The Five Steps to Building Great Experiences
- Fact – if experiences were so easy to create – everyone would be consistently “wowing” their customers.
- Fact – Banks need to spend more time focusing on how to minimize the “miserable moments” versus trying to replicate a Disney or a Starbucks experience.
So, where should they start? We believe that Banks need to step back and follow five basic steps to create lasting customer experiences. What are the steps?
Step I – Define the experience. What is it that will make you different in a highly commoditized world? Are you going to entertain your customers? Educate them? Create an esthetic experience? Are you going to break the rules?
Step II – Engage your employees. This may seem strange to anyone who is focused on building customer experiences, but if a company is truly serious about creating an experience that can be replicated consistently – it must capture the hearts and minds of its employees. Make the experience real and relevant for employees, for it is the employees that must deliver the experience.
Step III – Execute the basics consistently. Why the basics? So many banks continue to fall short in delivering on the very basic tenants of customer service. Simple things like greeting, building rapport with customers and showing appreciation for their business can go a long way. A customer experience is only real if it can be replicated consistently across every customer touch-point. This is about building the experience foundation – without consistency there is no customer experience.
Step IV – Don’t Forget to Capture Emotion. The best companies appeal to their customers emotions.
“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." Maya Angelou
Banks must deliver on more than the functional elements of the experience to build commitment and loyalty – they also must be trustworthy, empathetic, and genuine. These attributes present the greatest opportunity for differentiation in the marketplace largely due to the fact that so few banks are focusing on them.
Step V – Measure and Continuously Improve. Make the experience actionable. Create standards that can be measured and monitored. Measure continuously and don’t rest on your laurels. Look at the recent memo from Howard Schultz from Starbucks – “Over the past ten years, in order to achieve the growth, development, and scale necessary to go from less than 1,000 stores to 13,000 stores and beyond, we have had to make a series of decisions that, in retrospect, have lead to the watering down of the Starbucks experience, and, what some might call the commoditization of our brand.”
Great companies continually refresh their customer experiences. Executing consistently is only one element in building a customer experience – the foundation. If you want to be truly great – you will need to appeal to the emotions of your employees, your customers and you must be ready to reinvent the experience!
