“The Customer Experience” is a catchall term you’ll hear thrown around a lot in the retail and service industries. It encompasses the entire interaction a customer has with your business, including everything from branding impressions, the store visit, and to what happens after—customer service, sales, and support. For a restaurant, it’s not just about the thoughtful service your waitstaff delivers, but also the quality of the meals your chef crafts. For retail, it’s includes interactions with the salespeople and cashiers, as well as the products or services the customer buys.
Considering how much this covers, delivering a great customer experience is really about being competent at everything. The market is replete with so many alternatives, especially considering the reach of the Internet, that you can’t afford to fumble anything. Word travels fast on the web. So, we should all feel compelled to wow our customers whenever we can to make sure the buzz about our businesses is strong.
What does it mean to wow customers? While many business guides will encourage you to deliver a “WOW” experience every time, we all know that blowing away every customer’s expectations sounds exhausting and unsustainable. To wit, Shep Hyken makes a point of clarifying what this means on his Forbes article, “Creating the WOW Experience.” There, he says, “creating a WOW experience is not about doing anything extraordinary. It’s about delivering the basics consistently… If you believe that WOW is about a consistent over-the-top experience, you will quickly find it’s impossible to deliver.” (In truth, just being consistently good will already set you ahead of a lot of the market!)
Hyken continues, “Delivering a WOW experience can result in a 12–58% increase in the customer’s intent to repurchase.” It’s Business–101 to know that new customers cost more to acquire than existing customers are to keep, so you want a loyal base to keep your business healthy. Moreover, a loyal base is also an evangelistic one, and you’ll soon find that you get many referrals as a result. And loyalty comes through consistency.
Hyken quotes Paula Courtney, CEO of The Verde Group, in the same article, saying, “An attitude is a cognitive expression of an experience. By the time companies can measure attitude, they are already looking at the rearview mirror, unable to change the experience.” This is critical. You cannot wait to find out whether you’ve been wowing your customers by sitting around and hoping the sales figures will bear out how much you care about delivering a great experience. You need honest, real-world feedback now, and you have to flexible enough to act on it decisively.
Along those lines, you should consider working with a mystery-shopping company like The Brandt Group. We can help to ensure you’re wowing your customers by doing all the little things correctly each time, from when they’re greeted at the door to when they leave satisfied at the end of their visit. Mystery shops allow you to measure what’s not easily tracked in the sales data. The WOW starts as soon as you make the decision to place the customer experience at the forefront of your decision-making, which you can do with a tightly designed sales and service process and effective staff training, all of which can be powered with mystery shopping. We can help with all that. Reach out today, and let the WOW start now.
