5 Inspirational Customer Experience Stories
Great customer experience is something that many companies aspire to, but very few deliver on. Customer experience must be a core part of a company’s business model, not just an afterthought, in order for an organisation to succeed. This doesn’t only mean providing a working product, but recognising how important your company and product can be in the lives of your customers, whether you’re selling shoes, developing video games or trying to change the way people use energy.
Here are five ways to deliver an excellent customer experience that creates trust in your brand, and some examples of companies who took these lessons to heart.
1. Get Personal To Understand What Your Customers Want And Need
In order to deliver a better customer experience, you have to move beyond the impersonal interactions that define most company-client relationships. Knowing and understanding your customers personally is vital to building a relationship that lasts.
When Riot Games heard about Joe, a young League of Legends player suffering with cancer, they knew how much it mattered to make his dream of visiting Riot Games a reality. Riot Games, together with the Make-A-Wish foundation, organised for Joe and his father to join them at their studio in Santa Monica for the day. The Riot Games team was so moved by Joe that they decided create a charity campaign where the proceeds from sales of an in-game item would go to the Make-A-Wish foundation.
Riot understood that Joe was not only a customer, but a passionate player whose life would be dramatically improved by this small gesture. It’s this customer-centric attitude that has helped make League of Legends the most played PC game in the world.
2. Fix Your Mistakes
When something goes wrong, be sure to take responsibility for it. Trying to shift the blame won’t help anyone and might negatively affect your reputation.
Once you have acknowledged the mistake, be sure to take steps to correct it.
Zappos is a company that truly embodies great customer service. When their delivery partner accidentally sent his shoes to the wrong place, Jay got in touch with UPS, only to be told that they couldn’t get him his shoes. Jay didn’t give up there and got in touch with Zappos. An employee at Zappos didn’t just offer to send him new shoes overnight, but also upgraded his account to VIP status. Not only was Jay getting free overnight delivery on the order that went wrong, he was getting free overnight delivery for all future orders with Zappos. You’d have thought they’d stop there, but not Zappos. They also refunded him on his original order.
Zappos recognised that a customer of theirs was in need, and even if they weren’t directly responsible for the mishandling of the order, it was their responsibility to ensure that their customer was happy. This is why Zappos is synonymous with great customer service, rivaling the likes of Amazon.
One of the ways your company can show they are customer focused is by responding quickly to your customers. This is only emphasised when dealing with a time sensitive issue.
Microsoft understands how important it is to respond quickly to customers. This is why they have an entire social media team that deals only with customers on Twitter. This dedicated team means that the average response time for the @XboxSupport team is a blisteringly fast 2 minutes and 42 seconds. This is so quick that the team actually cracked a Guinness World Record for The Most Responsive Corporate Account. The Xbox Support team is also open about how they handle all customer complaints, ensuring transparency when it comes to customer service. They also make their responses personal by initialling and adding a caret to all their responses.
3. Respond Quickly To Your Customers
A quick response shows your customers that they are important to you and will increase their overall customer satisfaction. Evidence of this was captured by a Tweetpoll the support team did which showed that customer satisfaction was “through the roof”.
4. Go Beyond Your Customer’s Expectation
It’s one thing to do your job. It’s another to go beyond that and create an experience that your customers will remember. Loic Le Meur, a busy entrepreneur himself, probably didn’t expect Elon Musk would respond to his plight personally, let alone on the same day. When Loic pointed out that Tesla drivers were using charging bays as parking spots on Twitter, Musk agreed that this was a problem and that it would be dealt with. Musk didn’t drag his heels on the issue, and less than a week later a solution to the problem was implemented.
Musk could have easily passed the problem on to someone else in his company. Instead he responded personally and made sure the solution was rolled out as quickly as possible. This attitude carries throughout Tesla, which is why the company took the number one spot in the Consumer Reports’ annual owner satisfaction survey.
5. Remember The Future Impact Of Your Actions On Creating Repeat Customers
When interacting with a customer, you should be thinking long term. A customer who regularly has good experiences with you will become a champion for your brand, recommending your services to people that they are connected to.
Zappos understands this and has the numbers to back it up. Of all the purchases made, 75% are made by repeat customers, who also place more than 2.5 orders than above the average order size per year. Zappos also benefitted from this in regards to their new customers, with 43% of new customers hearing about Zappos via word of mouth.
Merchants aims to deliver a customer experience that understands the customer on a personal level, ensures the company takes responsibility when things go wrong, responds to customers quickly, exceeds customer expectations and thinks about the long-term impact of your customer experience.Bob Middleton, from Mercedes-Benz Financial Services in the UK, had this to say about his experience working with Merchants and the service we offer:
“I think it’s been very collaborative, with working with the colleagues as well in SA, because we have to satisfy all the European and UK data requirements, customer data requirements, and we’ve been able to do that in a very professional way with Merchants. And they understand our needs because they operate, obviously, globally and that’s been very important to us, to ensure that quality data, and all those exacting standards are achieved.”
In order to provide customers with a great customer experience, you need to implement a customer management strategy that aligns with their needs.If you’re not sure whether your CX is aligned with your customer management strategy and your customer’s desires, you need a CX assessment.