by Noah Fleming
It seems that no matter how they would describe themselves to their friends and family on their weekends away from school, as soon as a minor inconvenience cropped up, they threw out their espoused values of helping others and busily hurried on their way.
It seems that it’s rather easy to find excuses not to live our true values, whether personal or corporate. Many company mission statements say things like, “We put quality and customer service above all else,” but frontline experiences often seem directly antithetical to our lofty vision statements. And this study points out the reasons why: it’s easy to ignore our higher motivations when there are pressing personal concerns or there’s a gap in the expectations throughout the organization. It’s easy for companies to say that they’re committed to creating world-class customer experiences and to ensuring that everyone throughout the organization continues to improve their skills in these areas. But when budgets are tight, and deadlines loom, it’s also easy to put these goals aside and ignore learning opportunities for just getting through the current busyness, or dealing with the latest business emergency (as if another one won’t pop up next week!).
Every company says it’s a learning organization, and every company says that it puts customers first, but that’s usually not true. In this chapter, we’ll dive into the experience after the prospect has become a customer and what you need to do to ensure your team isn’t just stepping over customers. Just as incongruities can kill a business when Stage Two differs from Stage One, they can show up here again, and cause equal and perhaps far more damage. In the rest of this chapter, we’ll talk about what’s expected here and how to ensure you’re meeting those expectations. Here’s the best part: it’s often quite simple to excel in this stage because so many organizations are so bad.
Experience Your Competitors
When Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino’s Pizza would travel, he would always look in the hotel’s phone book and order pizza from a few of the local pizza businesses. When Sam Walton traveled, he would visit Kmart stores to see what he could steal for Walmart. Walton took a notepad and would make meticulous notes as he carefully walked through the stores. He would talk to customers, and he would talk to the employees. He would then take what he learned back to Walmart and see where they could instantly improve. Too many of us look at the competition as a threat instead of looking at the competition as a way to learn. Monaghan was interested in learning how the pizza was boxed, what the delivery cars looked like, how the ordering process was handled, what the pizza looked like when it arrived, and so on.
Others look at the competition and think they understand what they’re doing. They assume that because they’re selling a similar product or service, they must be using similar sales efforts, and delivering a similar customer experience. In my experience, this is one of the most valuable ways to improve your business. Talk to your competitors. Shop their businesses. Talk with your suppliers about your competitors. Learn as much as you can. More important, experience it for yourself.
For example, I’ve been conducting a little test lately. I call various companies and leave a voicemail. I send in contact forms on websites and wait to get a response. These are all businesses I’ve never done anything with. Then, I repeat the process with companies where I’ve actually made a purchase and I’m a client. If I see they’re active on social media, I’ll hit them up there and tell them that I’ve filled out a contact form or left a voice-mail, and I’m waiting for a response. And then what happens is I usually wait, and wait some more after that. What I’ve found is that the speed of follow-up from many companies is, for the most part, downright horrendous. I strongly believe that just being fast is more valuable than trying to be delightful and cute. I’m not talking about complaints, which we’ll talk about in another section; I’m talking about general inquiries made in every stage of the loop. Remember, the customer experience has less to do with being delightful, and surprising at times, but more to do with being good across the board. In fact, the less effort and more speed involved in getting help, providing an answer, or responding to an inquiry, the more business you will do. It’s that simple. This action is relatively simple, yet extremely powerful. It ties into the Evergreen Experience Audit but warrants its own action step. Measure your speed of response. If you don’t want to do this yourself, hire someone from outside your company to do it.
Visit your competitors’ websites and fill out their contact forms. Just like Sam Walton and Tom Monaghan would do, buy from them. See what the experience is like across the entire Customer Loyalty Loop. How do they follow up post-sale?
A client of mine wanted to complete this exercise by using their largest competitor as the case study. We essentially completed an Evergreen Experience Audit on their biggest competitor. When we were done, we reported our finding to the client’s sales team, but we didn’t tell them who we were talking about. We asked them to review and evaluate the experience and let us know what we thought.
Nearly everyone thought the experience sounded remarkable and almost all of them were convinced it was a narrative of doing business with them. When we explained it wasn’t about them, but instead it was their largest competitor, and then we compared their customer experience with them, there were a lot of unhappy faces in the room. They were only doing about a quarter of what the competitor was doing to please the client.
Remember, my goal as a consultant to my client is to improve their condition, even it means a few people will be discomfited by the findings. In this case, the entire sales team wasn’t loving me at this very moment.
But this wasn’t about saying the competitor was doing more; it was about seeing what my client could do even better. Both Walton and Monaghan knew there was always something they could be doing a little bit better. They just knew that it sometimes meant looking under a roof that belonged to someone else.
Action Step: Competitive Intelligence
Step 1: In the next five minutes, see if you can learn something about your competition that you didn’t know before. Ask yourself if what you’ve learned is a practice you can borrow, improve, or adapt to your company, division, or current efforts.
Step 2: Create a plan to do an in-depth study on your key competition. You may need to utilize outside sources. You can engage friends and family or outside experts. Use your findings to compare the competitor’s experience to your experience. Create the narrative of the whole customer experience and see how your experience matches up. Look at it across the various key areas of the customer experience, before, during, and after the sale. Know the customer inside and out. Below are some things to look for.
• Who are your main competitors?
• What unique strategies are they pursuing that you’re not?
• What unique sales and marketing methods are they using that you’re not?
• How does their website compare to yours?
• Is it a messy closet or neat and organized?
• Do they have a mailing list?
• What happens after you join their mailing list?
• Do they offer testimonials, guarantees, or case studies on their website?
• Do they have a unique selling proposition on their website?
• How do they position themselves in Stage One of the loyalty loop?
• Do they have a customer service phone number?
• Does someone answer?
• How long does it take before someone answers?
• Do they have a storefront or office space?
• What’s like it?
• Describe the curb appeal.
• If it’s a retail space, how is the store laid out? Is it brightly lit, are you greeted quickly, or do they have music playing? Take note of the sights and smells.
• What is their selling process? How does it differ from yours?
• Can you talk to their customers?
• Can you ask them about the experience before, during, and after the sale?
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bsp; • Do they post online reviews? If so, what do they say?
• How do their core products and services differ from yours?
You get the idea; those are more than a dozen questions I rattled off the top of my head. If it were me, I’d be looking at everything my competitors are doing, particularly the experience as a customer and how they follow up after the sale. Don’t view the competition as a threat; instead, view them as an opportunity to learn. After all, they’re your competition, which means they’re making money from people who should be buying from you.
Shocking Dogs
One of the all-time bestselling books in the business world is the catchy Good to Great by Jim Collins. How hard is it to go from good to great? What if you could go from okay to exceptional without really having to change much at all, except having a better understanding of the Customer Loyalty Loop and your ability to meet the customer’s expectations across each stage of the loop? Geez, for many businesses just going from dismal to good could perhaps be the difference in creating a dump truck full of additional revenue. Look, I’m not saying you’re dismal. But the progression is Dismal to Good > Good to Great > Great to World-Class.
One of my clients runs a successful dog day care business in Detroit. When I suggested during a coaching call that we start shocking her clients’ dogs in the name of science and the customer experience, the phone went silent. I was joking, of course, but one of our favorite social psychologists, Dr. Martin Seligman, wasn’t when he engaged in such a study in 1965.2 His findings have profound ramifications for the entire Customer Loyalty Loop and show us that getting customer service right across the entire loop doesn’t need to be difficult, but it’s remarkably important. In fact, it offers us the greatest opportunity to go from good to exceptional incredibly quickly.
Seligman’s experiments involved putting dogs into a small enclosed room where the animal would receive electrical shocks that they couldn’t do anything about. The researchers would ring a bell and then shock the dog. The idea was simple; the dog would become conditioned to associate the sound of the bell with the unpleasant shock. At first, the dog would attempt different behaviors to try to find a solution. It might try to get out, or hop over a small fence to avoid the shocks. But that’s not what happened. As each shock occurred, the dog became more helpless. Eventually, the dog would just give up and not try anymore. Even when the conditions were changed, and the dog could avoid the shocks by completing a simple action (like hopping over a fence), the dog would do nothing. They would lie down and take the shocks. Why? Because the dog had learned (and been convinced) that nothing would help, so there was no point in trying to escape its fate, meaning that even when escape was available, the dog would not try to avoid the shock. This became the concept known as “learned helplessness.” Learned helplessness can be defined as the situation in which the individual learns that they can’t escape some negative situations. So even if the circumstances change, they can’t be bothered to change.
The work on learned helplessness was extended to other contexts. For example, in one study subjects did a mental task in the presence of distracting noise. One group of subjects could switch the noise off and another group could not. Interestingly, the former group rarely turned off the noise, but their performance was far better than those in the helplessness group who had no such control and did the mental task in the presence of the noise, too. The explanation is that the former group had control over the noise, and it was this sense of control that differentiated the group’s performance. As we know, lack of control is the toxic element of stress.
The Helpless Customer
This concept of learned helplessness has been applied to different situations, such as mental illness or abusive situations, but it can also be useful in an organizational setting. One aspect in which this concept applies is customer service, which is important in Stage Three of the loop but also important throughout the entire loop.
Consider a customer who is calling a company’s help line. They dial the number, wait for an hour on the line, and are directed to someone who doesn’t know their problem, or barely even speaks their language. The rep tells them they need to be transferred, but the call is disconnected. I’m willing to bet that almost everyone reading this has experienced something similar.
They call again and repeat the cycle. They try once more, and get bounced around from representative to representative until they get tired and finally hang up. Next time the customer has a problem, it’s likely that they will not try calling again because they’ve already learned that’s it’s useless. They will have developed a learned helplessness concerning this company, and this experience is usually a frustrating one. It makes the individual feel helpless and hopeless—not the customer experience most customer-centric companies aim for.
Learned helplessness reflects physical processes in the brain that influence the entire body. The body has an underlying infrastructure that represents the fight/surrender dynamic. The autonomic nervous system is divided into the sympathetic branch and the parasympathetic branch The sympathetic branch is responsible for the activation of the fight/flight response that sends out adrenaline and hormones, and pumps blood away from the organs to the muscles; in short, it is energizing you and giving you the resources to fight. The parasympathetic branch does the opposite and underpins helplessness and depression. We fight for control but can, if the struggle gets too difficult, give it up.
At a neurological level, the brain decides it’s not worth exerting any more energy and goes into conservation mode. Most animals have a coping strategy where they “play dead” in response to danger, a tactic that requires very little energy. The accompanying thought in humans when they do the same thing outside of a life-threatening situation is some variation of “I can’t be bothered with this anymore.” In the case of real threat, we will justify playing dead as a tactic to trick the enemy into believing we are no longer a threat or are indeed dead. In some ways, the angry or frustrated customer who is in fight or flight mode is easier to deal with than the one who has just given up. The one who has given up is no longer engaging you and is probably lost forever. They aren’t just playing dead; they have left your world.
By now, it shouldn’t be a secret that customer service plays an important role throughout the entire loyalty loop. The major difference, of course, is that your customers aren’t dogs! (At least I don’t think so.) Customers, unlike dogs, do have the opportunity to find a way out of the box. It’s easier than ever before to find a new insurance agent, sell your car and get another, or find another provider. The same goes for complex B2B companies. There’s more competition than ever before, and it’s easier and faster than ever to shop the competition. Time and time again, this is where the breakdown occurs.
As you’ll see in a moment, when there’s very little competition, some companies can get away with having really bad service. It’s sad for consumers who lie down like helpless dogs, but it represents the greatest opportunity to go from good to exceptional rather quickly.
Customer service is an incredibly misunderstood area of focus for most businesses. I have a strong reason to believe most experts, gurus, authors, and consultants are incredibly misguided as well when it comes to speaking and writing about these topics.
For example, they tell us things like how important it is to say “thank you.” You already know that. Thankfully for you, I’m not one of them. But I’m incredibly dismayed whenever I hear a so-called customer service expert speak to an audience only to offer nothing more than basic platitudes about being nicer to the customers in general. In theory, it makes a lot of sense, but most people in business do a decent enough job at mustering up a simple thank-you. This has less to do with acknowledgments and more to do with maintaining a congruent experience all the way through.
As for the others, they seem to get by through sharing stories of companies who have done it right. For example, there were some 4,000+ books on Amazon that directly referenced Zappos
as one of the more important customer service organizations on the planet. Most of them simply share collections of outrageous stories and examples of experiences and service-related moments where a company did something (somewhat) exceptional. For example, if I hear the story of the Ritz Carlton and the kid’s stuffed animal from a speaker one more time, I’m going to lose it!3 Thankfully, I’m going to try not to do either of those things here. Instead, let’s look at the science of customer service, which will allow your organization to thrive when it comes to providing a remarkable customer experience.
As I think about the concept of learned helplessness, I am reminded of some of the major players in the Canadian wireless industry. The service is just remarkably bad, and they get away with it. There’s an oligopoly in Canada, and a few companies are profiting handsomely, but the service is just terrible. They treat customers poorly; they charge incredibly high prices, but there’s not much we can do, so we lie down like helpless dogs. There’s no customer loyalty. A quick Google search for some of the names of Canadian wireless companies yield hundreds of thousands of results from unhappy customers. Customers are stressed and frustrated, but there’s not much they can do until someday maybe there is something they can do about it.
The best thing for you and your company is to realize “wow” and “remarkable” service aren’t that difficult to achieve. That’s your opportunity! The difference is that you can provide it and not just say it. Will you take it? Many companies have recognized that the times have changed, and if they keep shocking dogs, they’re going to find themselves with no dogs left to shock. Below is one example.
Delight or Die
Gary Friedman is the CEO of Restoration Hardware, the high-end furniture retailer with revenues north of $500 million per year. In early 2016, Friedman issued a scathing memo to employees and told them to either DELIGHT the customer or find a new job.4 The memo was fascinating in that Friedman explained the company was busy worrying about everything but the customer. Sound familiar? By this point in the book, it shouldn’t.