words that work
[Image courtesy of Alpha at Flickr Creative Commons]
You know how it is when you hear a word for the first time, and then it keeps popping up everywhere? It happened to me a few months ago, when I saw dob somebody in.
It’s Ozzie slang for informing on somebody (he dobbed me in to the teacher), which explains why I wasn’t familiar with it. And the writer wasn’t from Down Under, so he was using it for the novelty value.
And it was certainly novel to me.
But then a strange thing happened. Dob in started appearing in more and more articles I was reading. Either it had gone viral, or I simply hadn’t noticed it before.
Whatever the case, it’s now firmly on my radar. In fact, I found myself using it to a friend last week, whose look of utter bafflement told me that the virus hadn’t become that widespread.
Not yet. Unlike customer experience.
Customer experience is nothing new, but it’s recently moved front and centre (much like the expression front and centre has). In fact, I was waxing lyrical about it over the summer, as I undertook a big project on customer care, and its close relation customer experience.
And now, just like our old friend dob, it’s all over the place. Everywhere I turn, I see something about customer experience. You may remember that my earlier research suggested that by 2020, customer service (and experience) will have overtaken price and product as the ultimate differentiator.
Well just last week, I came across a compelling survey that doesn’t just talk about customer experience in a nebulous, feelgood way. Instead, it slaps cold hard figures on it, suggesting that an improvement in CX at a $1bn company could lead to an $824m increase in revenue over three years.
Stop and read that again. It’s enough to make anybody sit up and listen, isn’t it?
The survey by the Temkin Group is based on 10,000 US consumers and 293 companies across 20 vertical markets, so it’s pretty thorough. And the findings concur with all the others I was poring over in the summer. The bottom line is that customer experience matters – and it directly affects your bottom line.
But it’s often patchy and unpredictable. I was reminded of this again recently by two very different examples of CX.
The first was at Three, the mobile phone operator.
I’d got a new phone – not through them, as it happens – and needed a SIM card cut down from micro to nano size.
On the face of it, everything was against having a good experience. It was a Saturday afternoon, it was a small job, and to be honest, as a pay-as-you-go customer, I’m small fry. I phoned up my local store to see if they could help.
I was blown away.
My new best friend Tom told me to come around whenever I liked. They were open till 6pm, and it would be a a pleasure to help. When I got there, Tom wasn’t available, but his equally friendly colleague smiled and said she could help me out. In fact, everybody was smiling – customers and assistants alike.
Five minutes and nano SIM later, I left the shop marvelling at what a wonderful (and free) experience I’d had. I’ll never look at Three in quite the same way again. And since then, I’ve been telling everybody what happened.
I then went for a coffee at one of the big chains to play with my new phone. And there, it was quite the opposite experience: sullen staff, tables overflowing with trays, and slow, grudging service.
Now the thing is, it’s not normally like this at the other branches I go to. But this one experience has coloured my whole perception of the chain. That’s the power of customer experience.
And whether it’s a £2.50 cup of coffee or free SIM cutting, it all adds up – sometimes, to hundreds of millions in lost, or gained, sales. The companies who get it right will reap the rewards, and the ones that don’t will pay the price.
By the way, in case you’re wondering why I didn’t mention the coffee chain by name, it’s because I know that we all have bad days, so maybe it’s just a blip on the radar. I’ll leave it a while and go back to see if things have changed.
And if they haven’t I’ll dob them in. Defo.