Tag Archives: Repurchase

Experience Counts: The “Downgrade” Debacle

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About Martha Brooke

Program Director and Founder, Interaction Metrics
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Shep Hyken’s reflections on his hotel experience illustrate a common customer service problem. Here’s what happened: Shep reserved a room, but when he got to the hotel it wasn’t ready, so the front desk worker offered to “downgrade” him to a room that was already prepared. No one is ever happy about a “downgrade,” especially when it comes to an unknown hotel room. Will the room be a closet? The bed a cot? But what rightfully surprised Shep was that the “downgraded” room was nearly identical to the one he originally reserved. So why didn’t the associate describe the room as a virtual lookalike? Why promote the negative when the positive is right at hand?

In subtle ways, frontline employees can undermine an otherwise excellent customer experience. And this slow erosion of the company’s image isn’t captured by big-picture metrics like Net Promoter Scores or overall satisfaction. If Shep had filled out a satisfaction survey at the end of his stay, he would probably have said he was “somewhat” or “very” satisfied, assuming nothing else went wrong. If he were just the average customer, he probably wouldn’t even have thought to take note of the rep’s use of “downgrade.” But it still impacted his perception of the company.

Some might say that small details like word choices don’t matter, that as long as the customer didn’t complain about them it’s not a problem. But Zaltman’s studies, amongst others, find that while customers don’t take note of very much about their buying experiences, small cues have a huge impact on customers’ unarticulated feelings and repurchase rates. Harvard Business School: The Subconscious Mind of the Consumer (And How To Reach It): “95 percent of our purchase decision making takes place in the subconscious mind.“

Moment-by-moment details are critical to a company’s sales success, so it’s hard to understand why managers tend to rely on overly-simplified averages that don’t represent the lived experience.

Action Item: To maximize customer loyalty, ask fine-grain questions like “how many positive words do our reps use in each customer interaction?” Or, “how often to associates use language that supports or tarnishes our brand?” Set expectations for how associates should act to align with your most critical objectives. That way, instead of some amorphous average score, you get a clear, actionable picture of what’s going on on your frontline and what your reps need to do to make it better.

Branding Customer Touchpoints: Why Most Companies Aren’t Cutting it

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About Martha Brooke

Program Director and Founder, Interaction Metrics
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With the dramatic success of startups like Dropbox, Groupon and Twitter, many people are wondering, what’s their secret? Forrester’s Kerry Bodine took note of one innovative approach shared by all three companies: these newer companies seek to actively brand and engage customer feelings at even minor customer touchpoints such as the confirmation email, bill, etc. This attention to managing brand detail could be driving heightened loyalty and advocacy levels.

Certainly, this idea of branding customer touchpoints has made its way into the zeitgeist with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh describing the “telephone as one of best branding devices out there” and other marketers quick to point to the power of customer experience branding.

But the biggest companies mostly leave their customer touchpoints untapped for their brand value and when it comes to customer service (the most memorable of all touchpoints), branding is often completely ignored.

Bodine argues that these opportunities are squandered because large corporations are crippled by too many silos, over-concerned with the demands of ROI and lacking customer focus.

As Customer Experience Analysts, we find these factors are contributive, but hardly the root cause. The real reason why large corporations tend to lag when it comes to touchpoint branding is that corporations largely subscribe to an antiquated notion that engaging customers’ feelings belongs in the back room, not the board room.

Until CEOs and COOs start asking essential customer experience branding questions, like “what percent of our customer interactions are branded?” “how engaging are our frontline reps?” or “have we trained our customer service reps to deliver our core marketing messages?”, these large companies won’t have the institutional inertia to carry their big marketing ideas through to the front line.  And that means they won’t be able to keep up with the hip Zappos-types and Dropboxes of the world.