Which 6 customer touchpoints with your business will impact your reputation?

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Jim James here with you today. I want to just ask you the question, and that is, how is the customer experience when they deal with you and your company? Because now public relations isn't just about what we get written about, it's what other people say about us as well. And now with social media, Everybody can be an experience sharer. Everyone can be a critic, and that can be magnified. So I want to just share with you some ideas about measuring the customer journey and just ask you to think about how are you managing the customer experience and making sure that you're delighting customers once they've come in the door. And I'm going to use some personal experiences and anecdotes, which is really what's prompted me to share this today. Okay, so let's just look at the customer journey. So it used to be a very simple public relations piece of work. Maybe you'd read about somebody, a restaurant or a business in a newspaper or magazine. You may see an advert or something, for example, a sign downtown or on the way to the airport, for example. But now the customer journey is not only one or two touchpoints, but it's consistent right up through To the point of purchase and at point of purchase and then post-purchase. I want to share with you a recent experience that I've had where I went to get my car serviced, and it's a Mini Cooper S. It's a nice car. And if you know anything about the customer service here in the UK, when you buy a car, the garages make the most money out of the after-sales service. So it could be very expensive. So I was looking for an alternative. And I found one. I found a big branded repair shop here in the UK called Halfords. I went online and I was able to find my local repair shop. And I spoke to somebody online on the chat. They guided me to look at the different service schedule that I needed. I put my registration number, the car registration, into the system, and it told me the kind of car it was and the latest service that it required and asked me if I wanted to book that in. And if I did, I could choose by postcode my latest and nearest garage and service time. The online digital experience was awesome, and the pricing meant that it was going to be less than half the price of the standard Mini garage. I thought, this is going to be fantastic. So the digital experience, everything from the AdWords to the keywords to the blog about what to expect from a car service was all done perfectly. So the digital team and the customer acquisition team was done brilliantly. So if we look at a customer journey, I can look at, for example, the Talkwalker website. They Have 6 steps. They say step number 1, there's awareness. I needed to get my car serviced. I've got little flashing bulbs. Step 2 is the research. I went online and did a quick search for Mini service, 2-year service. Step 3, engagement. I had a chat with the online assistant for the Halfords website. The next, then I was engaged and then they got me to convert. I committed. And in fact, I even pre-booked and prepaid using the monthly interest-free payment. Now, this is where it all went wrong. Step number 5, I went down to the local garage to get the car serviced and the car park was completely full. Went in, there was a slightly, well, very harried looking young man and he said, oh, sorry, sir, it's my first week in this garage. And 4 of our 6 technicians are away. So if you don't mind waiting, I'll see what I can do for you. What's your registration? So I gave him the registration. He said, oh, that's right, it's a service, a full 2-year service. No problem, sir. I'll see what I can do. Already the delivery at the point of purchase isn't quite as I'd expected from my digital experience, which had led me to believe I was going to be received and be organized and that someone would be able to drive my car in because I'd had an SMS to say, remember to drop your car off at 8:30 to be on time. So I duly turned up at 8:30 after dropping the children off at school, and I was met by this overwrought young man who told me he'd just arrived. Another customer came just after me, and he had been told that he should be there at 8:45 for his service for an MOT. And he was told by the young man who'd only been there a week that the person in charge of doing the MOT had been in a car accident and wasn't going to be there today. Could he leave the car, or better still, take it away? Over the period of the next half an hour, a succession of people who had had SMSes to tell them to be there on time drove their cars and found there was nowhere left to park. And I decided to say to this young man, I'll remove one problem from your experience today. I'll take my car and I'll come back another day. But I said, you did say on the phone that I could have a courtesy car for the day because you want to have my car all day. Yes, said the young man. Here's a car for you. It's parked around the side. You can go and get into that. So I got into this car and it was filthy. Cigarette ash everywhere. I turned it on and it was out of fuel. It had only 40 kilometers left and I was gonna drive 10 kilometers home and 10 kilometers back. And I was thinking, this isn't really gonna work out. So I parked the car, was making a phone call, and someone parked in front of me and a man got out with a Halfords branded jacket. And I said, oh, you're parked in front of me. I'm about to leave. He said, oh, sorry, sir, you can't take that car. Who said you could take that car? I said, well, the Young man inside. So you can't take that car. That's that's a mechanic's car. You can't drive that. I said, "Well, it is filthy. It has no petrol." And he said, "Well, it's not only that, sir. It's not insured. If you drive that car, sir, it won't be legal on the road." So I duly got out of the car, took all my things out again, and went inside. I'd overheard the exchange between what I understood now to be the regional manager and this young man who'd been there for just a week, who was trying to sort everything out. Meanwhile, a young technician, the only one who was actually working that day, was wandering around with an oil-stained rag, wondering which car he should start on. And I peered through into the workshop and I could see spanners on the floor. I could see oil with lids off, and I could see cars in various states of starting and finishing. The supervisor proceeded to talk in front of this young man who'd been there for weeks, explaining That the agency staff had let them down and that it was all really chaos and that he never normally worked in this shop at all, but they would get to the bottom of it. Meanwhile, I have quite an important 2-year service— brake linings, brake pads, oil filters, microfilters, and so on. I'm starting to think that the Mini garage, although twice the price, may have been A much less risky investment of my time. So whilst I'm waiting to get my keys back, the area manager explains to his young man and the rest of us who are waiting in the slightly crowded and slightly anxious-feeling reception that 4 of the 6 staff are not turning up. Not only that, the young man who'd been doing the MOTs wasn't in an accident at all. That was a lie that the man who'd been there for one week had concocted to try and make everybody sort of feel somehow better about the situation. The man who was going to have his car MOT'd also took his keys back and decided to leave. And I said, I think I'll just get my keys back because I think I can't have that car anymore. And the supervisor said, no, I'll tell you what happened. Because A young technician had an EV on the ramp, thought the electric vehicle was in park and had got out of the car because there was no engine noise, thought that it had been turned off. And this electric vehicle had shot off the ramp across the garage and driven into the wall. And so they had given the spare pool car to the owner of the EV. Only to find when he unfortunately had an accident that the car wasn't insured. Not so reassuring, the whole story in itself. So I said, well, I'll tell you what, I'll just take my Mini back home with me. So step 5 of the TALKWALKER customer journey is delivery. When it comes to advocacy, which is step 6 of the customer journey, you can imagine How people like me who feel aggrieved because frankly we've been lied to, we're likely to share that story. We know that happy customers share once or twice, but unhappy customers share multiple times. In fact, nine to ten times. It's a social desire to warn other people not to go there. The manager rang me twenty minutes later and said, "We might be able to fit you in." In 2 weeks' time at a different facility, sir. Would you like me to book that in for you now? And I said, you know what? I don't think so. I think I'll just have my money back. What happens is that having raised awareness, having got me through the research and the conversion funnel, when I have my product issue under delivery, if I am not happy, I'm not only going to not buy from them, but I'm going to start to share. And because of social media, we can share at scale. We can post photographs of the workshop in disarray. We could put it on our Twitter, on our Facebook, on our LinkedIn. If we're really not happy, we can start to do what I've been doing with one company is I'm recording using Loom the unhappy experiences I'm having, and I'm sending it through to them. But I'm also starting to share those on my social media with an@ symbol saying, do you know this is your customer service? Why are you not responding to us? And we're saying, why are you not responding? Because the promise was there. If there was no promise, we wouldn't worry. But If there was a promise and it is unrequited, then we're going to be really unhappy. So as we know, public relations is about building a great reputation. But if your customer journey is poor at any stage, it doesn't matter how much good PR you've done because you're going to have churn and you're going to have disloyalty. Worse still, you're going to have your users, potential users, becoming anti-users. When we look at PR, we have to manage all the touchpoints in the customer journey. And let's face it, customer journey is reflected by how good we are, for example, at technology, how good we are at serving, for example, the disabled or the under-abled. person, the old person that doesn't know how to use the app, and that's the only way to communicate with customer service, for example. We have to think about public relations not from our point of view, but how the customer experiences. We know that there are net promoter scores, NPS. There are customer effort scores. There's a task completion score. There's a customer lifetime value. All of these you can find out about on Talkwalker site or generally. There is no point in doing good PR if we give bad customer service or bad customer experience. So I'll leave that with you because the best advocates, as we know, happy customers. And if they're not happy customers, they'll go to Amazon ratings or NetScore or one of these other rating products. And that could be the kiss of death. So as you're thinking about your public relations, don't just think about the front end, think about the whole way through, because otherwise people like me that get bought in will feel kind of so embarrassed, will feel so stung that we will become your worst public relations nightmare. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. And I really hope that this show helps you. If you like it, please do rate it. We have a link in the show notes at the end on how to rate the podcast. Also, if you're interested, we have the book, The Unnoticed Entrepreneur, online at Amazon. Thank you for joining me on this, The Unnoticed Entrepreneur.