Customer Experience: we must make our moment count

I’ve just been working with an airline in the US with a strong brand, a rich culture and a fantastic, eager team. In getting into the detail, they were very open in taking a passenger’s viewpoint and understanding how they fit into their customers’ lives.

But having also worked with many less empathetic organisations, it reminded me of how important it is to make our moment count.

One lesson I quickly learned from my early inhouse, corporate CX roles many years ago was that, because we were then totally immersed in our own business and thought about it all the time, we unintentionally assumed our customers also thought about us every minute of every day.

We rolled our eyes when they filled out forms incorrectly, we tutted when they complained about navigating the website and we were bemused if they didn’t read the smallprint or FAQs that we’d come up with.

We brushed aside the notion that any new process or policy should be sense-checked to see how it affected customers – “It suits us so it’ll be fine for them”. We assumed they knew how hard we were working behind the scenes to get our processes right.

The reality of course was that they knew more than we did about our own operations, especially what it was like to be on the receiving end of them. We saw customers coming into the stores day after day after day so assumed customers knew how things worked; what we failed to appreciate was that they were different customers. Many might have visited us just once or twice a year.

When our world does overlap with our theirs, it may only be for a fleeting moment. It’s a moment that we need to make count and can’t take for granted.

Customers are not always right but we should treat our time together with the respect it deserves. If we don’t, our competitors are ready and waiting to pick up the pieces next time.

Loyalty is a fragile thing. It might only be as strong as the last interaction. If we’re heavy handed, ambivalent or myopic we can easily break it, often without realising it.

We have to organise ourselves well and adopt the right mindset. If we don’t make that connection, if we don’t shape the intended memory we will pay for it in increased costs and lost revenue opportunities.

We won’t get a second chance to make a lasting impression.

---

Jerry Angrave is founder and director of Empathyce, a Customer Experience consultancy and CX training company. He works with companies around the world to help them benefit from taking a more customer-centric view of their organisation.

Jerry is a member of the British Aviation Group and sits on the Accessibility Advisory Groups at London Heathrow Airport and Bristol Airport in the UK. He is author of “The Journey Mapping Playbook”.

If you have any questions about your own CX programme do get in touch to talk it through with Jerry – no cost and no obligation – [email protected] | +44 (0) 7917 718 072 | LinkedIn