Over the past six years, AskNicely has worked with some of the worlds largest customer experience brands. In our experience, the best and brightest all operate under a set of daily habits that drive their success. Consider this an intro to these habits.
1. Set Your Service Standard
Put simply, a great customer experience is one that matches the customer’s expectation. Your service promise tells customers what they can expect but, more importantly, it tells your frontline workers precisely what an awesome experience should look like.
2. Do One Thing Better
An open secret known by all of humanity for thousands of years is that there is tremendous power in achieving small successes every day. This is how we start the motion of delivering on your customer promise.
3. Get Feedback to the Frontline
Frontline staff deserve (yes, deserve — it’s a basic human right) to get feedback from the customers they serve, delivered fresh (same day is best), in a format that’s easy to digest and act upon immediately.
4. Recognize achievement
The next step is recognizing staff for hitting that mark. The core principle here is catching people doing things right.
5. Coach for small improvements
The great Stoic philosopher Seneca said, “Don’t underestimate the value of a moderate effort consistently applied.” When you focus on improving one thing every day, over time you build mastery which the customer will appreciate as will the leaders in your business.
6. Connect the Frontline to the bottom line
If you’re doing a good job on habits one through 5, you should be seeing healthy improvement on your key business metrics. Your frontline staff deserve to feel pretty chuffed about these results.
7. Un-mute the Frontline
Chances are, someone on the frontline has the perfect solution to that customer problem you’ve been whiteboarding alone in the boardroom all afternoon.
