How to create a customer experience revolution.
Imagine if you had the power to stop all bad reviews, well, at least 98% of them? Would you do whatever was possible to do this?
Well, here’s how it could work. Each customer that goes through your business would be sent a really short “filter survey” to find an overall customer satisfaction level. If that experience were bad, or even mixed, you as the business owner or manager of your business’ online reputation would get an immediate notification of that sentiment and have the opportunity to call that customer BEFORE they went on to leave a negative review, or spread bad juju via word of mouth to their friends and family.
From a customer’s perspective this would be way beyond the usual experience they’re accustomed to. This may even be something along the lines of what you might expect from the customer experience gurus like Zappos. Imagine being on the other end of that experience for a moment, you are the customer. You were just sent a thank you email from the business you just made a transaction with, and you were less than satisfied. You felt maybe angry, or that the business did a sloppy job and you want to tell someone at that business, “This isn’t right!”. So you answer their short survey with an unhappy face, and leave a short comment about what went wrong. Within 10 minutes you get a call from the owner. Wow, this is a bit strange, then the owner takes the time to listen to your complaint. He’s actuallylistening, and he’s thinking on his feet as only the owner or a high level manager can do – and he fixes the problem right then and there by taking appropriate and commensurate action. What if the owner then later followed up that transaction with flowers to your house, and a personal hand written note thanking you again for your understanding in the matter.
WOW – that is a customer experience worth remembering. Now, instead of having a customer that had a bad experience, and possibly going on to Yelp to slam your business yet again (like you need one more bad Yelp review right now in your life…) you might even get a reversed GLOWING review talking about how the owner had put into place a business system that found a potentially bad experience, and had corrected above and beyond the problem like no other business you’ve ever made a transaction with has done. How much do you think that review would be worth? How much new business would you get from that ONE experience being on the front page of Google Reviews or TripAdvisor? My thoughts are that you’d get 10x more than the cost to refund the customer, send them flowers, and the 20 minutes of your time it took to handle this personally. Imagine if you had a few of these? You might even start a customer experience revolution.
Why am I going on about this? Because this is the type of business system that GuestRetain is working on creating right now for itself and for its customers. The type of system that we are creating for our clients, but I’m not trying to sell you on our services right now. I’m talking about something that you, as a business owner, should be looking to create in all aspects of your business. It’s time to take back control of your customer’s experience by putting in a business system in place for every aspect of that interaction. Make it bullet proof, long lasting, and completely hands off.
Are you up for the challenge? Let’s do it together, because I think it will be worth the effort to create a business you can be proud of.
One Comment
Troy Brevers
Hi – great post thanks. I’m going to be checking this out more often, thanks for the great info.