John Sills, a partner at The Foundation, shares insights on good and bad customer experiences. He emphasizes the importance of prioritizing customer satisfaction and debunking myths. The discussion explores the significance of aligning products with customer behavior, building trust through transparent interactions, and adopting a human-centric approach to workplace behavior.
Improving customer experience requires recognizing and addressing service failures early.
Understanding and engaging with customers can prevent similar issues with employees.
Promoting transparency and empathy in customer interactions builds trust and respect.
Deep dives
Importance of Customer Experience
Improving customer experience is crucial for businesses to recognize when experiences are poor and enhance them. Understanding customer annoyances can lead to more effective responses, providing realistic suggestions for improvement and early intervention to prevent service failures.
Relevance of Customer Experience in Mitigating Human Risk
Insights from customer experiences are essential for managing ethics and compliance to avoid the employment contract fallacy. Learning from customer frustrations can prevent similar issues with employees, emphasizing the importance of focusing on understanding and engaging customers for organizational success.
Humanizing Rules in Customer Experience
Humanizing rules can improve customer interactions by avoiding rigid processes that overlook common sense in service delivery. Encouraging empowerment and flexibility leads to better customer service experiences, highlighting the need for genuine human connections and decision-making aligned with customer needs.
Transparency and Honesty in Customer Relations
Promoting transparency and honesty in interactions creates trust and respect in the customer relationship. Acknowledging when mistakes happen, explaining the situation, and resolving issues demonstrate a commitment to addressing customer concerns and building stronger adult-to-adult connections.
Importance of Humanizing Customer Experience
The podcast episode delves into the significance of humanizing customer experience by emphasizing the need to treat customers with empathy and understanding. It highlights the challenge organizations face in maintaining a human-centric approach amidst complex structures and biases. The discussion underscores the value of being authentic, demonstrating empathy, and treating customers how one would want to be treated, encouraging a positive customer experience.
Balancing Compliance, Regulations, and Customer Satisfaction
Another key insight from the podcast revolves around the balancing act between compliance, regulations, and customer satisfaction. It touches upon the aspect of compliance sometimes overshadowing the human element in customer interactions. The conversation explores how regulations can impact customer service and highlights the importance of addressing customer needs genuinely and ethically, even within the framework of regulatory requirements.
What makes for a good customer experience? In two special episodes of the Human Risk podcast, I’m speaking to CX experts who provide fascinating insights into what drives how we feel about the times when companies deliver really good or really bad service.
In two interviews that I’m releasing together, I’m speaking to experts in customer experience. They both have different approaches, but their work is aimed at the exactly the same objective; recognising when the experience is poor and identifying ways to improve it.
On this episode which is the first of the two, I speak with John Sills. He’s a partner at the Foundation, which helps companies to grow by providing better customer service. In our discussion, we explore what makes for good and bad customer experiences and how companies can do a better job of delivering them.
To find out more about John and his work, visit:
John’s personal website where you can subscribe to his CX stories Newsletter: https://johnjsills.com/
The Foundation website: https://www.the-foundation.com/
