Summary:
In this week’s episode of The CEO Warrior Podcast , Mike Agugliaro interviews Tema Frank. Tema is a best selling author, international speaker, and consultant. Tema Frank has over three decades of experience in business, marketing strategy, usability testing, and customer experience improvement.
Main Questions Asked:
- What is broken in the customer experience world?
- What is the competitive advantage of great customer service?
- How do we know if our customer experience is good or bad?
- What kind of feedback should we listen to?
- How do we improve the culture to customer service issue?
- What do you look for when bringing on new customer service people?
- Do companies have a choice to improve?
- What are some action items we could take away today?
- What is one piece of wisdom you want to us to keep in mind for the next few years?
Key Lessons Learned:
Customer Experience
- Many companies don’t believe the customer experience is important.
- Customers can share a bad experience far and wide via social media.
- Some companies have a protected market which means they don’t need to improve very much.
- Technology is disrupting even entrenched industries.
- Competition is getting fierce, customers will go to the companies that treat them best.
- Creating a connection can help build loyalty.
- Most customers won’t let you know your service is bad, they’ll just leave. Don’t wait for your customers to disappear.
- It’s less expensive to keep a customer happy than it is to find a new one.
Getting Feedback
- Talk to your customers. Ask them questions about how they feel about your business.
- Surveys work but the response rate is going down.
- Giving them an incentive to respond isn’t necessary if you’re providing a personal point of contact.
- Complaints or refunds are obvious hints of a bad experience.
- Defects could lead to complaints and refunds.
- Unhappy staff can lead to unhappy customers.
3 P’s
- Promise: Why do you do what you do?
- People: Everyone involved in your business impacts your customer experience.
- Process: Understand what needs to be changed internally in order to serve customers better.
Culture
- Changing a business culture starts with a leader.
- Listen to what your customers are saying.
- Listen to your staff and see what can be changed from a customer perspective.
- Some employees will resist change and may need to be eased out.
- Almost no one decides to give poor customer service.
- Most people want to do good work.
- Our society has moved away from empathy and connecting with each other.
Hiring for Customer Service
- Look for empathy in your candidates.
- Look for attitude first.
- You can train the technical skills later, attitude is harder to change.
Action Items
- Talk to your customers, what is their experience, what would they change to make your business better?
- Talk to your frontline people, what are they hearing, what are the problems they see?
- Gather your team and discuss the feedback.
Final Tips
- Always keep the customer’s perspective of your business in mind.
- Talk to your customers one at a time. Find out what they think you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong.
- If your company isn’t improving, it’s dying.
- Customers rule. Take your customer’s needs seriously if you want to survive.
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Links to Resources Mentioned
Canada’s Best Employers for Women Book
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