EP 161: Gratitude Is The Whole Customer Experience

What would 11-star service look like? That’s the question that Brian Chesky asked himself to figure out how he and his team at Airbnb needed support hosts to help everyone involved have an exceptional experience.
I first heard this idea of 11-star service during Brian’s interview with Reid Hoffman on the first episode of Masters of Scale. The idea is that you want to create the capacity for these exceptional customer experiences to happen on a regular basis. The more regularly they happen, the more people come back and buy again–and the more they tell their friends.
Of course, creating this 11-star service doesn’t just produce business results. It produces human results. Someone who takes the time to create an 11-star service isn’t just concerned with the bottom line, they are truly invested in showing genuine gratitude to the person they’re doing business with.
This month at CoCommercial, we’re talking about Gratitude and how it shapes the way we do business. What does authentic, meaningful gratitude look like? How are small business owners showing their customers this gratitude and creating exceptional customer experiences on a regular basis?
So we asked a few of our members: what do you do to ensure your customers know you’re grateful?
In talking with 5 of these members we noticed a pattern in their responses.
Gratitude wasn’t about a thank you gift or note. It wasn’t something that happened once at the end of an engagement. It wasn’t even a bonus surprise that got thrown in as a special value-add. These are the themes being explored in the conversations we’ve been having all month long with our CoCommercial community.
These business owners have operationalized gratitude into the very bones of their businesses.
It’s how they do business. They are integrating gratitude into every step of the customer experience. From the very beginning, they’re connecting the customer’s experience to the mission of the company.
They are making sure that their customer feels like more than a transaction.
For them, gratitude is the whole customer experience. 
Prefer to read? No problem. Find the entire episode in article form by clicking here.
This episode features Lacy Boggs, Nicole Lewis-Keeber, Bonnie Gillespie, Anna Laman, and Kristen Runvik. 
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