Crafting Your Customer Experience

Top Secrets of Marketing & Sales

What do we want the overall customer experience to be like? How do we want this person to be welcomed if they happen to walk into our business? Because we want that experience to be consistent.

That’s another important aspect of this. The businesses that really consider their customer experience want to make sure that it is absolutely consistent.

David: Hello and welcome back in today’s podcast. Co host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing crafting the customer experience. Welcome back, Jay.

Jay: Hey, thank you so much, David. And I feel like here once again I’m going to learn something from our discussion because I don’t think a lot about crafting the experience. For me, it’s like, Hey, we had a sales call. Now you’re a client and we’ll just fake it until we make it, I guess.

David: Right. And that is certainly a way to do it. It’s certainly valid. I believe it’s probably what many businesses do, perhaps most. The thing that actually got me thinking about this was a trip that I took to Disney World a number of years ago.

And I thought about how every aspect of the experience is crafted. It is thought out in advance. It’s planned. It’s choreographed. There is very little, ideally, that happens there by accident. And at the time, I thought, “wow, as a business, if we were able to craft a similar sort of experience for our customers, what would that look like?”

I’ve done presentations on this topic over the years. It’s something that a lot of businesses tend not to think about, but when I raise the issue with them, they seem to feel that it’s pretty appealing and interesting.

Jay: Yeah, absolutely. It’s funny you bring up Disney World or amusement parks. I remember being a little kid and going to an amusement park, and I thought even the staff members were installed as part of the experience.

I was amazed when I realized they actually went home after work. And then I ended up working at that very same amusement park on the backside, you know, where all the employees walk? It’s so disappointing!

David: It’s got to be.

Jay: Yeah, absolutely, and I think this is one of those topics where we’re not talking about, boom, one day you’ve got the customer experience defined. I think this is a process. It’s going to be very different from when you first open your doors, so to speak, because it is something that you should always be fine tuning, correct?

David: Yeah, and we can’t even fine tune it if we’re not thinking about it. If we basically show up for work every day and do what we do, then we’re doing what we do. We’re not considering what the customer experience is.

If you just take the title of this podcast to heart and say, “okay, what if I did want to craft the customer experience? What would that look like?” What happens if somebody calls our business on the phone, what happens?

Is it a person who answers? Is it an auto attendant? If so, what does that auto attendant say? Is it encouraging to help people get where they need to go? Is it discouraging? Is it likely to put them off? Something as simple as that, that’s one aspect of the customer experience.

This is what happens when someone calls us on the phone. This is what happens if someone visits our physical location. This is what happens when I meet someone on a Zoom call or in an in-person situation.

Every single aspect of the experience, if it is considered, if it’s even thought about, is likely to be a whole lot better than if we’re just winging it.

Jay: Yeah, such a great point. And I think one of the problems, David, is self-awareness. I think about this in sports. Like when all my daughters played sports and there were players and parents of players who didn’t really understand their individual skill set and they thought they were much better than they were.

Because of that, they didn’t ever progress because they thought they had reached whatever marker that needed to be. They’re kind of prideful about it. I think that can be really true in business. If you don’t have a feedback system, if you’re not constantly analyzing, you may think you’re much better than you are.

David: Yeah. And sports is a great analogy because, in so many cases, it’s all about the athlete. It’s all about the person on the field. Am I performing my best? Am I doing what I need to be doing? It’s all about me. And in business, it can’t be all about us. It has to be all about our clients and our customers, if we want to be successful in it.

We can’t just think about ourselves. We have to think about what the customer needs and how can I provide it? If I can, I need to tell them how I can provide it. And if I can’t, I need to tell them that too, right? I don’t want to tell them I can do something that I can’t do and then not come across.

So I think a lot of that has to do with focus. When you’re talking about sports versus business, the focus on the business owner and everyone in the business has to be on the customer. That’s why I think the whole idea of an experience and the idea of an amusement park isn’t bad, because all those experiences are designed to be pleasant — a great experience for the customer — which in our case would be our customers.

Jay: Yeah, and I think back to the sports analogy. After a game the coaches go through, pick out all the plays, and make the players watch back because…

David: Smart.

Jay: Again, self awareness, right? So the real question is what mechanism do you have in your business to play back that experience? I think that’s kind of really the hardest thing to come up with.

David: Yeah. And a lot of time we’re just playing it back in our own minds, which can often play tricks on us. We remember how a particular conversation went. But we’re remembering it from our point of view. And so when you talk about something like watching a video of your performance, you’re now seeing it from the audience’s perspective, which is totally different from your experience of it, where you’re living inside your own eyes and seeing it from this angle.

So what you experience is completely different. And some people do things like recording phone calls, they record their Zoom sessions, their Skype sessions, that sort of thing, and they watch them back. They force themselves to do that. I know in a previous podcast, we talked about how we both worked in radio and how they used to do that to us, record the shows, and we’d have to listen back to what we had done.

Jay: Oh, I hated it.

David: Yeah, sort of live through it again. But it does show you and tell you what it is that the other person is experiencing. So I think there’s definitely room for that. But that’s almost like the second step. The first step is recognizing that we want to consider the customer experience, that we want to be in charge of it.

It’s very likely a matter of making a list of things that we want to do, a list of contact points that we want to firm up and say, okay, what happens in this situation? If I go to a networking function, how does that go? What’s that like? And essentially choreographing that.

Jay: Yeah. And I think it’s important to not be afraid to just ask. Ask the customers, “Hey, how’s this experience going? Is there anything else I can help you with?” And recognize that a lot of times our customers will not give us feedback, but they will go and tell other people what a terrible experience they had with you. And you don’t even know it’s happening. So asking, I think, is important.

David: Yeah, it’s definitely good to get feedback. Now, a lot of times, I go by the mantra that people vote with their wallets. So if they’re not buying from you, they’re telling you there’s something about what you’re doing that they don’t like. But in each experience, every one of us only has the ability to perceive things through our own five senses.

So if you think of it in those terms, what are they seeing in this situation? What are they experiencing? What are they feeling? If not feeling physically with their hands, what are they feeling from an emotional standpoint?

Are they enjoying the experience? Are they not enjoying it? But you know, sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. How can you impact those things? Obviously, if you’re on a Zoom, you’re going to be able to influence fewer of those things than if you’re in-person. But when you consider an amusement park type of experience where they’re really focused on the entire environment, it includes all of those things.

They’re giving you certain types of food in certain areas. The smells are of certain areas, right? And the sounds are of certain areas. The music they’re playing goes with the area that you’re in. So all those types of things are designed to create the experience. Now in our own businesses, we’re not likely to go that far.

But we’ll do a lot better if we say, “well, what DO we want the overall experience to be like?” How do we want this person to be welcomed if they happen to walk into our business? Because we want that experience to be consistent.

That’s another important aspect of this. The businesses that really consider their customer experience want to make sure that it is absolutely consistent.

Amazon is a great example of this, because you don’t show up to Amazon, right? You don’t walk into an Amazon store. You go to their site. Your whole experience is happening on a computer screen. But that experience is completely choreographed.

You know where to go to look for the things you’re looking for. It comes up, it tells you if it’s in stock. It tells you how soon you’re going to be able to get it. It tells you what it costs. It tells you where you can get it from other people who also sell on Amazon, right? So it gives you a lot of different options.

And that’s one example. I’m not saying, “Hey, be like Amazon.” I’m saying, that’s a good example of a choreographed experience. And if you can do it in person, like an amusement park, and you can do it online, like an online retailer, that means you can pretty much do it anywhere. So we need to ask ourselves, how do we apply the lessons we can learn from examples like that to our own businesses?

Jay: Yeah, it’s a great example. Look around you. See what other people are doing. Don’t reinvent the wheel. You don’t have to do that. And you know, I think that that will save you a lot of time and effort, right?

We’re in this process right now in our own company. We’re establishing just a follow up email. “Hey wanted to make sure that you got everything you need. I’d love to hop on a call with you and talk about your experience and to see if there’s anything else we can do to help you out.”

So it’s a follow up feedback call, but in a lot of ways it’s also a sales call and they can be both. And I think the ultimate goal is to have the customer experience to where they want to come back and do more business with you.

David: Right. And you’re systematizing it. You’re setting it up so that each person, at a certain period in that correspondence, receives that particular communication.

When you’re doing it like that, you can make changes. You can tweak it. If you find that it would be better with this sentence instead of that sentence, you can fix it in one spot and know that it’s going to carry through going forward. So from a systematizing standpoint, I think what you said is very important.

There’s another aspect of this that I would also think of in terms of the performance aspect.

Every presentation we have with a client, every conversation we have with a client, is to some extent a performance. And I don’t mean that in terms of acting, like pretending you’re someone you’re not…

If I go to a theme park and I meet Cinderella, it’s not really Cinderella. She’s pretending to be someone else. I get that. I’m not suggesting that in our types of businesses. But what I’m saying is we need to be able to put our best foot forward. What is the version of us that should show up in a communication like that? And if we need to be seen as the authority with what we do, then we have to be able to convey that authority.

We have to bring our best game in terms of what we’re going to do, how we’re going to help, why it would make sense for them, and why it might not make sense for them so they can come to an intelligent decision about whether or not to work with us. And we can make the same decision whether or not we want to work with them.

If we have a good fit, it has to go both ways. I mean, we have situations in our business very often where I have to tell someone this is not a good fit. And I’ve had people say, “well, no, I think it’s a really good fit.” And when it’s not, it’s my obligation to tell them, right? In those situations, it might be easier to accept payment, right?

But I can’t do it. Because if I’m not absolutely convinced that I’m going to be able to help someone, then telling them you can is just false advertising. So I think that authenticity is key and that’s got to be part of your performance as well. Performance in terms of showing who you are, being clear about who you are, how you can help, how you can’t, and letting the chips fall where they may.

Jay: Yeah, such a great point. And speaking of not having to reinvent the wheel, how do people contact you because you help advance their situation?

David: Well, you can go to TopSecrets.com/call. That would be the traditional response. We say that at the end of every podcast, right? So there’s an example of a system.

But you know what? If you’re not ready to make that call and you want to do something else, go to TopSecrets.com/blog. That’s a little different. That will take you to lots of these types of conversations. You can get an idea of where we stand on hundreds of different topics and decide, “Hey, does this seem like the kind of business I’d like to work with?”

So, I mixed it up a little there just because you called me out on it. But I think it’s good to do that as well, to be able to say, okay, look, if you want something different, if you’re not quite ready for a call, then go to TopSecrets.com/blog. You’ll see a listing of our 10 most recent conversations that we’ve had on topics like this.

And you can go to the bottom and click and come up with 10 more, and click again and come up with 10 more and have a look. See if what we’re saying makes sense for you. And if it does, then schedule a call at TopSecrets.com/call.

Jay: All right. Fantastic, David. It’s been a real pleasure as always.

David: Thank you, Jay.

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