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Customer Experience creates loyalty Here’s how to build brand equity by retaining customers By Mike Townsend
I
met with a multi-store tire retail business owner recently who had no idea what “Customer Experience,” aka CE, meant. When I asked him about customer service, he knew immediately what to say: “Customer service is taking care of your customers,” he passionately proclaimed. In this “Age of the Consumer,” taking care of them will not create loyalty most of the time. Customer service is now part of Customer Experience — and a very small part. Customer service is geting your food hot and without a hair in it. Customer Experience is geting the same, but includes talking more about the experience the server created than about the amazing omelet. Te sum of all interactions that a consumer will have with your business is considered by many the best defnition of Customer Experience. Your website, print ads, radio ads, billboards, mobile website, physical location are part of the customer journey. So are driving by your store, adequate parking, signage, phone skills, showroom, bathrooms, employees (sales and technicians), sales processes, the inspection processes and follow-up afer the sale. All of these must be thought about in the framework of Customer Experience. In my experience, many independent tire retailers do not have a Customer Experience strategy/process in place. And those who think they do don’t always follow and enforce it consistently.
Customer Engagement In this article, we will deal with Customer Engagement through your most valuable asset — your people. In regard to how the retail tire sales associate engages the customer, let’s breakdown what a business looks like into four “Customer Experience Process” categories.
1. No process: “We think we do it (but we don’t).” I will make a bold statement and say stores that have no Customer Experience process/strategy in place typically have a higher turnover rate with employees and customers. Owners and managers get frustrated with their employees and cannot fgure out how to motivate them to serve the customer the way they, themselves, serve the customer when they are covering the counter. Businesses that “don’t do Customer Experience” are not fully engaging today’s consumer and are losing customers, slowly but surely, to the few tire retailers who do. In today’s environment, there are fewer ways to diferentiate your business from the larger multi-store retailers. When CE is “missing,” the main reason you are diferent is price. Having the sharpest price will not sustain your business. In order to build long-term loyalty while building equity in your
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Customer Experience Process
Goal: Systematic
No process
Sporadic
Repeatable
Source: “The Power of Putting your Customers at the Center of your Business”; Townsend Strategies
business, you must out-perform your competition by engaging today’s consumer through a Customer Experience strategy. 2. Sporadic: “We do it 10% of the time.” Second, there are tire stores that maybe execute some form of CE close to 10% of the time. When “Johnny” is engaged, he will be on his A-game 50% of the time. Perhaps his favorite team won over the weekend and all is well in his world. He will make people feel good either on the phone or in person. When the aforementioned conditions are not met, Johnny may still be engaged, but he will positively impact only the customers he likes and/or with whom he has a great rapport. When the owner or the manager is absent, Johnny falls into the 71% of the workforce in the U.S. that is disengaged. Furthermore, this salesperson usually uses price to win the customer’s afection and/or loyalty.
3. Repeatable: “We have one employee we think does this with some customers.” Tird, I have seen tire stores that have a repeatable process. For example, there will be one person out of three front counter sales associates who engages consumers in a way that could be defned as Customer Experience. Again, this person does
MTD July 2015
