Why Good Service Might Not Result in a Great Experience

Customer experience:

• Customers expect to receive what I promised without unpleasant surprises, which is harder to deliver than most companies believe
• Most customer dissatisfaction is not caused by employees but by international company actions and by customers who fail to read instructions, manuals, and contracts but who still blame you for the problem
• No news is not necessarily good news; receiving few complaints does not mean you are delivering a great customer experience. You hear from only a small percentage of unhappy customer, which results in both complacency and the inability to recover via great service
• Good service does not mean a great experience. The damage is often done by unpleasant surprises, and the revenue is often unrecoverable by the time service even gets involved
• Your current customer experience is leaving huge amounts of money on the table, which can be quantified to motivate your management to invest in an improved customer experience
• Technology, properly managed, can almost always make the experience effortless and memorable for customer and can be inexpensive for the company 

Components of a consistently great customer service delivery mechanism:

• DIRFT (Doing It Right the First Time) sets basic expectations for customer honestly and deliver the product or service as promised.
• Service access strategy breaks down the barriers to asking for service, keeps all possible communication channels available whenever customer need them, and makes them all easy to use.
• Service delivery makes an emotional connection with customers, prevents problems, and educates and gleans information while responding to the basic request for assistance.
• Listening and learning uses a voice of customer process to measure the end-to-end customer experience and presents it as an unified picture that provokes action.
• Technology can enhance the performance of your people and processes in each of the customer experience components via anticipation, proactive communication, and tailoring the experience to each individual customer.
• You cannot manage what you do not measure and few companies measure all customer experience components effectively.