Curatti

3 Behaviors That Make Or Break Customer Experience

  • Paolo Fabrizio

    • During the last three months, I’ve been traveling a lot to meet clients, mostly driving my car. Therefore I’ve also had some time to think about how customer relationships are born, evolve, and sometimes cut up. More specifically, what aspects influence the whole relationship in a positive or negative way, just like in any other non-professional sphere? That’s why today I’m going to focus on three behaviors that make or break Customer Experience.

    Are You Consolidating Customer’s Trust?

    That is the question. In fact, whenever you acquire a brand new customer, you do get a ‘temporary trust credit’. That person has put extra effort into changing his/her habit by giving you money for the first time. For any customer, that’s an effort and also a risk.

    As a new customer, have you ever had regret? I bet you have. On the other hand, you may also have enjoyed positive customer experiences exceeding your best expectations, huh? That’s why I’m deep diving into three key recurrent behaviors that make or break customers sooner or later.

    1. Availability 

    That goes way beyond business hours. Paradoxically you may officially have a 24/7 service, yet you still deliver poor customer experiences. In fact, we all, as customers, expect to be able to get information, to have conversations, to get solutions the moment we have that NEED. Meaning we do not want to:

    2. Empathy

    Then here’s another way to make or break customers. They may have a face-to-face conversation or the same over Digital Customer Service channels such as messaging, social media, live chat, and video chat. However, one thing remains the same for them: they want your support specialists to be able to detect and understand their feelings during the conversation. Yet they’re not satisfied with that, because they also want to perceive them by reading the responses they get.

    As a former customer service manager and today as consultant, I’ve experienced that lack of empathy makes both customer interactions unconvincing and ineffective. Since this is one of the main areas I deep dive into during my training sessions, I suggest you to learn more at this page.

    3. Transparency

    ‘Tell me the truth, how good or bad is it?’ – anonymous customer.

    As human beings, we all trust people whose words are coherent with their actions. That’s why, especially in case of issues, customers expect you to tell them that there is a problem instead of discovering it because you hid it or minimized its consequences. An example? You are an apparel eCommerce, and you’ve just found out that today your delivery staff are on strike(!) Well, you’d better advise all affected customers before they will realize it. Otherwise, they’ll be waiting in vain for your products. Of course, make sure to inform them about how and when you’ll sort things out.

    Over To You

    You can make or break customer experience in many ways. But the above three are tremendously effective. Be aware of them and share and make sure that all key stakeholders are aligned as well. That will prevent your organization’s pitfalls that, 100% of the time, add up to poor customer experiences.

    Have great conversations.

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    Featured image: Copyright: ‘https://www.123rf.com/profile_alexan107‘ / 123RF Stock Photo

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    Paolo Fabrizio

    Digital Customer Service Consultant, Trainer, Author, Speaker. Paolo has been helping companies to harness digital customer service as a business driver. Founder of CustomerServiceCulture, author of books and speaker at conferences in Italy and abroad. Lecturer at the Bicocca University of Milan