Lean into the New Year

Whether or not you make New Year’s resolutions, there’s one practice that should accompany the start of each new calendar. If you haven’t made a strategic assessment of your business and identified course corrections to keep you on track, now’s the time to lean into this work. We’ve all seen it – the daily demands of running a business, helping customers, and tackling a thousand small demands can slowly nudge us off course. It’s important to dedicate time to figuring if this has happened, what it means to your business, and how you get back on course.

Steps to a Better Customer Experience

Better customer experiences can start with the understanding that there’s not a single ingredient that goes into them. Instead, they come from empathizing with customers’ fundamental needs – economy, uniqueness, convenience, time-sensitivity, control, or many others. Identify those needs and it’s easier to focus on choosing and deploying the right tools and tactics to create a customer experience that serves them.

Take this example: A business surveys its customers and discovers that on average they expect a response to set up an in-home appointment within two business hours of initiating contact. That business currently struggles to return those calls or email requests within a business day.

Clearly, there’s a mismatch between expectations and performance. The tempting but wrong answer is to work faster.

A more realistic approach follows this path:

• Drill down into customer expectations to better understand the attitudes underneath. Is the problem just speed, or is a matter of setting expectations, or the tone, frequency and intervals of communication? We may discover that the two-hour goal is arbitrary, and customers are more concerned with being acknowledged, having expectations set, and having comfort that those expectations will be met. 
• For each of those issues, identify improvements that are needed to address the underlying attitudes. This is where work faster is less effective than a sustainable, incremental approach. Figure out the right building blocks – whether those are tools, new processes or other resources – and prioritize how to add them. 
• Put a simple plan in place to measure the effects of change. For this example, the business might use a simple post-appointment survey that measures Net Promoter Score.

Businesses must react faster to more frequent shifts in customer needs. Realizing this, we’ve refocused our attention on how to make software that supports incremental improvements in serving customers. A lot of these improvements revolve around integrations with other software products so the process of serving customers and running a business doesn’t have to start and stop each time a new system is needed. Those integrations with QuickBooks Online, Dispatch and Google Calendar give retailers more tools to apply to the job of building better customer experiences.