10 Ways to Provide Sensational Customer Experiences

As technology advances and more and more products and services become commoditized, the only thing that separates one business from another is the customer experience.

Poor customer experience can easily destroy a business . . . If you don’t believe this, just ask United or American Airlines. One ugly incident can destroy the customer loyalty that has taken years to build!

Conversely, exceptional customer service can accelerate a business and its profitability to new heights!

What Experience Does Your Business Provide?

I recently switched things up and gave up my BMW car for the iconic F150 short box 4X4 pickup truck. Aside from the obvious complete change in driving performance and utility, I was taken back by the lack of customer experience offered by Ford in comparison to BMW. For example:

Differentiate or Die!

If you do not differentiate your business from your competitors, you are just another commodity! Being a commodity means that your products are no better than anyone else’s. This drives down your prices, erases profits, and eventually kills your business.

I wrote about what causes commoditization and how to avoid it in a post called Why Does Your Business Exist and Why Should We Care.

In this post Apple entered the MP3 market as a late comer. They were not the “first mover” and the market space already had a large number of competitors who competed on price. The market space was already commoditized.

Apple knew this but they understood that they could still dominate the space by clearly differentiating themselves from their competitors. They identified their key differentiators, measured themselves against their competitors, and realized that they were head and shoulders above the others. They entered the market and still dominate it today!

Why Does Your Business Exist And Why Should We Care?

That which costs little is less valued.Miguel de Cervantes

 

In today’s world of hyper-connectedness and hyper-competition, it is really easy to yield to pressure and lower the prices for your products or services so that you can win the “super strategic” project or order. The problem with going down this road is that you now have set a new price expectation or ceiling on your prices. In effect, you have told the marketplace that your services or products are really not worth what you’ve been asking in the past.

A great example of this would be MP3 players versus iPhones or iPods. The first MP3 players sold at a premium because they were a new product with a new and growing market. But it wasn’t long before other electronics manufacturers saw the opportunity, created competing products and the price wars began. MP3 players had become a commodity.

Why You Need to Kill Your Company

Sometimes you have to destroy your business in order to save it.” James Surowiecki

What sort of insane person would suggest that you should kill your company? This seems like the most stupid idea ever but . . . I believe the concept of killing your company has a lot of merit.

Of course I am not talking about literally killing your business or organization. Rather, I am suggesting that you and your leadership team brainstorm to define all the ways you could kill your business or all of the events that could potentially happen that would kill your business. You then take these company killing ideas and events and, rather than implementing them, you build strategies to fortify your business against them.

How Do You Measure Success?

What is the most important indicator of success in your business or organization? What is the most important indicator that your business or organization is in trouble? Are there single indicators or multiple indicators that need to be monitored? Do you know the answers to these questions? Are the indicators clear to you and clear to everyone in the organization?

Every organization needs to have key health indicators defined clearly with specific goals and strategies set around them. Without this clarity your business or organization is like a person running a race blindfolded. The runner might be running hard but they don’t know where they are going, they can’t see what is in front of them, where the finish line is or what obstacles they may have to avoid or overcome to win the race. It would be a futile situation without any hope of success. Yet this is exactly the situation your organization is in when it does not have clearly defined indicators that illustrate where it currently is, where it is going and what it may need to overcome to be successful.

There are many standard business measurements that every business should be monitoring. Things like; employee safety, revenue, cost, gross profit, SG&A, operating profit, cash flow, long term debt, cost of debt, DPO, DSO, ITO, etc. Monitoring and controlling indicators like these are critical to ensuring that your organization stays healthy. However, I am not necessarily referring to these indicators. I am referring to the indicators that differentiate your organization in the marketplace.

For example,