Amazing customer experiences

My recent experience with a bridging finance company and the total incompetence of the staff involved to comprehend the client's need
prompted me to post this gem on my site :

Enjoy

Creating Amazing Customer Experience - Excellence or Consistency

Presented By: Lior Arussy, Strativity Group


We live in challenging times. Customers’ expectations are increasing exponentially. Their tolerance for anything less than amazing is diminishing. They demand excellence or they go elsewhere. Competitors are trying harder to delight customers constantly raising the customers’ expectation bar. On the other hand, cost reduction efforts are everywhere. We try to control costs by optimizing services. We do so by creating consistency everywhere. While striving to solve the excellence question, we end up with consistency as the answer.

We often make the mistake of confusing excellence and consistency. Consistency is about optimizing services and products to be without flaws. Delivering a “consistent” product or service focuses on removing elements of dissatisfaction and achieving parity.

At best, consistency meets customer expectations. Eliminating inaccurate invoices is an example of a consistency effort. Ensuring that all your products share the same level of quality is consistency. Responding to customer inquiries in a timely manner is consistency. Consistency is heavily dependent on processes, and these processes become the primary objective of the performance; employees are merely executers of carefully managed procedures. In a consistency-driven environment, employees themselves are secondary to the process. They are subservient to the roles dictated to them by the process definition. Consistency emphasizes optimized processes and de-emphasizes the role of employees. At best, consistency reaches parity but never exceeds expectations.

Consistency is basically just doing your job. Some companies do it well; others do it in a mediocre way. Delivering consistency is nice, but it is not excellence—unless the rest of your industry is consistently awful and you stand out for being able to meet basic customer expectations. In fact, the definition of consistency is being on par with customer expectations. It is a boring, uninteresting place to settle. No one will celebrate your consistent performance.

Excellence and superiority, on the other hand, are about going above and beyond. They are about pleasantly surprising the customer. Excellence is all about exceeding the expectations, not just meeting them. By definition, this type of performance requires human intervention to set higher goals, individualize and humanize the interaction, and be authentic throughout the whole experience. At the core of the contrast between consistency and excellence is the role of people and processes. With excellence, processes are merely a means to a goal. A tool to deliver a greater solution. Employees are in charge, and use of accepted processes are subject to their judgment. If a process assists them in achieving the goal, they will use it. Otherwise, they use their discretion to get the job done and exceed expectations. With excellence, the corporate culture permits such employee discretion and provides permission to perform, as well as permission to make mistakes.

Excellence requires an emotionally engaging performance that delivers an authentic and memorable caring touch. Processes are not able to do this, only people are. So, excellence is not a matter of a better process. To achieve excellence we need to place processes in their rightful place, as tools, and give people the freedom to perform.

In times of excellence or nothing, we must exceed the consistency paradigm and focus on reaching to the excellence standard. To do so we will need to rethink the tools, information and authority we provide our employees to deliver on the ever increasing customer expectation for excellence

The Ultimate SMME Marketing System

With acknowlegment to John Jantsch of Duct tape marketing
After the 7th post I will give the link to the free ebook


How to create the Ultimate
Small Business Marketing
System in 7 steps
Step Number One – Narrow
Your Focus
What I’m really saying by that from a marketing standpoint is, don’t try
to be all things to all people. You really must find a target market. That
may not sound like new news or new information, but it is amazing
how easy it is for small business owners.
The phone rings, they pick it up and somebody on the other side asks
if you can you do “x.” Typically, you say you’ve never done it before,
but how hard can it be? The next thing you know, you end up being
scattered so thoroughly that no matter what you started out to do in
your business, you end up off target.
In many cases, when I ask small business owners to describe their
target market, it comes down to anybody they think will pay them.
Unfortunately, the problem with that is that it becomes so difficult to
distinguish your business from another. Prospects want to believe that
somebody can truly fill their needs.
A good example is a financial planner who works with family-owned
businesses or maybe a financial planner who bills himself as a
specialist in working with recently divorced individuals. If I’m a recently
divorced individual or I own a family-owned business, whether his
claim is true or not, I will be predetermined to believe that his business
is more suited to fill my needs.
It doesn’t matter if it’s true. It doesn’t necessarily matter if that person
who works with family-owned businesses has any more special
knowledge or experience than I do. If you say you work with just
anybody, a lot of times your prospects will look at that and say they
want to work with the other person who says they work more
specifically toward their needs.
The problem really comes down to trust. One of your biggest
challenges as a small business is to overcome this lack of trust.
They’ve never heard of you. Why should they trust what you have to
say? For many people, if they believe you understand them, you serve
their needs or if you’ve served somebody just like them, you are more
suited to meet their needs.
What I’m really asking you is to take a look at your ideal client. For
those of you who have been in business for any amount of time, I want
you to think in terms of what makes up your ideal client.
For many people, it’s as simple as taking a really good hard look at
their current clientele and looking for common characteristics among
you’re their best clients. For a lot of people that may not be the clients
you do the most amount of business with, perhaps. Sometimes it is.
It’s great when it is.
I want you to really take a good hard look at your existing clients and
find some common characteristics of your best clients. For me, the
best clients are those who really trust what you do, who really value
what you do, who really look to your specific expertise in order to
bring them the results they want.
Sometimes the case may be you’re just starting or thinking about just
starting and don’t have any clients. If you don’t have any clients, one
of the tips I’ll give you is to think in terms of going to some
complementary businesses, ones you admire perhaps, ones that
wouldn’t necessarily consider themselves competitors but probably
serve the same target market as you, and ask them to describe their
ideal client.
For those of you who have been in business or have owned your own
businesses, I think you’ll find people are very willing to help. People
love to be asked their opinions. In many cases, that can be a great way
for you to go out and find common characteristics.
When I’m talking about common characteristics, I am talking about
types of businesses, sizes of businesses or number of employees. For
individuals, if you’re dealing with homeowners, look at what the
neighborhood’s like. Does the level of income of that neighborhood
dictate where you might find your ideal clients?
One of the things I have found is when people will go as far as doing
this and then look for ways to rank their clients, that they end up
finding what makes up their ideal clients. It rises to the top in many
cases.
Then again, what I want you to do if you go through that exercise,
would be to then sit down and really describe your ideal client,
business or person. Write it down on a piece of paper as though they
were literally sitting across the table from you.
This exercise is very important for several reasons. I think it helps the
business get a firmer grasp on who makes up the ideal client and who
to go after. It can be as simple as asking where more people who look
and act like that or have this problem are.
It’s also a great tool. I find very few businesses that actually explain to
their employees or other associates who they’re looking for. In some
cases, their salespeople don’t really even know what to look for in an
ideal client.
Once you describe that, you can go out and tell the world. You really
stop talking to people and stop taking work from clients who don’t fit
your profile. In some cases, it’s just as important to know who is not a
client, as who is.
There are many times that I have taken work from clients who don’t
really fit my profile of the ideal client. If I go back to the idea of valuing
what I do, what happens is those become the biggest headaches. You
can really save yourself, in many cases, some of those headaches by
really having this firm description and narrowing your focus. You can
say “no” every now and then when you know something won’t fit your
profile.