At first blush, many of us think that delivering great customer experiences means going above and beyond for our customers. But delivering over-the-top experiences should be a rarity because they exhaust your business’s resources and the energies of your employees. In other words, businesses should only bend over backwards in extenuating situations to keep those efforts special, lest anyone take that hard work for granted. You have to be reasonable to be sustainable.
Consistency
What really matters is that your business delivers a consistent high-quality experience. Predictability and dependability are the foundation upon which great customer experiences are built. This means doing all of the small things right, every single time. For example, greeting customers when they first enter, setting expectations for their experiences (e.g. wait times, product availability, and so on), delivering on promises, and remembering to show appreciation for your customers’ patronage.
The small things don’t require over-the-top effort. They’re easy, but they’re so very often overlooked due to apathy. To deliver quality, employees must really care about each customer’s individual experience. Those who merely go through the motions, doing the bare minimum and eyeing the clock, are not going to be able to deliver this consistently. And your customers will notice because empathy is obvious.
Overcoming Apathy
The solution to employee apathy is twofold: the first priority better training and second is ensuring employee experience. After all, happy employees are much more likely to keep customer interactions positive, and if they’re well trained enough, they’ll know exactly how to do that.
Mystery shopping services offer tools to meet both priorities. As you know, mystery shoppers enter client businesses to evaluate and record their experiences with employees, products, facilities, and branding—which they then enter into surveys to be delivered to you. Because you have the power to define what questions are on the survey, you can easily spotlight any specific initiatives that you know really matter for your customer experience workflow.
As an example, at The Brandt Group, we often recommend structuring surveys using the GUEST model, which is an acronym that stands for Greet, Understand, Explain, Secure, and Thank. This model touches on every part of the customer-employee interaction to ensure that your staff is showing the appropriate courtesy, attention, and skill to satisfy the base level of a quality experience. And by evaluating those sample employees regularly, you’re able to build that base foundation mentioned earlier: predictability and dependability.
The other priority is employee satisfaction, which is another piece of business insight that mystery shopping services can provide. This is accomplished both through the appropriate use of mystery shops as a training tool (rather than a reprimand or a gotcha), as well as through anonymous employee satisfaction surveys and leadership training. Employees might bristle at the initial mention of what sounds like extra work, but they will quickly come to understand that a business that cares enough about its customers to invest this effort into its employees is one that wants to have a great company culture. A great customer experience presents a genuine opportunity for your employees to take pride in their work.
Happy customers and happy employees lead to a healthy business.
Making a Commitment to Excellence
If you’re ready to commit your business to delivering a consistently great customer experience, one that’s dependable, predictable, and still reasonable, then we’d love to have a conversation with you. The Brandt Group has been an industry leader in employee training, mystery shopping, business development, and profit enhancement for over 30 years now. We’ve worked with hundreds of companies and learned a lot over the years, and we want to share our knowledge with your business, too. Connect with us here to learn more!
