If you own a business or lead a team who deals with new customers all the time, you should do everything you can to ensure the people interacting with first-time customers never get tired of making their first experience wow!
This doesn’t mean letting follow-up experiences be any less wow, but it’s crucial because;
- When a current customer tells a friend about your business, they’re telling them in the hope that when they try or buy, they feel the same as them. The worst thing a current customer can hear from someone they referred is that their recommendation sucked.
- For them, this is it. They are not a number, they’re doing this once – not several times a day or week or month as your sales team does. From their perspective, it’s magnified. People taking the time to approach your business have built up their expectations, for them, this is a single anticipated experience. It counts.
- You earn a second sale possibility and a second chance in future. So much depends on the first experience. A second experience that isn’t as great as the first – due to a genuine unintentional mishap – is often forgiven when made up for, but would never even take place if the first was poor.
Maintaining the magic takes conscious effort. Training your staff to see the business from the outside in, every day. Entrenching habits like:
- Leading by example and holding true to the brand’s values and reinforcing the brand positioning that makes the business unique and worth being proud of. This is through both formal training and also ensuring it flows down through the organisation hierarchy in reality. A brand story (how the brand came to be, for example: How the founders overcame challenges to achieve a vision they can be proud of) can be a powerful tool to use to ensure the team is emotionally connected to what they do.
- Perspective: Walking into the workplace daily and looking at things as though they are the customer. Dedicated time to imagine themselves in the shoes of their customers and ask them for suggestions to improve the experience.
- Understanding the power they have to make someone’s day by being empathetic and helpful in attitude and tone, even when they might not be able to practically help due to real limitations.
- Finding ways to value them or express gratitude towards them for how they make people feel, not just sales numbers. If an employee feels good about their role, it shines through.