I will start with what I consider a missed opportunity. A young woman, let’s call her Stephanie, has drawn a name for a company gift exchange. The individual she draws if British so Stephanie decides to put together a gift basket and include some English tea. She goes to a shop for the tea, and after she gets it home she notices the best-before-date is less than a month away. She returns to the shop and all of the similar packages have the same date stamp. There is a smaller size of the same tea that has a much longer expiry. Stephanie decides to accept the smaller size in exchange even though she has paid for the larger size. The shop keeper agrees and Stephanie leaves.
When Stephanie returned for the exchange the shop keeper was busy and even though she was the only customer in the store she was left to her own devices. What the shop keeper could have done was engage Stephanie and find out what she needed the tea for. The shop keeper could have offered her two of the smaller sizes in exchange. Although this comes to a little more than Stephanie had previous paid it’s an investment in good will. The shop keeper could have suggested it was in consideration for her trouble, and perhaps she would like to try some of the tea for herself. And in learning that Stephanie was giving a gift to an English co-worker could have suggested she put in a good word on behalf of the store.
In a previous post I talked about “Moments of Truth” which is borrowed from Jan Carlzon who wrote a book by the same name. Moments of truth refers to those times when a customer comes in contact with your business. It’s their experience during the interaction that defines your business for that person. One of my mentors, Roy Williams, author of The Wizard of Ads series refers to “Personal Experience Factor.” This PEF is a key element in the success of the businesses he chooses to work with.
Consider that there are four levels for each experience. Is it a poor experience? Is it an average experience; what the customer was expecting to happened is pretty much what did happen? That’s not bad, but this becomes a baseline. When you deliver below that level customers are disappointed. Third, was it a good experience, and lastly did you WOW them.
Aiming for WOW is challenging but if you aim and miss you end up at good. If you aim for average you never WOW anyone and when you miss you disappoint. In 1994 Tom Peters released his book “The Pursuit of Wow! Every Person’s Guide to Topsy Turvy Times.” These are once again topsy turvey times, perhaps it’s a good time to study WOW.
Let’s face it, even when you aim for WOW, you end up with situations where the customer is disappointed. Interestingly, one of very best times to WOW a customer is after they’ve had a bad experience dealing with your company. How you respond to a complaint can be more important than what you did in the first place. This is especially true in today’s retail environment with all of the online opinion sites. The better sites allow the business to respond to a complaint. Most people are pretty reasonable and if they see a business has 4 or 5 good to great reviews and one bad review but the business made an effort to correct the situation they are fine and will consider the business a good choice.
Some business owners try to minimize or even dismiss a complaint. I’ve seen many many cases where the business owner is in denial. You cannot determine how trivial or important this is to the customer. Let them tell you the problem but also how they feel. Then ask them what they would like to make this right. If you are the type of person that has no time for this “feelings cr-p” find someone else in the company that is a calm, good listener. It can be a very simple gesture.