When is the last time you had an exceptionally good experience? I hope you can think of at least one! Now think of a terrible experience you had. Include any experience you had in which you had to exchange your time. This could be shopping, paying a bill, renewing your insurance, going to the post office, using a website, eating out, taking a flight. I can’t imagine you’re going to have much trouble recalling one or two that didn’t quite deliver happiness.
A Short story of an experience.
I recall an experience a while ago in which I went to a restaurant in London. It had a nice name that implied it was fresh and really cared about me. It was located in a nice are – beside the water, the place looked great, the menu looked okay, the google review looked okay, the prices were a little on the high side but hey it’s London! So in I went with my family. The food turned out to be just okay, bland, overpriced salad really. The real fun started after the meal.
I hailed the waiter and paid the bill, then I went off to the mensroom. On returning my wife was in discussion with the manager – The manager was asking her to pay and being very aggressive about it. No problem I though, a misunderstanding! I showed her the receipt on my phone. The manager looked at us like we had just stolen the crown jewels from the Tower of London around the corner. I asked what the problem was and she maintained that we had not paid and were trying to leave with out paying. Her computer said so – so clearly it must be true!
Despite me pointing out the member of staff I paid, who was now sheepishly making themselves scarce – clearly afraid of the manager, and again showing her my receipt and my bank app and reiterating that we had indeed paid (and left a tip… regrettably), she stood her ground as a bull faces a matador. Then she announced loudly to the restaurant that she would have to cover the bill herself. What? She actually dug in, despite the evidence to the contrary. This very angry manager stared at this customer intensely. I turned on my heals and walked out of the restaurant. No apology, not an inch given.
WOW Kids, did you see that! They learned a great lesson in customer service that day, it’s a running Joke now at restaurants that the ones that don’t accuse us of stealing are generally the better ones. Now you’ll notice that I began that story by saying the restaurant HAD a nice bane.. The restaurant shut down soon after that. Unsurprisingly.
I’m sure you could tell me a story just like that one but the point is not to gossip it’s to observe and learn. So what want wrong? This place passed all the tests up to a point and then failed in the most random of ways. All they had to do was not accuse me of stealing – or at least admit that they mad made a mistake and they would have passed, pretty low bar in an industry with a very high bar. It’s like they had run a marathon and instead of crossing the line they lay on the ground beside the line kicking and screaming. I’ll tell you what went wrong. They don’t know their product is service.
Your product is service.
No! you may say, our product is in a box, its a fast moving consumer good, we put it on the shelf, the marketing people make ads and we collect the profit. Good for you, I’d start paying myself well if I were you because you’re going to need the money when you go out of business. If you think your product is just the thing in the box or if you’re a service provider and you think it’s just the core service you provide (Accountant, lawyer, therapist, doctor) then you’re like the 90%. The bottom 90% that are going down, one after another. That’s where you’re wrong! I’m a doctor! I’m necessary. Yes, I understand that you may be as indignant and self-important like my friend the ex-restaurant manager, but really you are – going out of business. Maybe not today, or tomorrow but the minute that there’s an alternative to you then bye bye!
But I don’t want to go out of business! Good – who does? It’s time to really understand something ‘Your product is Service’. Now it took me a while to understand what that meant for my last business. It took me a while because it was indeed a product in a box. In fact it was the same as all the alternative products in boxes. My last business sold water filters. For years my business sold water filters and it did a good job of it. Once I understood that our product was actually service things began to change.
From good to great.
The single event that transformed us from good into great was realising that our product began when a customer thought about a water filter and ended when they raved about the water filter why purchased – we seen our product as the customer journey. The piece of plastic is not the product, the experience your company provided over the entire A-Z of the customer journey is the product. That’s why it’s easier to see it as a service. You are there to serve the customer. If you do that well you might be successful, if you don’t – you won’t.
Did you ever hear the one – A customer does not want a drill they want a hole in the wall? Our customers wanted clean water, how hard can it be? Most companies focus on a unique selling point (USP) by adding a new button to do something that the customer does not want or need. If you’re a manufacturer and innovator then you can possibly use that. But if you’re like most businesses you’re not the manufacturer, or at least you’re not that different than most of your competitors products. There’s all the other stuff you can do – like pretend to be a luxury brand, that works too but it’s capital intensive to sponsor a formula1 car. We did not take any of those approaches.
Our innovation was to ‘Make water filtration easy’. We did that by breaking down the customer journey into finding our product, educating themselves about our product, making it easy to buy our product, making it easy to get it delivered, making it easy to install, providing support when they needed help installing, providing support when everything else went wrong, giving a lifetime warranty, proactively following up weeks and months after the sale – not to sell them more stuff but to make sure that their experience was easy. We literally turned ourselves into servants of the customer.
What to do
There’s so many things to do when you make your customer journey the product. But ultimately once you decide that your purpose is to serve the customer then it’s only a matter of resources. We started by creating our own manuals, our own videos, images and listings. In this content we removed all technical language, we built and easy website, we listed the product in places where they wanted to shop (like amazon), we organised returns no questions asked. We called them to ask if they needed any help. Simple things, all manual, the automaton came later. Do not start with automation, it’s disastrous. Automating a great customer experience is not difficult, but you must make a great experience first. We took feedback on our process in the form of reviews.
The greatest business improvement tool of all time is free – Customer reviews. As young fledgling ‘product sellers’ we scoffed at the ‘bad reviews’ it’s was always the customer, we though. Later, when we saw the light, we realised that reviews were like having thousands of independent consultants constantly experiencing and feeding back into our process.
Because we saw our product was actually Service, because we had a process of continuous improvement of our service, we consistently make our experience better. Better experience gave better reviews, better reviews got more customers, more customer made us the number 1 and everyone wants the number 1.
Notes:
The title of this post was inspired by a book I read, it was the title of the first chapter. Unfortunately I can’t remember the name but I’ll find it and thank the author.
Sadly another business permanently closed… The writing was on the wall. I hope this does not happen to you.s
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