Are You Really Delivering a Good Customer Experience? Here’s How to Manage Your Customer Experience

One of my favorite movies is The Scent of a Woman, where Al Pacino won the Oscar for Best Actor.

In the climax, Pacino delivers a powerful speech defending a young student’s integrity. One line from it has always stayed with me:

“I have come to the crossroads in my life. I always knew what the right path was. Without exception, I knew, but I never took it. You know why? It was too damn hard.”

Have you ever faced a similar crossroads while dealing with customers—knowing the right thing to do, but hesitating because it’s hard?

Let me share a story from Sheena Iyengar’s TED Talk on “The Art of Choosing” that illustrates this challenge.

In Japan, she ordered green tea with sugar. The waiter replied, “One does not put sugar in green tea.” After some back-and-forth and even involving the manager, she was told, “We do not have sugar.” Moments later, when she ordered coffee, it came with two packets of sugar.

From a Western perspective, a customer should have it their way because happiness is in choices. But the Japanese perspective values preserving tradition and protecting customers from what they believe is a poor choice.

So, how do you manage expectations like these? When do you honor the customer’s request, and when do you guide them toward what you believe is better?

Before we dive deeper into managing such situations, let’s define what customer experience management really means

What Is Customer Experience Management?

Customer experience management (CXM) is a system of processes, infrastructure, and strategies designed to improve customer interactions with the organization, thereby exceeding customer expectations and delighting them. 

Let me give you two stories that cover both negative and positive customer experience management.

The One That Went Sideways

There was this gentleman whose bag was misplaced by a domestic airline twice within 15 days. The second time around, he was frustrated and wrote them an email stating, “Thank you for misplacing my luggage for the second time in the past 15 days. I look forward to flying with you soon.”

Their automation engine reads this mail and responds, “Thank you for writing to us, and we are happy that you loved your experience. We want to continue providing that experience and look forward to your next flight with us.”

After all, their intelligence engine did not understand sarcasm.

The One That Is Remembered Even Today

One of the participants in a panel discussion that I was a part of shared this anecdote.

He had to travel to Los Angeles on his Birthday. So, when he goes to the counter for the boarding pass, they look at his passport, give him a warm smile, and wish him an incredible journey with the Emirates.

While waiting for the boarding announcement, his name was announced on the PA system, asking him to come to the counter. On reaching there, he was told that he was being upgraded to the business class as it was his Birthday.

Inside the plane, they come together and cut a birthday cake for him. Now, he was speechless, and on his way out, the air hostess slipped a couple of champagne bottles into a duty-free bag and wished him a great evening ahead.

When he ventured out, a person was standing with his name on a placard stating Emirates had arranged for his drop in a Limousine.

Can you imagine this experience? Since then, he has been traveling only to those destinations where Emirates flies.

And, hasn’t he recounted this experience innumerable times?

The best way to manage customer experience is by addressing the customer’s needs and looking at the customer experience from the customer’s perspective.

How Do You Go About Managing Customer Experience Positively?

Here are some pointers that you can look at:

1. Culture Eats Service for Breakfast

Peter Drucker came up with the phrase, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

No matter how great your business strategy is, your plan will fail without a company culture encouraging people to implement it.

The same applies to service. Unless you ensure customer service culture across the organization, your service strategy will almost always fail.

If you are serving through only one channel, so be it; do them well.

• Amazon has a callback feature.
• CDBaby picks up your calls within three rings
• Banks today offer the choice of callbacks

2. Employee Experience and Customer Experience

Employee Experience (EX) and Customer Experience (CX) are two pillars of any business. One must ensure these two experiences are aligned.

After all, “if we consistently exceed the expectations of employees, they will consistently exceed the expectations of our customers,” thanks to Shep Hyken. 

3. Watermelon Effect

80% of brands think they provide exceptional customer experience. Only 8% of their customers agree.

The outer shell is green. Everything else is in the red.

What is believed or perceived is not the truth.

Complaining customers are often better than the ones who quietly leave you for your competition.

Leave out your perceptions and start interacting with your customers to understand their needs, wants, and desires.

Initiate conversations from your side.

4. Customers Expect Reassurance

Organizations are often stuck with challenges they cannot address within the given SLAs. What do they do in such scenarios?

The most important thing for the CX representatives to do would be to acknowledge that a problem exists, reassure your customers that it would be addressed, and provide them a realistic resolution time and resolve them.

5. Empower Your Agents. Bring in Answerability as Well.

It entirely depends on the context.

How do you know how much you can empower your customer-facing representatives? This is a tricky subject for most people, but here is a simple solution.

For instance, let us assume that an agent’s decision will result in revenue loss for the organization; then, we should cap the value to which an agent is empowered to make decisions. Besides, they will be answerable for the decisions that they took. This would make it practically possible to empower agents.

Have you heard of Ritz-Carlton allocating discretionary spending of $2000 to every employee to ensure they are on the side of the customers?

Let us look at an example of an empowered agent.

I was moderating a panel discussion recently, and one of the panelists shared this scenario with us during the session.

He booked a hotel for a 4-night stay in Gurugram using an Online Travel Agency. It was a non-refundable booking. When he checked in, he said he did not like the hotel and expressed that to the hotel staff. The hotel staff apologized and suggested upgrading him to the suite room. He wasn’t convinced and decided to shift to a better hotel.

So, he called the Online Travel Agency and told them he had booked this hotel and wasn’t comfortable staying there. The agent said he would figure out if something could be done while listening to this.

If he had followed the Standard Operating Procedures, the agent would have said, “We are sorry that you don’t like the hotel, but since it is a non-refundable booking, we cannot help you.”

However, the agent made sure that he got the refund, booked him in another hotel, and helped him check in. The agent even checked whether he was comfortable with the new place.

What happened here?

The agent had enough data to know that ‘So and So’ has booked more than 500 nights through their portal in the last ten years. The agent knows he is a loyal customer of the portal because of their integrated system. He was empowered to decide to push for a refund of a non-refundable booking by going against the SOPs.

The agent ensured the customer’s lifetime value increased with this phenomenal customer experience.

6. No Longer a Cost Center

Post-pandemic, customer experience has found a seat at the table. It directly influences customer loyalty and trust, increasing revenues and business.

7. Act On Feedback

What do you do when a customer clicks on thumbs down on one of your service metrics? Often, you flash the message, “Thank you for your valuable feedback.”

What does your customer do with this message?

Absolutely nothing. They might even find this annoying.

Would you be interested in providing feedback any further? I am afraid not.

Imagine you click on the thumbs-down button, and it immediately triggers a response to the CRM. In turn, an agent calls you to inquire what went wrong and why you gave a thumbs down.

How would you like this?

You would feel heard.

Start to act on the feedback you receive.

8. Intelligence as the Starting Point

To begin with, train your bots to act on transactional queries like appointment rescheduling, cancellation, checkbook requests, account balance checking, etc.

You would not go wrong with it, as the bots would have direct access to this information.

For the rest, train your bots to answer 90% of your existing queries before rolling them out.

Also, provide options for the customers to request a callback as a part of your bot interaction, or better still, allow them to speak to a human agent directly.

Customer experience isn’t just a buzzword or a box to check. Managing it is a mindset, a philosophy, and a commitment to excellence.

Imagine a world where every customer interaction is a masterpiece, and every conversation leaves a lasting impression.

This should be the world that we should strive to create, where customer experience reigns supreme.