Getting the basics right: creating delight or averting disaster?

A typical dinner time with my 4-year-old son goes something like this…

My son: Mummy I know what will make you so happy!

Me: Yes, that would be you eating all your dinner up

My son: No mummy, I KNOW what will make you so happy.

Me: I’m pretty sure it would be for you to eat all your dinner

My son: NO Mummy, I’m going to give my brother a big kiss… **jumps down from the table and runs off to kiss his baby brother in the other room**

Me: **face palm**

Now I’m not denying that what he did was super sweet and a lovely gesture. But there were more important things I wanted to be done at that moment.

I can’t help but feel this is similar to how some companies approach CX. Many will focus time and energy to create ‘delight’ experiences before they have even begun to tackle the basics of customer experience (ease, simplicity, getting things right the first time). This leads to an extremely frustrating experience for customers who might be struggling to achieve a straightforward transaction with ease.

Yes, it’s still important to create those moments of delight, but make sure you’ve also got the basics covered to avoid your customers experiencing their own ‘face palm’ moments with you.

There are many ways to check if you are covering the basics…

Check your internal data:

• Complaints, what are the common issues coming through that should be prioritized?
• Do you know how long is your average complaints resolution or how many times a customer needs to contact you to resolve a complaint?
• Have you got records of how often you get it ‘right first time?
• What is your churn rate like? A high turnover is often an indication that the basics are not being delivered

Check with your employees:

• Where are there bottlenecks in your systems/processes that negatively impact customers? Your employees are an invaluable source of information for this!

Map the customer journey:

• Have you spent the time to understand your customers’ needs, what they are trying to achieve, and how they think and feel at every stage of their interaction with you?
• Doing a customer journey map gives you the opportunity to not only improve and rectify service failures impacting the basics but also identify those moments to drive delight.

Track and improve performance continuously to drive lasting loyalty:

• Implement a transactional NPS program that identifies instantly when there are service failures, allowing you to rectify the issue and close the loop.
• Track the common failure areas to be prioritized for improvement.
• Engage employees with your program to get their input on what causes some service failures and ideas on how to make improvements.

If you need help designing a CX plan for your business, contact us today to see how we can get you started.