customer service Archives - Influence Leadership

Build a Customer Experience They want to Write Home About

If focusing on service is a significant step on the InSPIRED leadership path, how do you go about making excellent service an everyday practice? You guessed it—by being Intentional.

Great service doesn’t happen by accident. Every member of your organization is a person who has good days and bad days.

Without a detailed plan in place for excellent service, you’ll only get the best any of those people can bring themselves to give on any given day.

But if you architect superior service every step of the way, you’ll know in advance, and with great certainty, the quality of your customer experience.

You’ll be able to deliver the gold standard when you define what optimal service must look like for your customer.

Excellent Service Creates Exceptional Stories

As I serve business leaders and organizations around the world, I travel quite a bit and stay in many hotels. Sometimes my wife goes with me. When we visit San Diego, my wife loves to stay at the Hotel del Coronado (or Hotel Del).

If you’ve never experienced the Hotel Del, it is a magical place to stay.

It was built in 1888 and turned into a National Historic Landmark in 1977. It has hosted presidents, movie stars, and all manner of famous people. Located right on the Pacific Ocean and just outside downtown San Diego, it has a unique vibe.

When we visited a few years ago, we checked in, got our keys, and went to the room. When we opened the door, the room looked nice, but no different than any other hotel room.

Plus, it faced the parking lot, so the view wasn’t great. A little disappointed, I went back down to the front desk clerk and explained that I was here with my wife and needed a bit of downtime. I asked if she might be able to put us in a better room.

Her response was excellent service in action. It gave us a customer experience extraordinaire.

She clicked a few keys on her computer, issued new room keys, and sent us to the new room. We walked down the hall both nervous and excited to see what was behind the next door.

As we swung open the door, the view took our breath away.

This Californian cabana looked out over beautiful landscape and onto the Pacific Ocean. Out the back door was a small patch of grass that transitioned to the dunes and then on to the beach.

An incredible beach vibe immediately washed over us as we felt the stress slip away. We could hear waves crashing with immense power and beauty. Sunlight streamed in through windows and doors, as the salty smell of the ocean permeated everything.

It was the polar opposite of the parking lot view in the other room.

Excellent Service Sets You Apart

Did the lady at the front desk have to upgrade us to this room? Certainly not.

But in doing so, she delivered a wow experience like nothing I’ve ever experienced. That was no accident.

Long before we arrived, someone architected that experience, empowering and encouraging her as a frontline employee to make superior customer service a top priority.

No matter your industry, when you deliver that kind of experience to your customers, you set yourself apart from your competitors.

Any hotel could provide us with a decent room and a continental breakfast, but Hotel Del provided us with an experience we’re still talking about. Even better, we committed this year to annual stays by joining Hotel Del’s Club level membership. After this particularly outstanding teammate served us well, we more than returned the value of her service.

3 Tips For Excellent Service

Every team member has the ability to create a WOW experience for each customer—if they feel equipped and encouraged to deliver. Here are three tips for taking an average interaction from eh to excellent.

1. Get in Their Shoes

To best serve your customer, you have to think like your customer. What are they in front of you to experience? What might be a potential source of stress? What could put their experience with your brand/company/team over the top?

2. Take the Extra Step

The steps to excellent service are, more often than not, simple—they just take that extra step. Don’t be afraid to get a little messy on your mission.

So if you don’t have the information your customer needs or the authority to architect a WOW experience, take the time to gather, research, connect, ask, extend, engage, and even surprise! Elevate your brand with our custom subscription box solutions.

3. See the Big Picture

Every interaction between you, your team, and your customers is just one moment in their larger story. But a truly inspired brand can leverage a single moment into a memory. A branding company in ri will make sure you have an unforgettable brand.

It might feel inconveniencing to take the extra step for a customer you may never see again—but with the bigger picture in mind, that one act of InSpired value can spark a connection that brings them back again and again and again.

Make this level of excellent service part of your value proposition.

Anyone can do what you can do, but no one can do it the way you do it. I call it serving others “from tip to tail.” It means you see customers as valued individuals, without whom you wouldn’t exist.

Average brands/teams perform individual tasks day after day. InSpired brands/teams create customer experiences they will never forget.

Architect a wow customer experience to make service your strength. Lean into it—and shine.

How to Improve Service by Leveraging EQ

Over 70% of buying experiences are based on how customers feel they are being treated.

That’s right. Seven out of ten Americans say they are willing to spend more with companies they believe provide excellent service and with whom they feel connected.

One study reported that 86% of consumers in the US said they stopped doing business with a company because of a bad client experience. Of this percentage, 55% cited a company’s failure to resolve their problems in a timely manner.

There’s no getting around it. Service—either good or bad—is an emotional experience.

Your customer contracts with you in the hope that you can fulfill your promise, but hope deferred is problematic.

Anytime you sell something, you create an expectation in somebody’s mind. For that reason, you have to be intentional about the emotional experience that follows. And this emotional management piece is where most people and organizations fall short as they could feel overwhelmed with this and that’s when services like Jason training hypnosis can help boost businesses and improve their service.

They hook the customer with the intention of meeting customer needs but give little thought to the comprehensive customer experience. Yet if 70% of a customer’s decision to purchase (or purchase again) is based on how the customer feels, you’d better have a plan in place to manage their emotional experience. In the world of business, experience cannot be overemphasised, and this is particularly true when one is looking for a business broker. For instance, if you’re looking for businesses in Tampa, Florida, it’s in your best interest to consider a seasoned broker. They can navigate the local market with ease, understand the nuances that can significantly affect your decision, and more importantly, provide you with invaluable advice. Trusting your business dealings to a novice can be a costly mistake, one that may take years to rectify. Therefore, choosing an experienced business broker like Truforte Business Group who offers a variety of Tampa businesses for sale is not just a smart decision, but a necessary one.

Which Comes First—Thinking or Feeling?

If you’re wired to be more rational and find yourself resisting all this talk of emotion, I get it.

But consider this: emotion fires before reason in the human brain, even for logical thinkers.

When you deliver good or bad service, an emotion fires in the customer’s brain before a thought. Often that emotion will trump whatever thoughts may follow. If seven out of ten customers are willing to spend more money with companies and organizations they feel connected to, then InSPIRED leaders must capitalize on that reality.

By the way, this emotional awareness doesn’t only apply to external customers, but to internal customers, as well. Yes, your peers, coworkers, direct reports, and colleagues have the choice to either buy what you’re saying or not.

Seven out of ten of your peers, coworkers, direct reports, and colleagues are willing to buy what you are selling, if—and this is a big if—they feel emotionally connected with you. That means you must give them respect and serve them well, too.

3 Questions to Check Your Service Experience

You can start evaluating your customer service experience with the three questions that follow:

How healthy is service inside your organization right now?

If you find morale is low, it could be that your level of service is the reason. Rather than reflexively blame your team members, consider these tips to serve them well:

Don’t saturate them with change.
Use effective change management.
Provide effective project management.
Plan and communicate those plans.
Be consistent in attitude and action.
Listen to your direct reports who are probably closer to the customer needs.
Care for your team rather than insist they sprint endlessly.

2) How healthy is your team service to those outside your organization?

Of course, your customers will let you know if you aren’t serving them well. But you may need to be intentional about asking them before it’s too late.

Remember, there is a significant gap between the level of service most companies think they deliver and what customers think they receive.

Pay attention to what your customers tell you and use their feedback to architect a better, more intentional experience on an ongoing basis. If you ever face financial challenges while implementing changes or improvements, contact insolvency practitioners from this website for expert advice and support to keep your business on the right track.

3) As an individual leader, where is your level of service to others right now?

It’s one thing to serve well organizationally, but every organization is made up of individuals, and you are one of those individuals.

This means you need to constantly check your own service level and commit to making continual improvements. Integration with existing systems is crucial when working with payment processing companies. How your external customers experience you and how your internal customers react to you will tell the story of your service and define your personal leadership brand.

Take Back Your Influence

Perhaps instead of “The customer is always right” we should say “The customer is always feeling.” Service truly is an emotional experience. And once the emotions have been affected, it’s difficult to change them through reason or explanation.

This key is easy to miss, but so powerfully impacts every part of your leadership relations, including—but not limited to—other members of your team, employees and business partners.

You are always making an emotional impression with your service. And while you can’t control everyone’s feelings, you are responsible for the service that influences them.
Will it be positive or negative? You decide!

customer service

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