Jul
28
posted at: 1:19 PM
On Friday, our company president gave a brown bag on creating great customer experiences. If you aren't familiar with brown bag seminars, they are basically seminars that a subject matter expert will organize during lunchtime in organizations, usually technical, to help inform employees from throughout a company about topics they might not usually get exposed to. Brown bag seminars get their name from the idea that for the day of that seminar, everyone would opt to bring a brown bag lunch and stay in to attend the talk. At ISITE, pizza is provided if the topic is work-related, so while our seminars don't usually live up to the name, we still get free pizza. A fair trade-off in my opinion, and people are more encouraged to get involved.
The topic of great customer experiences took things in a different direction than I had originally anticipated walking into the seminar. I was originally expecting to hear more of the same regarding applying a personal touch to interactions with clients. The approach was more along the lines of analyzing customer touch points, and pro-actively thinking about how our business processes send messages to clients. These could range from the signatures in our e-mails to the usability and experience of working with our bug tracking web application. Even our deliverables are touch points, in that the experience a client has with something we put out the door can shape their overall attitude about us as a firm. The goal of the seminar was to get our gears turning about identifying touch points, and how we can strengthen those experiences, which could then potentially lead to additional service offerings, directly or indirectly.
Initially I started thinking about ways we could proactively introduce new mediums and forms of interaction with clients to improve our position as a visionary in the industry. Part of the reason for this, was that all of the best ideas were taken during the open discussion portion of the seminar. My position on that has since changed following a negative customer experience I had this morning at a local Burger King restaurant.
Now I don't eat at Burger King very often, but today happens to be the day Erika and I set aside to go to the Oregon Brewers Festival. For some time now, we've believed in some sort of urban myth we picked up somewhere that eating greasy food before drinking a bunch of beer will absorb the alcohol better, and allow you to drink more beer without getting a hangover. This is probably totally false, but for the sake of tradition, we decided we would get some fast food today and then take public transportation downtown to the festival (because drinking and driving is bad bad bad!). Since I am a huge sucker for BK's chicken fries, I decided that I would hit the drive-thru on the way back from some other errands.
I usually hit up this particular BK when I feel like cheating and poisoning my body with fast food. Typically this is for viewing major sporting events, sneaking out of the house when Erika isn't paying attention to indulge in bad food, or in preparation for events that involve lots of beer (like today!). Every single time I go there I get the chicken fries and I ask for honey mustard sauce. Every single time, I get home and realized they forgot it. It totally sucks! This time, I discovered they had forgotten again in the car on the way home, and I sheeped out and didn't go back and lay into them for it. It was seriously a breaking point for me, and I'm not sure I will ever go back to that Burger King, though there is another one that's actually just as close to our house.
This negative customer experience provoked another thought, though. Pretend for a moment that BK didn't usually give out sauce with their chicken fries. Wouldn't it be awesome if BK realized they forgot to give me the sauce, called me up to let me know there was a mistake, and drove out to my place to give me my sauce? Then when they got here, if they gave me a coupon or something for more free chicken fries and maybe one of those kiddie BK crowns or whatever, it would be awesome. Anyone in customer service knows this as service recovery, and this is obviously a dramatization of typical service recovery, but this is what people should strive for!
In bringing things full circle, in a service-based industry, we need to be open and honest in communication with our clients. We need to continue to bring issues to the table as things that may cause problems in a project from any perspective, but I think being proactive is also a huge part of it. Sometimes that may be suggesting an improvement to a project, but it doesn't necessarily have to be an upsell. People love little pleasant surprises. It can make somebody's day. Fixing a bug, and then pointing out that while you were working on it, you discovered some other things that you took care of, and made a minor tweak to some configuration to make their site load faster. I think a lot of this stuff we do already, we just don't always tell the client about it. Maybe we need to. A little honey mustard sauce can go a long way.