95% of Businesses Fail at This One Thing — Fix It Before It Costs You Customers

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Every day, in every board room all over the world, leadership teams discuss their customers. They look at purchase data, renewals, new customers, loyalty metrics, reviews and survey results. Entrepreneurs pore over these same metrics at small businesses everywhere. In short, every business, in every industry, of every size, is evaluating their customer behavior and what it means for their financial performance.

Unless an obvious negative customer metric exists, most executives will declare that their businesses are healthy. Their customers are happy. A rare few will dig deeper, questioning every positive indicator, looking for the leading data that gives them cues to what they need to do to stay ahead, innovate and change before the competition. In my experience, this is less than 5% of executive teams or entrepreneurs in businesses of any size. Most leaders aren't obsessed with unpacking positive results or thinking about staying ahead of any potential market or customer shift.

If you are reading this and you believe you are in that 5%, I'd ask you to think hard about the last time you challenged every aspect of the customer experience you provide. Why is customer experience the bellwether indicator? Because most leaders think that they do a great job delivering a great experience, and most customers think that their experience is horrible at worst and baseline acceptable at best.

How NPS scores and surveys are misleading

If you have this "reality gap" in your customer experience, you have even bigger gaps in your other metrics. I have seen this pattern repeat over and over. You might be one of those companies with hundreds or thousands of "five-star" survey results and a high Net Promoter Score (NPS), so you are patting yourself on the back. These are the companies whose customers dry up overnight and no one "knows why." Every time I audit one of these companies, inevitably I find that the questions on that "five-star" survey are measuring bare basics, like "was everyone friendly and polite?" Every single business in the world should have a 5/5 on that question. That is not customer experience success. That is the bare minimum level of service.

These inflated and misleading positive surveys mean that most companies have very little understanding of what customers really think about their experiences in every interaction, every day — and that is dangerous because in our current economy, customers will leave you in a heartbeat over one mediocre experience. Even if you are a company that thinks you have built a great experience because you have a department that focuses on customer service or customer experience, you are probably behind. Why?

Customer behavior has changed dramatically in the last 12 months, and with the compression of innovation cycles, AI and technology advancements, geopolitical changes and cultural trends, customers continue to raise their standards and shift their ideas about what defines a wonderful experience. Most businesses aren't keeping pace with all of this. Instead, they are leaning on old-fashioned ideals around customer service.

Most are still using customer service, hospitality and customer experience as interchangeable concepts. They believe these are all the same things. In reality, they are all wildly different concepts. All are needed, but each needs to be considered, designed and regularly updated to delight the modern consumer. Your hospitality program, your customer service and your customer experience must all be layered to create a positive impact on the customer.

What this confusion means is that for most companies, your customer experience is on dangerously thin ice, and you won't be aware of it until customers are leaving you. Revenue will be down, loyalty metrics will shift overnight, survey results will still be good and new customer acquisition will slow to a crawl. You'll be in a spiral that is hard to reverse. Your customer experience has failed you.

If this scares you, good. You have an opportunity to move into the 5% that obsess over their "great" customer experience, question all those positive metrics, and you can be one of those companies that stay in front of their competitors and are prepared to weather market shifts.

How to find out the real state of your customer experience

Now what do you do? Start by acknowledging that old-fashioned ideas about what creates a great experience are exactly that … old. Modern consumers have decided that being polite, efficient, having good manners and personalizing interactions are baseline service principles. Delivering a warm welcome, using the customer's name and executing a fond farewell are basics. Answering their questions and delivering things they ask for quickly and accurately? That's another basic.

If you already think about "wow moments" as an important differentiator, you are ahead of most. Wow moment programs must be carefully designed, scaled and measured. Wow moments don't just "happen." But for that to make any impact on the modern consumer, it must be something that you do for every customer, every time ... and even then, you are still at customer experience circa 2018. The new standard is way beyond that.

Modern consumers don't care how big or small your business might be. You can be a global 50 company or a single outlet on their local street corner, and they expect that you will know them, deliver excellent hospitality and then wow them with your ability to deliver an immersive storytelling experience that leads to a "wow." You'll master an expert and artisanal experience from your own employees, you'll understand the customer's unique story and build a multi-layered set of wow moments that reflect that knowledge, you'll deliver a sense of place that capitalizes on your geography or history, and you'll provide a set of brand signatures that demonstrate your unique point of view. These are the critical items that every business must have to claim that they are focused on customer experience.

Most companies don't deliver any of the above and are instead delivering the basics, and those basics do not confer any competitive advantage. Some are delivering an occasional wow moment, but that is also very old-fashioned. As an example, if you are an automotive dealership, and you observe that your customer has a child seat installed in their backseat when they bring their car in for service, and then you leave a teddy bear in that child seat when they pick up their vehicle, you are delivering a baseline wow moment. That isn't the personalized, multi-layered wow moment journey that consumers expect. That customer could probably go to 10 dealerships in your market for a teddy bear — it's that common. You are not unique.

Every company has limited resources, so it is critical to use those resources to maximum impact. Customers are looking for you to deliver exceptional baseline hospitality, excellent, efficient customer service, and then to craft a set of customer experiences that make you stand out. These experiences wrap around your product to expand your story. These experiences capture narratives that are powerful reminders of why they chose you over all others. They validate their choices and reinforce that they belong in your tribe. You deliver moments that make customers feel seen and known — where their individual story is important, understood and acknowledged.

You may feel intimidated by that mandate, but it is within reach. Utilizing modern CRM technology, creating a powerful culture of customer-centricity, empowering employees to create meaningful moments, investing in an experience model and building a company culture that values creativity, innovation and bold action can make all of this possible. Those of you with an hourly workforce, remember that hiring is essential. Hire for personality and cultural fit. Train vocational skills. Give everyone the power to delight customers. Creating experiences is fun, and it is directly correlated to employee retention metrics.

Above all, remember that your customer experience is essential to the long-term success of your business. If you sit at your customer metric dashboard and never question your success, you'll soon find yourself at the back of the pack.