Customer Experience: The Art of Creating Loyal Customers

Hey everybody and welcome to the June webinar of the Cleantelligence Software 2018 webinar series. I want to give a special shout out this morning by thanking everyone who registered beforehand and are listening in live. As a bonus, you will be getting a free ebook which I'll tell you a bit more about later. I hope you will find these webinars from cleantelligent useful because we're going to keep doing them as long as there's interest. Now, this year there will be a webinar every other month, and we started back in February. Our next session will be presented by Zach Droube, our new Sales Director, followed in October by CleanTelligence Executive Vice President Kaden Hutchins, just before the 2018 ISSA show in Dallas. After that, we'll again hear from Bradley York, our Director of Marketing, as he wraps up our 2018 webinar series. Please keep an eye out for more information about each session as we move closer to those dates. And as a reminder, we always welcome your feedback on these webinars and we'd love to hear your suggestions for future topics. Please give us a shout@webinarscleantelligent.com every webinar is recorded, including this one, and you can find them here@www.cleantelligent.com. so if you want to review my video again later, or if you need to leave early, or if you just find it amazing enough that you want to share it on social media, here's where you can find it as well as our past webinars going back all the way to 2010 now. These videos and our blog come from our commitment to provide excellent resources for you and your cleaning company to be successful and stay up to date on the industry's best practices. Here you can also subscribe to receive updates on any future webinars that we're going to do. Okay, now that we've gone over all that, let's get this party started. As you all know, the title of today's webinar is Customer Experience, the Art of Creating Loyal Customers. For the sake of brevity, I'll mostly refer to customer Experience simply as CX from now on. And just so you know, it's pretty common in general for it to be called this. So the idea of Customer Experience has been around for a few years now, though it's still new enough that a lot of people I meet haven't really heard of it. Most of the time when I introduce myself as the Director of Customer Experience, I get blank stares or people just asking what it means. On the other hand, I've also heard a lot of people refer to customer experience as just a fancy name for customer support. And I guess you could say that, but I think it gives the wrong impression of exactly what CX is and how it's executed. So then, what is it? Adam Richardson, in an article for the Harvard Business Review, defines CX as the sum totality of how customers engage with your company and brand, not just in a snapshot in time, but throughout the entire arc of being a customer. When I think of customer support, I generally think of call centers, but this definition tells me CX is far more than taking calls from confused or irritated customers. Now, to understand the importance of customer experience and why you should build your own CX program, it helps to have a brief grasp of the history of consumerism and how competition led to the evolution of CX in today's marketplace. Simply put, consumerism began with a need for product. These needs were historically met by individual craftsmen and then, over time, businesses who began competing for customers. Competition led to a focus of greater quality products offered at a better price. This business model wasn't indefinitely sustainable, however, as ever increasing quality eventually meant enormous costs with little return on the investment. So the focus turned instead to getting inside the mind of the customer and understanding the journey they take in decision making. This idea was called customer satisfaction, and companies began measuring it by asking for feedback through interviews and surveys. Then down the line came the Internet. This of course, changed all kinds of aspects of consumerism. But one aspect important to CX was big data. As companies realized they could not only get feedback from consumers, but also easily identify common thoughts and trends among the responses. No longer did a business have to guess at what parts of their product worked and what things were driving customers away. They could now measure those things and in doing so, now know what they needed to improve. To take customers beyond just being satisfied, but also being happy and loyal. So one more time Customer experience is the sum totality of how customers engage with your company. Why is CX important to you? It's important because by gathering and utilizing consumer data, you have a firm grasp on what your customers think about you in every interaction you have with them, enough so that you can control and shape those interactions to create an overall enjoyable experience. Customers will become promoters of your brand and stick around for years. This idea sounds great in theory, but does it actually work? Does it create loyal customers? Does it improve retention and boost profitability? There have been countless studies done to answer these questions and I want to highlight just a few findings. First, 67% of consumers cite bad experiences as their reason for churn and more importantly, 85% of customer churn due to poor service was preventable. This stat is especially bad when you consider that depending on which study you look at, the cost of attracting a new customer can be anywhere between three to 30 times more expensive than retaining an existing customer. Now on the flip side of these stats, 55% of consumers are willing to pay more for a guaranteed good experience, 72% of consumers will share a positive experience with six or more people, and 70% of companies that deliver best in class CX use customer feedback to do so. I really like the contrast of these two sets of data because it highlights the differences between companies that provide bad experiences versus those that offer great ones. Yes, it works. And with that in mind, hopefully you can see all the benefits of CX and you want to start building a customer experience program within your own business so you can get in on all the action. Let's take a look at some things to help you get started. First, keep in mind that the purpose of any CX program should be to rapidly gain insight into your customers thoughts and feelings during the many interactions they have with you and then to resolve any issues that come to light along the way. This will be achieved by having a clear understanding of your goals as well as your customers goals, providing an easy way for customers to give you feedback, and making sure you have a constant cycle of reviewing and responding to the feedback, quickly implementing changes and reviewing the results. Then start the cycle over. As mentioned in step one, before you get too deep into building your CX program, you'll want to be clear on what you're aiming to achieve. A few questions to ask yourself to help with this could be how do you want to be perceived by consumers in your industry? Or what's your special sauce? What are the key things about you that you can or already do that set you apart from the competition and what are your strengths? Do you provide the best quality service or the most affordable? Do you have the fastest response time to request? Have you won awards for your customer service? Now with those questions answered, you can not only highlight those things in your marketing, but also use them to determine the main metric you use to define and benchmark your success. What is the North Star goal that every employee in your company knows and is constantly driven toward? This can be different in every company, whether it's number of new clients, monthly revenue or number of contract renewals, etc. It all depends on you. But determining this is important because it will shape interactions with clients you see as pivotal moments to focus on. Next Knowing your customer is a key factor to the success of any CX program. Customer Profiles now this idea has been around for a long time, but it's still just as important as ever. When defining your customers goals, you'll want to create profiles where some of the things you identify are the core tasks they're working to accomplish every day and the needs they have. Specifically Focusing on Unmet Needs the jobs and needs of a person can vary a lot depending on what roles and responsibilities that person has in their organization. So choose a few common roles and create more than one profile outlining these things. It's critically important to note, however, you or your employees cannot be answering those questions. You should be going straight to your customers through interviews and surveys to learn what it is they need. Let them describe their issues and then you use your knowledge and experience to determine the solutions. I also recommend being sure that you are very open minded in hearing what your customers have to say. You may think you already know what they need, but if you assume wrong, you'll be in danger of designing a product or service that no one needs, let alone wants. Another helpful way to look at CX is thinking about your relationship with the customer as a journey they are taking. The journey starts when they first come in contact with your brand and then travels down a set path, a path that you map out so you can direct the customer to specific moments you want them to experience and emotions you want them to feel along the way. Here's a basic template showing an example of the kinds of things that you should be mapping out to really understand the experience that your customers are having. By breaking the entire journey into stages, you can get into the details of each moment. For example, during the prospecting stage of a client's journey, list out all of the goals that they have and the actions that they take while looking for solutions to meet their needs. Again, it's super important to get this information straight from the client's mouth. There's a study that shows that only 72% of customers said that the customer journey map missed their needs. Now, beyond knowing the correct needs of the client, list out every touch point or interaction that they have with your business during this stage. As a side note, when you're starting out, it's good to map the touch points your clients currently experience to help you identify the key moments you want to focus on. The map can then be adjusted over time as you design new ways for that touch point to be experienced. Moving from there, continue mapping by determining your own goals and actions taken during each stage, as well as who's responsible for creating the experience you want, whether it's a specific person or position in your company or an entire team. You can also identify opportunities for upsells or requests for customer reviews or anything else during the different stages. And if you'd like a copy of this template to work with or have any questions about it, just shoot me an email after the webinar and I'll send you one now. As I mentioned before, once you have your overall journey mapped out, it will be time to identify the key touch points or interactions that you should focus on the most. Compare each of the touch points you listed with your main objectives as a company and how you determine success. As another quick note, I want to be clear that focusing on touchpoints is only the beginning of building your CX program. The real need in today's market is to go beyond focusing on touchpoints to designing a great seamless experience in the entirety of a customer's journey. But touch points are a powerful starting point, so pick two or three of them that have huge impact on your overall success and begin designing how you want those moments to be experienced. Airbnb is famous for the way they went about doing this stem the CEO Brian Chesky was inspired by Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to not only talk about how they envisioned the journeys for guests and hosts of Airbnb, but to also storyboard them. This frame is highlighting the moment a host receives a reservation request, just for example. Now, by creating storyboards, each moment came to life in a new way for Brian's team and they were able to narrow down even more details they could design. The storyboards also helped to share the vision they were hoping for with other employees so the entire company could better understand and provide that experience. A key driver in understanding how your customers feel about you is the voice of the customer. A commonly used survey is called a Net Promoter Score used to get this to hear this voice of the customer. It's also known as an mps. It's a short either one or two question survey where you ask your customers how likely they are to recommend you to a friend or colleague on a scale of 1 to 10. The results are then segmented so you can answer the question of which of your customers are promoters of your brand. Those who gave a nine or 10 detractors of your brand. Those who rated you a one or a six or one through six or those clients who are just neutral giving you a score of 7 or 8. Now, the average of all the ratings you get is considered your Net Promoter score, and it gives you a quick glance of how your customers and others in your industry view you. As you can imagine, it's probably important to you to include a follow a follow up question asking the customer to explain their rating. That way you have an idea of where you can focus improvement efforts. And Here is the perfect place for me to throw in a plug for CleanTeenelligent. There are plenty of great ways to go about executing an NPS survey, and cleantelligent is one of them. Within the app, you can quickly and easily build a survey, email it to your clients, and view their responses in your inbox. You can also generate Excel reports of the data and start looking for trends. Now for the last but most important step in any CX program, and that is to make sure you're effectively communicating with your customers before and after they provide feedback. It's not enough to just get your clients talking, you need to show that you value their opinion, make them feel heard, and they'll keep giving you valuable information. Part of mapping out your customer journey should then also include designing internal processes for managing client communication, communication and adapting to feedback. This should be an ongoing cycle called feedback loops, and the first step of course is figuring out how to most effectively collect insight from clients. Surveys, interviews, or just talking to clients are all good methods to learn how you're doing and how you can help them. Once you start getting feedback, it's time to evaluate it. Who in your organization will be responsible for this? How often will they meet to review the feedback and be sure that they know how to identify opportunities for growth or areas of improvement. Make a plan for how you respond to the customer and if possible, how you'll implement new ideas and changes. Identify the metrics you can measure to determine if the changes are working. Once you have those things in place, the next step is to get back to the client. Tell them you appreciate their feedback and let them know what your next steps are going to be. Then follow through. As you execute the plan of action, start watching the things you identified as important benchmarks of success. Don't just assume your plan is a solution. Watch how the changes affect other aspects of your business too. Then, most importantly, reach out to your customer again. See how they feel about what you've done and if it meets their needs. Make any needed adjustments and improvements here you can continue the cycle or close the loop as the need is satisfied. Either way, it's important to have these processes in place on an ongoing basis if you want to be consistently adapting to meet your customers growing needs. And that's it. I know that building all this can feel a bit overwhelming, especially in the beginning. It's important to remember that it's okay to take things one step at a time. The best part of CX is that any portion of it that you start to utilize will be a benefit to you and your customers, and it will of course lead to a higher volume of sales, stronger client retention, and Create loyal brand advocates for what you have to offer to quickly recap everything we covered, first we defined that CX is the sum of all interactions your customers experience with your company and brand. We covered the history of CX and the evolution of consumer products that went from just meeting basic needs to competing for customer satisfaction to the tactics businesses use today, strategically utilizing big data to create loyal customers. We then looked at some data that gets to the heart of why it's important to have an effective CX program in your business, and I showed you the first few steps you can take in designing that program. Now, there's a lot more to study and understand about customer experience than what I've covered, so here are a few links to some of the articles I referenced and you can use as a launchpad to keep exploring these ideas on your own. Also remember that@cleantelligent.com you have access to all of our past webinars and we regularly post to our blog addressing a variety of other topics that you may find useful. I encourage you to check these out as well. And as I mentioned earlier, all live listeners of this webinar will receive a free ebook which will go into more detail about customer experience. Keep an eye out for that email, which should come in the next couple weeks or so. And if you aren't listening live, you can still get a copy of this ebook by subscribing to our webinars, which you can do at www.cleantelligent.comwebinars or you can send us an email at webinarscleantelligent.com if you have any comments or questions for me personally. Here's my contact information. Feel free to email me or Connect on LinkedIn. I've also included contact information for Cleantelligence sales and support teams in case you need to reach out to them. And please follow us on social media. We're on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and Instagram. Come and leave us a comment about your thoughts on customer experience or what you thought of this webinar. Thanks again so very much for listening to the June 2018 webinar. I hope you have a great rest of your day and I wish you all the best in your business endeavors.