Customer Experience can all come down to psychology, and training your staff is ultimately the answer.
Do you ever really know what your customer feels about their experience with your business.
Have you ever been in a team meeting, and when you chatted to a colleague afterwards, they said to you: “Was everything alright in there, you had a face like thunder?” At which point you look horrified and puzzled. “No everything was fine, why do you ask?” And of course, you learn that the way you thought you were projecting yourself was nothing like the view that everyone else received.
Self-awareness is a mercurial thing, and even though you think you know yourself very well, you still get caught out as in the example above.
Reflecting upon it, you realise that the traffic that morning, or the alarmist email from your insurance company, or the mountainous to-do list you are facing (I could go on with examples), etc have got under your skin, and unwittingly you were transmitting this to the whole room.
Staff in any customer service role, face to face, telephone or online all face the same challenges, and if you are responsible for that customer experience operation, this produces a daunting realisation that controlling the experience our customers receive is a challenging task to say the least.
But it’s not impossible.
Personally I have always been a fan of The Chimp Paradox, a theory published by Prof. Steve Peters, made famous by his support of numerous olympians, British cyclists in particular.
In short, my take, linked to the thoughts above, is that we humans are constantly plagued by distracting inner thoughts, that take us away from the purpose or task which is right in front of us.
Steve Peters would suggest that our ‘chimp’ creates often unnecessary, imagined, negative scenarios in our minds. In other words we worry unnecessarily about things not actually a part our situation.
At this point, you’re asking where is this going? Well it’s very simple. We can all be trained out of this behaviour, and that is exactly what customer experience strategy aims to do. Customer service training exists fundamentally to take the over-thinking and distraction out of something, so that we do it with clarity, focus and purpose.
At Yomdel, that is why Mystery Shopping is most often our entry point to understanding the experience a customer is receiving from any given business. Before we get into primary research with the customers themselves, we walk in their shoes, and see what they see.
And when we then feed that experience back to the business themselves, we get the same realisation I exemplified earlier. So often, customer service teams are surprised by the impression they have delivered, and immediately keen to improve the customer experience they are delivering. And that’s when the really productive work that can transform business results begins.
Mystery shopping results can be fed directly back in to training and development programmes. Essential actions and behaviours are broken down and isolated into manageable components, that can be positively influenced, and trained to become outcome focused.
Essentially, mystery shopping enables a business to train the ‘distractions’ out of a customer experience process. It enables true self-awareness, of the positive kind. The sort that you can act upon, improve and achieve more as a consequence.
For now, if we can train ourselves and our teams to park whatever is distracting us at the door, and follow a pre-defined set of best practice customer experience behaviours, we will all see revenues grow quickly.
Come and talk to Yomdel, and find out how you can really get to know your customer.
