.

by Richard Kimber

Copyright © Richard Kimber. The right of Richard Kimber to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. All rights reserved. First published in 2014 by The Solopreneur Solopreneur Publishing Publishing Company Ltd. Ltd. West Yorkshire WF9 1PB www.thesolopreneur.co.uk The publisher makes no representation, representation, expressed expressed or implied, implied, with regards to the accuracy of the information contained contained in this book, and cannot accept any responsibility or liability. Except for the quotation of small passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except under the terms of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 without the prior consent of the publisher at the address above. ISBN 978-0-9930569-2-5 Printed in the U.K. by Charlesworth Press, Flanshaw Lane, Wakefield WF2 9LP

PUBLISHER’S DISCLAIMER When referencing financial, marketing or sales information in any of our books, websites, blogs, videos, resources, newsletters, and any other content, we have taken every effort to ensure we’ve accurately represented ideas, theories, products and services, and their ability to improve the success within your business and your life. We offer no guarantee that you will get the results you seek using these ideas, ideas, tools and strategies. We do not engage in ‘get rich quick’ schemes or ideas. We also do not guarantee earnings. It is up you, as the reader, how much time and energy is spent applying the following information. It is also your choice whether you take on board and follow through with any business or marketing idea/advice, and you should recognise that a number of factors will affect any success achieved. You, as the reader, are responsible for your own actions and outcomes. We are merely representing generic ideas from industry experts that we believe, when acted upon, create differing degrees of success. Finally, we recommend that you seek advice from the appropriately qualified professionals, i.e. solicitors, accountants, doctors or psychologists, if specific help is required, pertinent to your individual circumstances.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Richard Kimber has over two decades of experience in commercial and customer-facing roles building successful and profitable customer relationships. He currently helps businesses of all sizes who want to understand how to deliver consistently great customer experiences that bring greater financial benefits. Richard’s key experience was gained working for a market research agency that specialised in customer satisfaction and loyalty measurement for business to business organisations, and business to consumer companies, with clients that included The Co-operative Retail Group, Xerox, Lombard Financial Services, Stannah Lift Services, Manchester United, Volkswagen Group and Principality Building Society. He has also conducted international research for Rolls Royce, travelling to Moscow, Norway, Istanbul and Jeddah. He’s designed and presented public and inhouse training seminars and workshops, covering all aspects of the customer satisfaction measurement and improvement process. He has presented frequently at client conferences on customer experience, and its importance as a foundation in making and growing a successful business.

Richard is a companion member of ‘The Institute of Customer Service’ and is visiting guest lecturer on customer experience at Huddersfield Business School. Connecting with Richard:

www.ce-coach.co.uk Follow Richard on Twitter: @ce_coach Email - [email protected]

ABOUT THE ‘SOLOPRENEUR’S GUIDE’ SERIES This book - indeed, every book in the ‘Solopreneur’s Guide’ series - is different from most other business guides or titles. It’s not structured chapter by chapter; instead, the content is laid out in such a way that it answers solopreneurs’ most frequently asked questions on a given topic or discipline. So, what is a ‘solopreneur’?

The term ‘solopreneur’ is is used when talking talking about ‘Independent Professionals’ (or ‘IPs’). There are many similarities between solopreneurs and entrepreneurs; in the context of our books and series, by describing a business owner as a solopreneur, we’re referring to people who are completely reliant on their own personal brand in order to make a living (essentially, ‘one-manbrands’). What else is unique about the ‘Solopreneur’s Guide’ series?

When researching the merit of business books, feedback showed that solopreneurs found many titles hard to relate to – particularly those written by successful, or well-known, business leaders. Though solopreneurs felt felt some information within these books was valuable, they said the ‘golden nuggets’ were hidden within masses of pretentious, technical, or irrelevant text. They were also disappointed that the majority of

business books failed to offer direction on how to apply the authors’ advice within the average solopreneur business. As a result, the business owners we spoke to felt that many authors of non-fiction ‘business books’ didn’t understand them or their needs. Most businesses – even global corporations – have to start somewhere. Having a small business does not mean the owner has little ambition, nor is it a measure of how successful the business will remain as time advances. The right kind of information, applied at the right time, will help more businesses grow – which is where this series comes in. We’ve sourced the best experts in each field: qualified and experienced professionals - whose target markets are made up of solopreneurs and small business owners – who will impart useful, appropriate information, in an easy-to-apply format. In today’s society, people want to fast-track their understanding of a subject and any subsequent results. The advent of the internet has made knowledge more accessible than ever, but nothing can replace the added ingredient of experience within that framework. The authors chosen to write write for the ‘Solopreneur’s Guide’ series are already recognised experts with a credible track record. They understand their customers – and, in turn, their readers - and the problems they commonly face.

These experts are accessible, which we feel is is important, should you like more information or tailored advice. They’re not unattainable or out of reach – all ‘Solopreneur’s Guide’ authors are business owners, just like you. Contact information will be included in all books, relating to the author in question, as well as links to any free downloads/resources/training in the ABOUT THE AUTHOR section, section, at the beginning of each book. Every ‘Solopreneur’s Guide’ author is active on social media and welcomes your feedback.

Contents Introduction Question One: What is the ‘customer experience’?

Why is it important to a one-man-brand? Does it apply to me? Question Two: How does it impact on my sales/

turnover/cash flow if I don’t bother taking your advice? Question Three: I get that it’s important to look

after my customers, but how will it impact on my business in the short, medium and long-term? Question Four: If I implement a strategy to

keep customers, won’t it take me away from finding new ones, which will ultimately grow my business? Does the pain outweigh the gain? Question Five: How can I give a great experience

in the smallest amount of time, but to maximum effect? Question Six: How often should I measure the

results of such a strategy without spending too much time on analytics, and why should I bother measuring the results? Summary

The Unforgettable Customer Experience

Introduction Let’s start by describing the business landscape, where a problem exists that plagues businesses small and large, on a daily basis, at a local and national level; on the high street and online. It’s not confined to one industry, one type of business, one service, or even a particular group of people. A problem that at the extreme, makes people’s lives frustrating and unhappy. It afflicts everyone at some point, including you, and it’s more than likely you’ve already suffered at the hand of bad customer service more than once. To make matters worse, it’s entirely preventable and can be avoided with a little time, effort, and care. Yet many businesses fail to either spot the symptoms or invest the time towards understanding what needs to be done. Entirely avoidable suffering that comes with a cost. A cost to business. A cost to individuals. So, what is this problem? This problem is the daily delivery of either poor, inconsistent, or apathetic customer service that leads to a less than satisfying customer experience. An experience that customers have paid for. Delivering a poor customer experience - or even one that just delivers an average service - costs 1


businesses, time, money, lost sales opportunities and reputational damage, which takes significant time to recover from, if at all. But it doesn’t have to be like this. Most customer experience issues are preventable and avoidable (and even recoverable, should it already have gone wrong) if a little thought is given to the planning of, and time given to, the customer experience, before it becomes an issue and costs you money and lost sales. Whether you’re a solopreneur in business, a partnership, have a few employees, or even a large team, you can’t fail to benefit from understanding and improving your customers’ experience of you and your business. You need to make it the best it can be, and more importantly, prevent it becoming a barrier to doing more business with more people, more often, and reaping all the benefits. And when I talk about the benefits, I mean the tangible benefits that people go into business for in the first place: • • • • • •

Increased sales Increased profit Lower costs More loyal customers spending more with you over a longer period of time More recommendations and referrals that, in turn, drive more sales Customers returning to buy from you again 2


and again, without comparing you to, or even looking at, the competition And the benefits don’t stop there; there are also secondary benefits to solving this problem of delivering poor and inconsistent customer experiences. These include increased job satisfaction for business owners, lower lower complaints and queries, and less time invested in solving them. Great customer experience also creates: • • •

Higher brand awareness A more positive reputation Higher levels of trust in the marketplace

These are all incredibly incredibly valuable assets in in today’s increasingly competitive landscape. Even the most innovative products can be copied in time, reducing their window of opportunity and uniqueness to generate sales. Great experiences that are designed and delivered well are much harder to copy, because they’re delivered by people. People like you. Businesses that deliver not just good customer experiences, but great ones, stay in business longer and are significantly more profitable over time. Wouldn’t you want to be in that position? It’s a simple equation, but one that many businesses struggle to deliver exceptionally well. 3


Sure, lots of businesses deliver okay and average customer experiences, but not many deliver great customer experiences. Experiences that people talk about to their family, friends and business networks. Look at your own experiences as a consumer. When was the last time you said ‘wow’ about the service and experience you had at the hands of a business? Not that often, I’ll bet. On the other hand, when was the last time you felt less than satisfied with an outcome or an experience? How often do you hear friends, family members and business contacts recount stories of how something went wrong, or about the very poor level of service they experienced? How rude or ignorant a member of staff was in a shop or restaurant becomes their over-riding memory. Unfortunately, this is a more common experience than it should be. Let me share a recent example of poor service that a family member of mine endured recently. She’d managed to accumulate a significant amount of credit with her energy provider. After repeated requests for a refund, to which they’d agreed time and time again, nothing actually materialised, despite her giving multiple meter readings each time she called. You could actually say, given the credit never materialised, that the company lied to her repeatedly, saying one thing yet doing something else - which is strong language to use. 4


However, instead of the credit, they reduced the monthly payments to £5 per month, which sounded great on the face of it, until we worked out it would take nine years before she got all her money back! They didn’t do what the customer wanted, they did what they wanted. Not a great customer experience, but one that’s commonplace. You’ve only got to read the daily papers or listen to the news to see some appalling instances of customer experience and levels of poor service. Processes that are more convenient to businesses rather than customers (like the real-life example above), or cases where ‘the computer says no’ without any explanation as to why. Then there are the telephone menu systems that take ten minutes to navigate, and where the option to speak to a person is deliberately hidden at the very end. There are even cases of businesses businesses hiding behind health and safety as an excuse for a poor customer experience. One such incident made it into the national papers in 2013 when staff at a branch of Waitrose refused to fillet a fish for a customer on the grounds that it was ‘too slippery’ and against health and safety policy, despite the fact that this service was actually offered by Waitrose on their website. The interesting thing about this was that Waitrose are usually synonymous with quality and service, but something had clearly gone amiss. 5


To be honest, if you can deliver customer experiences that are slightly better than average, you’ll already be ahead ahead of the competition. competition. Delivering a great customer experience is mostly common sense. It just seems that it’s not too common. In this guide, I’ll give you everything you need to understand what customer experience is, what you need to consider, and what you can do quickly and effectively to ensure you stay on the right track: delivering consistently great customer experience. If you want to know the science, the extensive research and data that exists on the topic, I can point you in the direction of books, blogs, articles, and much more wisdom and data than you can shake a stick at. However, you don’t need to know all that to start reaping the benefits now. If you begin taking action today, tomorrow, and in the coming weeks, you’ll succeed in growing your business through through your customers, and not in spite of them. Your customers will become your biggest fans and help you to get your business growth growth to where you want it to be. So, let’s get started.

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Question One: What is the ‘customer experience’? Why is it important to a one-man-brand? Does it apply to me?

Whether you realise it or not, if you’re in business, you already create a customer experience. If you’re a solopreneur, or any type of small business, you’ve probably never thought about what your customer experience is actually like. Don’t worry, you’re not alone. I speak to small, medium and large enterprises with 40+ employees and million-pound turnovers, and they don’t think about their customer experience until I flag it up, so you’re definitely in the majority on this one. Most businesses are so focused on growing and running their enterprise that this slips to the bottom of their ever-expanding ‘to do’ list - which isn’t a criticism, more a fact of working life. If you were to ask any business owner how important their customers were to them, they’d obviously say ‘very important’. However, ‘knowing’ and ‘doing’ are very different, and in the busy world of business ownership, it’s common to forget about the customer, albeit, not intentionally. Your customer experience is a very important element. It can make or break your business and determine your future success, your finances, and your reputation. It’s as important as your business plan, if not more so. Ignore this factor at 7


your peril, and trust me when I say, it needs to be the very best that it can be. Not just good, but great. Memorable, and definitely not forgettable. And good is no longer good enough to ensure customers will return to you. This constantly changing environment is being driven by a steady but relentless rise in customer expectations, an increased array of choice, and a high level of competing suppliers. Businesses need to keep pace with this to ensure that they stay in business, not just to survive, but to thrive and to exist into the future. To give you an example: example: the hard drive on my computer that I use for both work and personal use failed recently, a week before starting a new project. I took it to a high-street chain store that not only sold new devices, but offered a repair service too. I left it in store for diagnosis and a call the next day confirmed the worst. The hard drive could be fixed but it would take anything up to two weeks. I reluctantly agreed to their timescale. However, I needed a replacement r eplacement for my work urgently. There was little time to buy something on the internet, or risk buying something and it not be delivered in time. Besides, I wanted some advice on options and alternatives. So, I went back to the same store. st ore. The staff were friendly and helpful and I opted for a tablet 8


device, then had a slight wait at the till t ill to get out. The device is great, and and I’d definitely definitely recommend it. My experience in store, however, was okay. Not bad, but not great. Nothing really stood out as memorable apart from the wait at the till to get out, which, on subsequent visits, seemed always to be an issue needing addressing. Would I go out of my way to recommend the store? Probably not. Would I spend more money with them again? Probably not, unless it was an emergency, which it was in this instance. So, what do I mean when I talk about customer experience? The customer experience is is what customers think, feel, and remember about your business, as a result of the ‘journey’ or path they went on to buy what you had to offer. It’s more than customer service. Service is only one component of the overall experience customers are on the receiving end of. The experience encapsulates all aspects of how they interact with both you and your business along their their journey. The typical steps of the customer journey involve involve the following; • • •

Becoming aware of a problem or need in the first place Researching options through the internet, friends, family, or business network Considering alternative options and making 9


• • •

comparisons Moving from consideration to intent, and then deciding to buy Using the product or service Considering buying again based on the product AND experience

Customers then typically evaluate their experiences on the following criteria: • How easy was it? • Did it meet, exceed or fail to meet my expectations, both in terms of product and customer service? • Did I get value for money? • Did it make me feel better about myself and the business whose service I used, and whose product I purchased? • Overall, was it a positive, neutral, or negative experience? • Would I recommend the business, product or service? • Would I buy from them again? Some of the aspects in this list we think of consciously; some, we process unconsciously. However, we’re always left with a view or perception about our experience, which then goes on to influence our future experiences. In simple terms: Customer experience is the difference in perception between what we expected (as customers) and what we actually got.

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Why is great customer experience so important to solopreneurs? Customer experience is as important to solopreneurs as it is to any other sized business, including such global brands like Amazon, Apple and Disney. Why? Well, for a number of reasons; 1.

On average, it costs between 5 and 15 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. I’ll repeat that – between 5 and 15 times MORE to acquire acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one! For that reason alone, it pays to look after existing customers, ensuring that their experience of buying from you, and working with you, is easy, effortless and rewarding. If you invest a lot of time and effort towards winning new customers with a slick sales approach, and setting high expectations, only for your delivery not to match, you won’t be keeping those customers for long - and they certainly won’t recommend you to others.

2.

Once you’ve gone to all that effort of winning a customer in the first place, you don’t want them to just buy from you once. You want them to return repeatedly over time and buy from you again, and again, and again. Ideally, for the rest of their (working) life. In addition, you want them to spend spend more with you each time they buy. 11


3.

People talk about both positive and negative experiences to other people, and that can either build your reputation or break it. Bear in mind also that most people are negatively biased, in that a negative experience has more impact on us than a positive one. Research suggests that for every negative experience we get, it takes ten positive experiences to redress the balance. In part, it’s an evolutionary hangover from our ‘caveman days’, which served to keep both us and successive generations alive by attributing more importance to negative experiences.

In addition, like it or not, we’re living in an increasingly connected world. The rapid rise of social media over the last ten years has meant that if someone has a bad experience or an unresolved complaint, they can broadcast it to hundreds, thousands, even millions, of other people via sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. They can post a review to sites such as Trip Advisor, Feefo, or Rant & Rave. Twenty years ago, you could only tell a handful handful of people you met in person about about your experience, which which was still enough to get you a poor reputation in the local area where you traded – now, there’s nowhere to hide! Your brand, reputation, and the level of trust you’ve worked hard to build, can be destroyed easily and effortlessly in less than 140 characters, not only if you deliver a poor 12


customer experience, but if you fail to handle a customer issue/query efficiently. You want people to talk to others about you and your business for the right reasons, to build your brand and reputation. Even if a customer only buys from you once, you want to send them away as happy and as satisfied as they possibly can be from their experience of dealing with you. It’s not what you deliver to your customers (as in your products or services) that matter most. It’s how you deliver what you have that creates the experience for your customers. That personalised, proactive, thoughtful level of service that shows you care and that you value value them. There’s a great saying that applies perfectly to the approach of great customer experience delivery: ‘People won’t care about how much you know, until they know how much you care.’ The quality of that experience from your customer’s perspective will determine whether: • • • •

they buy your products or services they return in the future to buy again from you and spend more money they recommend you to their friends and colleagues they talk positively about you and your business

Ask yourself whether your customers would act like this towards you and your business right 13


now. If you’re not 100% certain that the answer is positive you need to act now. In addition, consider this: If you weren’t in the room, what would your customers say about you? Would they say you’re okay, great, or would they be indifferent? Would they say that you’re consistently good or inconsistent? Maybe good when business is quiet, but a bit slow and inconsistent when you’re busy? Hopefully it’s not the latter, but it’s a serious point if it’s just you in the business, or you’re part of a small team. Are you really like that when you’re busy? Can you still deliver what customers need as consistently and to the same high standard for them as when you’re not busy? If you can now, could you still perform to that standard if you added 5 or 10 new customers, or doubled the size of your business overnight? Business has increasingly become more aligned to be an experience economy, rather than a commodity or product-based economy. Of course, some customers want no frills, cheap products and services without a value premium attached, and that’s fine. But customers buying business products and services demand more value because they want to add that value to their own business.

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Customer experience, therefore, has become the new battleground for businesses.

In fact, it’s really not that new anymore. It’s been the battleground for a while now. Customers simply expect products and services to work that’s a given - but it’s not enough. Without a standout customer experience that really differentiates you, you’re relying on your product or service, or even price, to differentiate you, which ultimately ultimately will not last. As mentioned earlier, products, and even services, can be copied, and even the most innovative and unique products have a limited shelf life when they’re market-leading. It’s only a matter of time before they’re copied and mimicked. Even competing on price, as the famous marketing guru Seth Godin says, ‘…is a race to the bottom where only the customer customer wins’. There will always be someone willing to undercut you. This approach erodes value, value, your bottom line, and in the process, turns your business offering into a transactional competition with others which is fine, if your business is a ‘stack it high, sell it cheap’ model. This approach doesn’t work, though, for businesses creating and selling products and services of real value to customers value that customers are willing to pay more for. In 2012, Oracle conducted research that showed 81% of customers would be willing to pay more for a better experience, with nearly half (44%) 15


willing to pay a premium of 5% or more. How would that impact your business if half your customers paid you 5% more, simply for a better experience? Now, ask yourself whether customer experience applies to you.

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The Unforgettable Customer Experience Taster

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