After discovering who the best of the best are, we picked their brains to discover why they are the best of the best. The following are the experts’ best practices for delivering exceptional customer experiences.

The Magic is in the Client Facing Employee Team

Brittney Kocaj, Federal Tax manager at Crowe Horwath LLP, credits her team and says she couldn’t do it without them. “The team I work with most closely has been recognized many times for providing exceptional client service. It’s just how we do business. Because it’s emphasized at the leadership level, we embrace the culture of taking the client needs into consideration when all decisions are made. I find myself always being an advocate for the client, whether it means pushing the other members of the engagement team to ensure we meet client deadlines or taking extra time to hear and address client concerns and questions.”

“I feel good about the work that I do,” she says about her client-facing work. “I enjoy the work so much more when my clients appreciate my efforts.”

All Day, Every Day, Stay Customer Centric

Brittney doesn’t have a long list of tips, tricks, and advice to give to people starting out in an occupation directly involving customer interaction; she has a description of her way of life. “Providing an exceptional client experience means consistently going above and beyond. When it’s engrained in my daily routine, it’s much easier to continue.”

She does specifically mention that she finds being very responsive to your customers and providing valuable ideas contributes to a great overall customer experience.

Remember, Your Customers Are People Too

She also makes sure to point out that you should get in the habit of personifying your customers; “Always remember that our clients are all individuals who have many tasks and responsibilities to manage. Working with Crowe on a tax or audit engagement may only be a small part of the job that our clients do and working to make sure that it runs smoothly for the individuals involved and that they feel valued for their hard work and contribution are important. We’re all human and the basic respect I provide for the clients I work with goes a long way.”

Brittney also knows many of her clients on a personal level, and she rightfully believes that can contribute to the relationship.

Learn from the People around You

When asked about where she finds inspiration, Brittney brings it back to the team. “I take cues from the people I work with every day. Early on, I learned to mirror the actions and mentalities of those I look up to. Of all the incredible leaders that I work with at Crowe, I identify the behaviors that make them good leaders and great professionals and do my best to learn those characteristics.”

What You Can Learn (For Free) From Your Own Brand Ambassadors

Your Brand Ambassadors are your experts, tuned to your business, and closest to your customers. Utilize their knowledge. These individuals will give you a ground-level view of the customer’s needs and wants.

Sit down with them, and just chat. Asking questions like, “What do you think customers really need?” and “What could we do better for the customers?” will give you insight you never had before.

If you don’t know who your Brand Ambassadors are, simply pick a person that has received customer kudos most recently. Ask him/her questions about the specific event that warranted the positive customer feedback. I guarantee you’ll come away from that “free” conversation with something that is priceless.

Become More Customer-Centric Today

Are you interested in discovering your true Brand Ambassadors? Do you want to be more customer-centric?

Check out “Seven Practices of a Customer-Centric Organization” to learn more about: how your customer strategy impacts the employee experience; the benefits of using customer feedback to recognize employees; and the value of getting employee input on the customer experience.

After discovering who the best of the best are, we picked their brains to discover why they are the best of the best. The following are the experts’ best practices for delivering exceptional customer experiences.

Be Nice to Your Customers

When asked what keeps Chris Patryn of American Hotel Register Company motivated and makes her such a great candidate for the PeopleMetrics Brand Ambassador Award, she says humbly that she doesn’t do anything differently from any other salesperson.

But, in reality, she knows the secret to a great experience: be nice. She states that a quick response is extremely important, as well as getting to know your customers personally, which she always does to the best of her ability.

“It might sound simple,” she says, “but make sure you’re nice! Honesty is important; if you’re honest, you build trust and you don’t trip up. You don’t have to try to keep your stories straight if they’re the truth.”

She emphasizes the importance of getting to personally know the person on the end of the line and to have enough knowledge of the product to offer solutions and substitutions as needed. “We’re all people, and we all want to be treated like people.”

An Employee Team That Helps Each Other Out

Chris has been with Avendra Sales at American Hotel for 25 years, and gives credit to her own department as well as others across the company. She says that her coworkers are always helpful, possibly because she always makes an effort to be kind to them.

“After 25 years, people really get to know you, and they really remember kindness.” She also credits the care of her manager, Will Schmidt. “He helps me when I get stuck, listens to my suggestions and is always upbeat. He helps me do my best and inspires me to be a better sales representative.”

Chris is equally kind to new team members: “I tell them not to worry. I don’t have any magic tricks, but do listen to your customer. During the first six months you’ll probably feel nervous, but don’t worry! You’ll get more comfortable as you form a relationship with them.”

Overall – Happy Employees, Happy Customers

Chris finds inspiration in many places. “I don’t have one quote that inspires me,” she says, “I’m looking at a wall of them at my desk right now.” (Need a few inspirational quotes of your own? Take a look at our “14 Quotes to Inspire Customer Experience Leaders”.)

She also finds inspiration in her many exotic travel destinations; she is always trying new foods, which understandably enhances her cooking endeavors.

Chris is a chef school graduate and relates cooking to her job, and it’s a simple correlation. “Making people happy – that’s what it’s all about. Cooking or selling something, either way, you’ve got to make them happy.”

What You Can Learn (For Free) From Your Own Brand Ambassadors

Your Brand Ambassadors are your experts, tuned to your business, and closest to your customers. Utilize their knowledge. These individuals will give you a ground-level view of the customer’s needs and wants.

Sit down with them, and just chat. Asking questions like, “What do you think customers really need?” and “What could we do better for the customers?” will give you insight you never had before.

If you don’t know who your Brand Ambassadors are, simply pick a person that has received customer kudos most recently. Ask him/her questions about the specific event that warranted the positive customer feedback. I guarantee you’ll come away from that “free” conversation with something that is priceless.

Become More Customer-Centric Today

Are you interested in discovering your true Brand Ambassadors? Do you want to be more customer-centric?

Check out “Seven Practices of a Customer-Centric Organization” to learn more about: how your customer strategy impacts the employee experience; the benefits of using customer feedback to recognize employees; and the value of getting employee input on the customer experience.

But, one day, a customer service disaster could explode and go viral.

Why me? Why my company? This one customer service call is going to ruin my brand! I’ve worked so hard to build it the right way, and why, oh, why did this one employee do that one thing?!

One thing you can soothe yourself with when the inevitable happens: social media has a short shelf life.

Yes, it may seem like the world is ending right now.

But, I promise you a bigger and badder fail is going to come along in a week and everyone will be concerned with that. This ‘stay calm’ advice comes with a warning: it’s the lasting customer emotions you need to be concerned about.

We wrote previously on how a celebrity and Comcast were also battling it out. Today’s story shows how even a person without celebrity status can go viral, if the customer is being treated unfairly.

Go On, Tell Me All About This Customer Service Fail

The story goes like this: Ryan Block, a former tech editor, called in to cancel his service with Comcast. He reached a “customer retention” specialist who had decided that Ryan was not, in fact, going to cancel his service that day.

The rep was desperate and aggressive. After listening to the rep for over 10 minutes, Ryan decided to record it. Listen to it below:

What an uncomfortable and unsettling call! Check out Comcast’s official statement on the situation here.

Ryan Block wrote his own mini-statement in three seperate tweets.

1/ I want to publicly reiterate my asking @Comcast not to terminate the rep. My first job was in tech customer service. Not fun. Further…

— Ryan Block (@ryan) July 17, 2014

2/ It's clear the rep had a strong incentive (or threat) not to disconnect our service, and felt an inappropriate level of pressure.

— Ryan Block (@ryan) July 17, 2014

3/ It belies a dysfunctional system that pits call center reps + customers against one other for the benefit of the company.

— Ryan Block (@ryan) July 17, 2014

Comcast, It’s Not You, It’s Your Customer Experience

Let me say, I like Comcast and have many friends who work there. If you are from Comcast, I feel your pain.

The call with Ryan Block should never have happened in this manner and this viral outbreak could have been completely prevented. It’s suspected that the reps get paid more if they retain the customer, and Elise Hu from NPR contrasts Comcast’s experience to Zappos.

It’s tough for large organizations to keep track of all the working pieces, and that’s why a closed-loop tracking system is so important.

Here are the 3 things that could be done to prevent those customer experience disasters.

1.) Get a read on how customer-centric your culture is today.
Take an objective look at your culture and get a sense of how much the customer means. Is the customer the center of your culture’s focus? Identify the behaviors you require from all your employees and make sure they are aligned with delivering a great customer experience.

2.) Tie employee performance to customer feedback.
Specifically ask customers after each interaction with your employees how well the experience went and particularly whether the employees were delivering on key behaviors. This feedback can be used to reward employees who are customer-centric and train those who are not.

3.) Close loops. Always.
When you ask customers for their feedback after a key touch point (e.g., install, repair, customer service call) and there is a problem, always close the loop by following up with those customers who had a negative experience. A follow-up that was based on a systematic process with Mr. Block may have soothed irritations and prevented his experience from going viral.

Incidents like the Ryan Block call will be fewer and far between, and when they do happen you will have mechanisms in place to prevent it from going viral. So, what do you think about Comcast’s social fail?

Looking for some advice on how your customer experience is going? Take our short Cx IQ quiz, and get personalized recommends on your situation.

Love Comcast? Hate Comcast? Talk to us in the comments.

After discovering who the best of the best are, we picked their brains to discover why they are the best of the best. The following are the experts’ best practices for delivering exceptional customer experiences.

Like-Minded Teams Create Better Customer Experiences

Niki Bencik has been in her current role as a partner at Crowe Horwath LLP in the Federal Tax Group for 3 years (though she has been with the firm for 7), and is very proud of her team and the firm itself. “I would not be successful without the fantastic group of individuals on my team; they make me feel and look like a rock star.”

Niki points out that she has some Brand Ambassador award-winning backup; the non-partner winner for Crowe this year was Brittney Kocaj, who is on Niki’s team, and last year another teammate, Rachel Spurlock, won the title. “I would put them up against any team in the country,” she says.

Employees That Are Responsive Simply Make Their Customers Happier

“I’ll be the first to tell you that I don’t always know everything,” says Niki when asked about the methods that keep her customers happy, “but I do play by the 24 Hour Code. I will always return a call or email within 24 hours, even if it’s just to say I’m looking into your question and will follow up with more information. This builds trust because when they make that call or write that email, that issue is at the front of their mind and important to them. This might be something that would keep them up at night, so why let that happen when a simple email could put them at ease? If I can alleviate their stress in any way I take advantage of it.”

Make Sure Your Hiring Practices Are Aligned for Customer Centricity

Niki enjoys her clients and finds motivation in her desire to help them, and urges us to keep the customer in mind, no matter what. “The bread and butter of any business are the clients. Don’t forget that. They’re people and like to be treated as people; get to know them, talk about their lives if for no other reason because it’s harder to be angry with someone who has a face and is a person like you.”

Learning the Business Is Essential

Niki credits multiple personal mentors in her 17 years of experience. She muses that in the beginning you try to emulate the people you look up to in your field and replicate the things you like about them, but eventually you find your own style.

She even mentions putting the newest members of the team right where the action is as soon as possible. “Try to immerse yourself in the environment and spend time with clients; even if you aren’t contributing at first, you’re absorbing and learning.”

Don’t Forget to Just Relax

Niki emphasizes that it’s very important to unwind and have an off switch. “Have a vice to get back to balance. A vice can be anything, a jog, a trip, a picnic. You can’t work all the time, and if you get too bogged down it’s harder to do your job.”

What You Can Learn (For Free) From Your Own Brand Ambassadors

Your Brand Ambassadors are your experts, tuned to your business, and closest to your customers. Utilize their knowledge. These individuals will give you a ground-level view of the customer’s needs and wants.

Sit down with them, and just chat. Asking questions like, “What do you think customers really need?” and “What could we do better for the customers?” will give you insight you never had before.

If you don’t know who your Brand Ambassadors are, simply pick a person that has received customer kudos most recently. Ask him/her questions about the specific event that warranted the positive customer feedback. I guarantee you’ll come away from that “free” conversation with something that is priceless.

Become More Customer-Centric Today

Are you interested in discovering your true Brand Ambassadors? Do you want to be more customer-centric?

Check out “Seven Practices of a Customer-Centric Organization” to learn more about: how your customer strategy impacts the employee experience; the benefits of using customer feedback to recognize employees; and the value of getting employee input on the customer experience.

Picture this: I’m at my desk in an open-office workspace, when a co-worker IMs me a video about TD Bank. I had previously written on switching from TD Bank to an online bank named Simple, so I’m interested, and I click the link.

About halfway through, my eyes well up with tears.

In addition to handing twenty dollars to everyone who came to specific Canadian locations and depositing the same amount to online banking customers, last week TD transformed their normal ATMs into Automated Thanking Machines for 12 very lucky customers.

Emotional and striking, this video is a brilliant example of making the banking experience personal. See it for yourself below:

That video has gone viral and has over 7 million hits on YouTube at the time of publishing. When I started writing, it had 3.5 million hits. The number is still climbing.

Changing Lives and Making Customer Connections Personal

Maybe it’s the current economic crisis, still a fresh wound to many Americans, or maybe it goes all the way back to the Depression, but the fact stays the same: we have a hard time trusting big name banks.

TD Bank, however, is trying to change that.

TD is a place where dog treats and water bowls lie in wait for furry companions.

Lollipops are waiting for the kids and the kids-at-heart.

The free branded ink pens can be found in the hands of waiters and administrative assistants all over.

But even with all those benefits, community institutions are receiving higher Net Promoter Scores (NPS) than national institutions like TD, as discovered within our Most Engaging Customer Experiences Retail Banking study. NPS, for those that are unfamiliar, is a metric that measures customer advocacy, and asks how likely a customer would be to refer.

Community institutions received a NPS of 46, whereas national banks scored only 9. Community institutions are just better at delivering those lasting positive memories. That personalized experience they can provide because of their size gives them a distinct advantage in courting customer loyalty.

TD Bank Chose a Strategy to Personalize the Customer Experience

So the strategy chosen by TD Bank Canada Trust was to go above and beyond for a select group of customers, film it, and share it with the world. Smart thinking TD Bank.

The customers featured in the video were in for a surprise; each was given a special and personalized gift, just to say “thank you”.

A jersey and a hat from a favorite baseball team (followed by a special guest visit and the opportunity to throw first pitch at the next game) is a life-changing event for a die-hard fan.

Ask yourself what’s more impactful. A hot dog lunch, or plane tickets to visit a severely ill daughter?

Community banks might not be able to compete with this type of budget, but they can compete with the creativity. When there is a budget to do something special for your customers, such as a customer appreciation day, be creative! Doing something as a surprise, or out of the box, can make someone’s day and get them talking about their experiences.

Film it, and your bank might even be the next viral customer experience star.

Need some recommendations on what to do for your banks’s customer experience? Check out our retail banking research now.

The 2014 Brand Ambassadors:

• The RHR International Team
• Chris Patryn, American Hotel Register Company
• Brittney Kocaj, Crowe Horwath LLP
• Niki Bencik, Crowe Horwath LLP

We’d like to recognize the great work of all of these individuals on working toward delivering a consistent customer experience.

“The bread and butter of any business are the clients. Don’t forget that,” says Niki Bencik, one of the 2014 PeopleMetrics Brand Ambassador Award winner from Crowe Horwath LLP, one of the largest public accounting and consulting firms in the U.S. “They’re people and like to be treated as people.”

What is a Brand Ambassador?

Simply put, a Brand Ambassador is an individual that receives the highest number of kudos alerts from his/her customers.

Brand Ambassadors are the cream of the crop. They are the experts that know what their customers need and want (as you can read about in last year’s post Brand Ambassadors: How People Bring Your Brand to Life), and their customers know and appreciate their dedication.

Brittney Kocaj, a Brand Ambassador Award winner from firm Crowe Horwath LLP, said, “I feel good about the work that I do.” She goes on to say that providing exceptional client experiences is a reward in itself and she adds, “I enjoy the work so much more when my clients appreciate my efforts.”

How Does PeopleMetrics Select Brand Ambassadors?

It’s a two step process:

1. Every year, we use our Voice of the Customer client feedback software and technology to pick out the clients that have received the highest rate of Recognize alerts (read more about a closed-loop system and action alerts here).

2. Then, within these clients, we look through the customer feedback and find the individuals that received the most Recognize alerts within each winning company.
We believe these individuals deserve public recognition. Through their actions, they make doing business easier and better, and we want them to know their efforts are appreciated.

Why Did We Start the Brand Ambassador Awards?

In PeopleMetrics customer feedback surveys, we include the question, “Has any individual gone above and beyond for you today?” and if the customer says yes, there is an option to tell us who it was and what they did that was special.

This approach allows the customer to reach out and give that individual a virtual high-five. Organizations can also use that information to better guide and train their employees.

Over the years, we started to see that some employees consistently receive these virtual high-fives. So we created the Brand Ambassador awards to honor our clients’ outstanding employees.

What You Can Learn (For Free) From Your Own Brand Ambassadors

Your Brand Ambassadors are your experts, tuned to your business, and closest to your customers. Utilize their knowledge. These individuals will give you a ground-level view of the customer’s needs and wants.

Sit down with them, and just chat. Asking questions like, “What do you think customers really need?” and “What could we do better for the customers?” will give you insight you never had before.

If you don’t know who your Brand Ambassadors are, simply pick a person that has received customer kudos most recently. Ask him/her questions about the specific event that warranted the positive customer feedback. I guarantee you’ll come away from that “free” conversation with something that is priceless.

Become More Customer-Centric Today

Are you interested in discovering your true Brand Ambassadors? Do you want to be more customer-centric? Check out “Seven Practices of a Customer-Centric Organization” to learn more about: how your customer strategy impacts the employee experience; the benefits of using customer feedback to recognize employees; and the value of getting employee input on the customer experience.

Customers don’t want to have to work hard to troubleshoot with you. It is true that you can’t make every experience effortless, but by being responsive and asking questions to show you care, you can avoid the negative impact of being hard to do business with . It may feel like even this is difficult if you are running a large, complex business or are short on customer service employees. And perhaps you think that doing this every time is not worth the investment.

“Let’s let them figure it out this time,” you say. “What’s one negative tweet or email? It’s just one customer.”

Well, let’s put it into perspective.

Like a lot of other food-lovers I follow my favorite chefs and personalities on Twitter. New recipe? That deserves a favorite. Callout to an up-and-coming chef? That person gets followed. When celebrity chef Alton Brown, host of Food Network show “Good Eats”, recently had a run-in with his internet provider Comcast Cable, my passions for food and customer experience overlapped. Hooray!

Celebrities Have Customer Experience Issues Too

Last week Brown’s modem gave out on him, and after 45 fruitless minutes trying to troubleshoot, he turned to live-tweeting his experience with Comcast’s customer service department:

Hey @comcast after being on the phone with a non-english speaker for 45 minutes, I got hung up on

— Alton Brown (@altonbrown) July 1, 2014

This went on for awhile…

Hey @comcast If you don't pick up my call in 60 seconds, I'm going to pee on this modem.

— Alton Brown (@altonbrown) July 1, 2014

Hey, @comcast, I'm serious.

— Alton Brown (@altonbrown) July 1, 2014

And his followers, 803,000 of them in total, were given a glimpse into how difficult it can be to connect with someone at Comcast when you need them the most.
Things were looking grim.

Current – and prospective – Comcast customers looked on as Comcast’s social team wasn’t successful in rerouting Brown to a service technician, or connecting him with a live representative on the phone. As Brown’s frustrations grew, his negative feedback continued to fill the Twitterverse.

Hey @comcast and I'm going to make a video of it.

— Alton Brown (@altonbrown) July 1, 2014

Your Employee Interactions Can Flip a Situation

Mike changed everything.

Well, @comcast, you're on the line. Thank you.

— Alton Brown (@altonbrown) July 1, 2014

Hey, Mike at @comcast is has real skills and he's polite.

— Alton Brown (@altonbrown) July 1, 2014

Mike! Helpful, knowledgeable, patient Mike stepped in to help, and in doing so turned Brown’s situation around.

Mike was able to use his knowledge of Comcast’s systems to diagnose Brown’s issues and get him back up and running quickly.

So in the end, Mike from Mississippi saves @comcast from a urine soaked modem. It only took 1.76 hours. Goodnight everyone

— Alton Brown (@altonbrown) July 2, 2014

You Might Not Ask For It, But You Better Be Prepared

Moral of the story? Customers will give feedback, whether you solicit it or not. Be vigilant and prepared to follow-up when someone’s having a problem, lest you end up with pee on your products, or worse, lose customers due to negative word-of-mouth.

Now how do you hire, train and retain excellent customer service reps like Mike? As Alton Brown would say, that’s another post. Want some recommendations around your current Cx and your delivery of it? Take the Cx IQ, a short quiz that will tailor answers based on your needs.

Had your own bad situation with Comcast or another internet provider? Talk it out in the comments!

On the flipside of the coin, there are these shining, positive moments that happen in everyday interactions between people and businesses that we also get to talk about (see some great ones here: 10 Heartwarming Customer Service Stories Will Put a Huge Smile on Your Face). These experiences amaze and astound customers, build trust in a brand, and go viral on the internet.

Recently, one of those experiences happened to me, and solidly cemented my trust in a brand I had never even purchased anything from.

The Worst Friday Ever

When I got the call, I was on my way to enjoy my well-deserved Friday night with my coworkers.

That call went like this: “We’ve been robbed”.

What a punch in the stomach – that was the last thing I expected to hear. The feeling that I had for the remainder of the weekend was indescribable. I felt unsafe, violated, angry.
Getting robbed was bad. What they took was worse.

My only mode of transportation. My nice little single speed road bike. I frantically posted on Facebook hoping that perhaps someone would recognize my black, totally-normal-looking-and-unidentifiable, bicycle.

Needless, to say I was in a pickle.

The Best Thursday Ever

I was out grocery shopping, when I got the second call.

That call went more like this: “We have your bike, can you come by with proof of ownership?”

After I picked my jaw up off the ground, I rushed over to a bike shop called the Bicycle Stable, where an employee was waiting with my bike.

Years ago, I had purchased my bicycle from Trophy Bikes. Unbeknownst to me, Trophy Bikes puts a logo sticker on every bike they sell.

The competitor shop, Bicycle Stable, saw the Trophy Bikes sticker on the stolen bike, and knew where it had originally been purchased from. This simple yet effective process allowed the employees at Bicycle Stable to understand where the stolen bike had come from.

They then proceeded to call Trophy Bikes and track down my information to return my stolen bicycle to me.

The very definition of above and beyond!

I had never shopped at Bicycle Stable and had never had an experience with them. Knowing that the bike was from a competitor shop, the employees still spent many hours tracking down my contact information, filing a police report, and hosting a full-out ‘sting operation’.

On top of returning my bike, they even gave me their employee discount when I went to buy a new lock and lights.

One Small Action, One Big Impact

Trophy Bikes may have recognized that putting their sticker on the bikes they sold would have a twofold advantage: one being, hey, free advertising, and two being, able to identify bikes that come from their shop.

This is a practice that is super helpful to the local bike community. “Recovered” bikes can be identified and returned to their owners by calling the original bike shop and having them look up the purchaser. Bike theft is an ongoing problem, but this small step is making people very happy by reuniting owner to bicycle.

Look across your own organization. When you focus, you can make a smaller change that has a greater emotional impact on your customers, thereby building greater brand trust. Is there something you can think of right now? What is your ‘simple sticker’ idea?

+1 for a Great Customer Experience

The employees at the bike shop recognized and empathized with my situation, and took on my problem as their own. This amazing act of employee-customer love stuck with me and I asked them how I could ever repay them for their efforts.

You know what they said?

“We really appreciate and value customer feedback.”

Lessons to Be Learned from this Story

The employee from the Bicycle Stable did not need to track me down since I was not a customer. That’s not part of his job description. But because he went above and beyond, he’s made a proud Promoter of me.

So here it is, my little trumpet to the guys at Trophy Bikes North and Bicycle Stable. Thank you for turning my worst Friday into the best Thursday.

Without both bike shops expending a little bit of extra effort, my bike would not have been recovered, and I would have been riding the bus to work this morning.

Hopefully, this has inspired you to deliver an even better customer experience in your own business. Want to know where to get started? Read our 7 Practices of a Customer Centric Organization for some best practices to implement in your own company.

That’s because culture, like strategy, is intangible, soft and elusive. About as concrete as steam.

And yet, so many businesses claim that they have or aspire to have a customer centric culture – to become more customer-centric, to put the customer first, to be customer-inspired.

In one of our previous posts, “Why Great Customer Service Isn’t Enough to Be Customer-Centric“, we talked about these topics being hard to nail down. The challenge with setting a goal around something that is so slippery is determining when you have achieved it.

Customer Centric Culture and Our Approach

PeopleMetrics recently took up the challenge. Our Cx Culture Navigator benchmarking study included an assessment of the opinions of around 2,800 employees across 10 different organizations. We were looking to uncover the dimensions of customer-centric cultures. We recently presented this at the CXPA Insight Exchange, check out the slides below.

That is we were seeking the practices, beliefs, norms, language, behaviors, and policies that exist in companies where the customer is at the heart of operations. Not only were we able to build a diagnostic instrument that accurately measures how customer-centric an organization’s culture is but we were also able to identify some solid scenarios or situations that indicate a need to become more customer-centric.

Customer Centric Signs You Should Be Watching For

Here are five signs you may not be as customer centric as you think you are.

1. You frequently attend internal meetings to discuss product development, marketing, sales or strategy decisions during which the customer is absent from the agenda

2. Managers can quote month-to-date sales statistics but give you a blank stare when you ask about customer retention and loyalty stats

3. When you listen to employee/customer interactions you hear scripted conversations and inflexible policies not real people with individual discretion to take the right action for the customer

4. When you pay attention to how the organization speaks you realize that the terminology and language requires translation for company outsiders

5. Employees in different departments are unresponsive to each other and do not follow-through on promises

Just How Customer Focused Are You?

These are just five of many possible signals that your company is not putting the customer at the center of its operations. How well do you really know your customers?

Always plan before beginning work. Culture is but one stop on the way to fully becoming customer centric. If you’d like to discover how customer-centric you are, take the Cx IQ Assessment in order to gauge your own perception of your company’s customer-centricity.

This tool will tell you where you are in the entire spectrum of customer experience by giving you a Cx IQ score, then instantly give you advice and feedback on becoming more customer centric, all customized to your answers. Find out where you are, and where you can advance your customer focus.

1) The firm conviction in the reliability of an organization’s services and

2) The belief that they have your best interests in mind

If we get trust right there are great benefits to be realized including undying loyalty to the brand and positive word-of-mouth.

Of course, the flip side is also true. Doing something to break a customer’s trust is perhaps the most damaging action for any business to make. Not only does lost trust equal lost business but it also means a bad reputation spread socially. And a bad reputation spread socially means lost revenue. We had written previously on such a story where a customer’s trust was broken, and they had spread it throughout Twitter, titled “How To Disappoint Customers on Social Media: A Cautionary Twitter Tale”.

Customer Trust: The Goal of Many

We are not only seeing customer trust come up for our own clients – across different sectors –but we are also hearing about it in the media and from the thinkers we follow. For instance, in the Brand Innovator series from Content Standard, Carmen Vetere from startup Gazelle said:

“Much of the marketing work at financial services companies is about driving trust with the customer. With Gazelle being in a new category, establishing trust with customers has been crucial to our growth as well.”

And, CMO.com.au recently reported a shift in Lloyds Banking Group’s strategy to modify their corporate culture to focus on the customer and build trust. You can read more in this article. Sergio Vieira, head of customer insights and interaction, says this:

“We are trying to now build customer trust by putting them at the heart of decisions, using data-driven insights, and create a win/win/win for us, our customers, and our shareholders.”

Customer Trust and Me

And then there is my story.

It starts with my hatred of doing laundry. It’s boring, tedious, and I could be doing things much more entertaining (like writing blog posts or performing analysis on data). So when I moved, 3 years ago, I went on a hunt for a drop-off laundry place.
When I found Polly’s, I was in heaven. A dollar a pound for never having to do laundry again? Fantastic!

Choosing to partake of a drop-off laundry service requires a certain amount of trust in the business already. You start to wonder: will they shrink my favorite sweater? Will they lose my socks? Will they flat-out take my favorite pair of jeans?

For me, my dislike of this chore pushed me to take that leap of faith faster than someone else might.

Polly’s did a good job of building a solid foundation of trust. They didn’t lose my socks. My jeans always came back clean and folded and my favorite sweater retained its shape. But in the end, securing my trust came down to a mere $20 bill.

I’m notorious for leaving things in my pocket, be it headphones, chapstick, hair bands, whatever. This awesome place always ties whatever relics I leave in my pockets into a plastic bag and places them into the bag I dropped my clothes off in. And then one day the sweet ladies at Polly’s discovered $20 I had misplaced – and gave it right back to me.

I’m not sure about you, but if I left $20 bucks in any of the other places I frequent, I’m pretty sure I never would have seen it again. But Polly’s Laundromat employees are honest – and because of that I won’t go anywhere else… ever. Not because they saved my twenty, but because they restored a little bit of my faith in humanity.

So How Do I Build Trust As a Company?

So, what are the steps needed to secure customer trust?

• It begins with reliability. First, you have to have a clear understanding of where the breakpoints are – when do you disappoint customers and fail to be reliable?
• Next, you build a plan for responding to disappointment and broken trust. A real-time voice of the customer program will allow you to be aware of issues as they happen so that you can fix them before they damage the relationship and your reputation.
• Third, you’ll need consider how to improve processes so that the broken elements of your experience are eradicated forever.

But, ultimately, trust is a cultural issue. I wrote previously on a Vladimir Gendelman’s approach with his company, in “The Best Way to Encourage Customer Trust from the Inside Out”. Vladimir has a beautiful foundation for his hiring policy. He only hires people he trusts, so that they can do the right thing, at the right time, for their customers.

While there is so much buzz about taking an Outside-In approach, it is our belief that when it comes to building customer trust it starts inside. It starts with who you hire but it also starts with how you lead and manage. Do your employees trust you? Do you trust them? Without doing the right thing for your people it is unfair to expect them to do the right thing for your customers. What would happen if you put your organization to the $20 Trust Test? I dare you…