Every week as SmallBizLady, I conduct interviews with experts on my Twitter talk show #SmallBizChat. The show takes place every Wednesday on Twitter from 8-9 pm ET. This is excerpted from my recent interview with @MichelFalcon – Michel Falcon is a customer and employee experience coach and professionally represented keynote speaker. He works with organizations who aspire to recreate or refine the service they deliver to their customers and employees. By creating and deploying customer and employee focused initiatives, he helps companies grow their revenue and become admired brands. Michel has worked with billion dollar companies while also helping small businesses become customer and employee centric.
Prior to becoming a business coach and keynote speaker, he was a part of 1-800-GOT-JUNK? customer experience team that managed the organizations customer centricity efforts. A few of the company’s accomplishments included: a NPS score of 83, reducing customer complaints by 33% in one quarter and deploying customer centricity training content across the organization. For more info, visit www.michelfalcon.com
SmallBizLady: Within small businesses, do you believe customer experience is given the same attention as marketing and sales?
Michel Falcon: I believe that small business owners understand that customer experience is important but I don’t believe they put the same level of strategy into it. Too many companies believe that customer experience is just something that happens during the day-to-day, but to be successful we must ensure that we sit down, strategize and create a customer service experience that our customers will obsess over. I believe the best and most affordable thing a small business owner can do is set aside time to “map out” their customer experience and define each point of interaction your customers have with your business. By doing this, it will provide clarity on what your customers actually experience when doing business with you.
SmallBizLady: What is the best thing a small business owner can do to improve their level of customer experience?
Michel Falcon: Understand how you are hiring and recruiting. You may have a great training program to teach your team how to deliver amazing service, but if you don’t have the right people to take that training and implement it effectively, then it’s good for nothing. I believe we must hire exactly how we plan who will be invited to our wedding or dinner parties. Think about how meticulously we become when we decide who’s going to attend an event of ours, we must take the same approach to hiring and welcoming people into our businesses.
SmallBizLady: You regularly speak about onboarding as a great way to inspire exceptional service. What can small business owners learn about onboarding?
Michel Falcon: Let’s first define what onboarding is. Onboarding is the experience your employees receive after being hired. For example, how are they trained? Are they given the resources they need to succeed? While these things are very important, I’m extremely focused on how businesses emotionally connect with their employees during the first day, week or month after being hired. A question I coach companies to ask during the hiring process is, “what’s an indulgence you can’t live without that costs less than $20?” Let’s say the employee says, “I can’t live without Toblerone chocolate!” How meaningful would it be, if on their first day, there was a handwritten card from the owner of the business thanking them for joining the team, plus a Toblerone bar? I have witnessed firsthand how connected employees immediately become with the business which will inspire them to create meaningful relationships with the company’s customers. Do you see how customer and employee experience are interconnected?
SmallBizLady: What customer-focused companies can small business owners look to for inspiration?
Michel Falcon: Of course, there are the recognizable companies like Zappos, Nordstrom and Starbucks, but I think we must all pay attention to other small businesses in our cities who deliver amazing service. It could be the coffee shop or bakery down the street; it doesn’t have to be large business. In fact, I think small businesses are better at delivering a consistent customer experience than larger companies. My recommendation is, when a company, regardless of size, delivers amazing service to you as a consumer, make a note of it and think, “would this work in my business?”
SmallBizLady: How has social media affected customer experience? What can small business owners learn?
Michel Falcon: We recognize that social media has given our customers a louder voice and a platform to be heard. We must set service level agreements (SLA’s) within our business to respond to customers. For example, if a customer tweets at us we should respond within one business day (maximum). One thing I would recommend to small business owners is to use social media to educate your customers to improve their experience. For example, if you operate a hair salon I think it would be great if on a weekly basis you created a blog post about what type of products men or women should use or new hair styles that are popular. Creating some sort of content that provides value to the customer will enhance their experience.
SmallBizLady: You hear of large companies focusing more on customer experience. What about small businesses, should this be their #1 priority?
Michel Falcon: Absolutely! Customer experience must be at the core of your operation. When I work with clients or speak at event, I always say, “If your customers aren’t at the core of your business, then they will be at the core of your competitors’.” You see, if your customer experience is world-class, then your business will grow organically through referrals and repeat purchases. Growing organically is the least stressful way of scaling your business.
SmallBizLady: You mention that customer experience will make your business more profitable. How?
Michel Falcon: If you earn customers through referral and repeat buyers then the cost of customer acquisition is low. It costs very little to service or sell to a customer who has been referred or who has bought from you before. The alternative is to spend money on marketing strategies and hope that customers visit you. Word of mouth marketing from positive customer experiences is very powerful.
SmallBizLady: What type of training should employees receive to deliver an exceptional customer experience?
Michel Falcon: I believe frontline employees must be the most educated people within our company. After all, they are the individuals who interact with our customers the most. I’ve worked with small companies and large companies and find that training programs are very underwhelming. We must teach our employees on: what’s the difference between customer experience and customer service, what are the three customer personality types are and how to deliver amazing service to the 100th customer of the day as you did the first (plus more). My recommendation to small business owners is to evaluate your training material and honestly ask yourself, “is this material setting my team up for success?”
SmallBizLady: What are some effective ways small business owners can ask for customer feedback?
Michel Falcon: Great question! I find that too many small business owners aren’t asking for feedback which is negatively affecting their customer experience. I believe the best way to gather feedback is through email. If you collect your customers email addresses for marketing purposes, use affordable software like SurveyMonkey or Google consumer surveys to power your feedback collection. We must habitually survey all customers when we have the opportunity to do so.
SmallBizLady: Other than resolve complaints, what else should we do with customer feedback?
Michel Falcon: Do two things: analyze the comments and share it with your entire team. There is no point of asking for feedback if you’re not going to use it to improve your business for example, if 15% of your customers aren’t happy for a particular reason, well, find a solution for it then move onto the next customer aversion. Also, you must identify what you are doing well. If 30% of your customers say they love your small business for a particular reason, keep doing more of it. Once we have compiled customer feedback, which I call “customer intelligence”, we must share it with our entire team. The feedback is great for frontline employees because they will have a better understanding of what makes your customers happy or not.
SmallBizLady: How important are testimonials to improve our customer experience?
Michel Falcon: Very important! When a prospective customer is thinking of doing business with you, they want validation. They want to see that other customers have purchased from you before and that they had their expectations exceeded. Gather as many text or video testimonials as possible and use them on your website, marketing material or sales presentations. You can never have too many testimonials.
SmallBizLady: What can small business owners do today to improve their customer experience as quickly as possible?
Michel Falcon: Be a critic of your own business. Take your company and put it under a microscope and ask yourself some hard questions like, “Is our level of service growing our business or holding us back?” We must be able to have hard conversations with ourselves and commit to wanting to get better every single day. Lastly, if your employees aren’t delivering amazing service, it might not be their fault. Perhaps, you haven’t set them up for success. As the saying goes, “employees don’t fail, systems do.”
“Beautiful Young Woman Holding Shopping Bags” courtesy of Serge Bertasius Photography / www.freedigitalphotos.net
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