Imagine it’s your son’s birthday and you want to do something special. You want to go out to your favourite restaurant, where they do a cake your son just loves.
So you phone the place up, a week before to see if they can do you a whole cake and not just a slice. The person on the phone replies; ‘Sure, we can do that. Not a problem.’
You call again on the day, to check everything is set. This time the person who answers the phone has no idea about the cake. They get a manager, who also has no record of your request.
You’re upset, in fact you’re pretty mad about the whole situation. Eventually, however, the manager agrees to go through with your request.
When you turn up for dinner, you finish your food and wait. Forty minutes later there’s still no sign of the cake. You try to get to the bottom of it and, finally, what comes out of the kitchen is not the cake you specifically ordered. It’s not the cake that your son wants to have.
It wrecks the whole experience of the evening. Not only that, it wrecks all the previous good experiences you’ve had at the restaurant. Instead of being your favourite place, the place you always go to for special occasions, it becomes the place you tell ALL your friends and family ‘Do not go there. They ruined my son’s birthday’.
Is this good customer experience? If making a whole cake wasn’t possible, it would have been better to say no right from the start, rather than raise unrealistic expectations and ruin the moment. Making promises just to get the customer into the door is no longer okay. With this mindset and approach, the business is going to lose revenue.
If you look at customer experience as a whole journey, are you going to remember that the starter was nice or that way that the restaurant ruined your son’s birthday?
What wins in people’s memory? Is it the free dessert the restaurant gives to apologies or the story about how a mess up with a cake ruined a little boy’s birthday?
Watch the On Demand presentations from our CX Day Event to find out what else there is to consider when trying to build a great customer experience:
