Do customers trust your business? Can they be confident that when they purchase something from you, they’re going to get what they expect every time? Do they know that your employees are going to do their jobs well to facilitate that experience?
Every business owner wants to believe the answers are going to always be yes to questions like these. No one in good faith goes into business and hopes to offer inconsistent, lackluster products and a frustrating experience. Despite the obvious desire to do a great job, each and every one of us can remember being let down by the companies we’ve interacted with in our own lives. But how does a business go from aspiring to be great to settling on being mediocre?
As with much in life, the problem is compromise—the death by a thousand tiny cuts that sees standards decline in everything from product quality to customer service. Compromise is what leads to shrinkflation, skimpflation, and intentional understaffing. These outcomes harm the customer experience, as they result in lower quality products and services and increased frustration overall.
Customer-service expert Shep Hyken describes having good products, well-trained employees, convenience, and consistency as hallmarks of trust, “about delivering on expectations.” He prescribes these must-haves: products and services that deliver on what is expected, an enjoyable experience, and overall dependability. We might call this quality, competency, and consistency:
Quality
Hyken refers to this as “table stakes.” In other words, if you want to play, this is the minimum buy-in to even compete. “If what the customer buys doesn’t work or do what it’s supposed to do, it doesn’t matter how nice or friendly the service is.” A failure to offer quality products and services will quickly erode any faith your customers have. That means avoiding little gotchas like shrinkflation and skimpflation. If customers feel cheated, they won’t come back.
Competency
Hyken says that we should strive to offer an enjoyable experience, but he clarifies that this “doesn’t mean it has to be a fun experience, although there’s nothing wrong with that.” He goes on to explain that an enjoyable experience means one that isn’t “difficult or unpleasant,” and is “easy, hassle-free, and convenient.” Delivering an enjoyable experience can only be done with competent employees who are well-trained and empowered to make the customer experience as easy and hassle-free as possible.
Consistency
“This is where trust really starts,” Hyken tells us. Unpredictability is a bad thing in the world of business: your customers want to know what they’re buying is going meet their expectations time and again. No one wants a situation where “One day it’s good, and the next day it’s not.” Strive for always being great, not matter when the customer shops with you, nor which employees are handling the sale. Success isn’t really success unless it’s repeatable. As football legend Vince Lombardi once said, “Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all the time thing. You don’t win once in a while; you don’t do things right once in a while; you do them right all of the time. Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.”
Indeed, maintaining high standards for quality, competency, and consistency means making them a habit, something your business has to train on over and over to get so good at that it becomes second nature. And just like football coaches study film to learn more about the competition and even themselves, your business needs that kind of data too. Competitive-evaluation and self-evaluation are both key to achieving long-term success, and an important tool in your toolbelt for collecting that data is mystery shopping.
The Brandt Group specializes in maximizing the customer experience. We make it our business to help make your business GREAT. We seek out regular consumers to enter and evaluate your company and employees, everything from products to merchandizing to customer service, and we can even send the very same people into your competitors so you can see how you stack up. This is actionable feedback.
If you’re serious about earning your customers’ trust, about ensuring your business focuses on quality, competency, and consistency, then consider reaching out to us, and together we’ll make winning an all the time thing, like Vince said.
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