Are you providing a good customer experience? Here are some questions to ask your customers to find out:
1. Did you find what you were looking for?
2. If not, were we helpful in recommending how to find what you were looking for?
3. How can we make your experience here more valuable/meaningful to you?
4. Did you find our website helpful?
5. Was our online store and online check-out process simple?
6. If (when) you had a problem, were we responsive?
7. Were you able to easily get in touch with someone who could help you?
8. Was your "customer service" experience helpful? Or did we try to get you off the phone too quickly?
9. How did you hear about us?
10. Have we made it easy to provide feedback?
11. When you gave us feedback, did we respond in a way that appreciated what you had to contribute?
12. Did we tell a good story?
13. Did your customer experience with us push an emotional button?
14. Did we engage with you? Or did we treat you like a number?
15. Were we responsive to your inquiry on the social web (Twitter, Blog, Facebook)?
16. Did you have to wait long on the phone when you called us?
17. Was our retail store clean?
18. Was our store organized?
19. Could you find what you were looking for?
20. And if no, did we give you an idea where you could find what you were looking for?
21. When you were in the store, and you needed help, did someone help you with a smile?
22. When you needed help in the store, could you easily find someone to help you? Or were our employees not making eye contact?
23. Did we do what we said we were going to do?
24. Did we deliver when we said we would?
25. Are we giving you something to talk about?
26. Would a customer loyalty program mean anything to you?
27. How can we improve on our performance?
28. How can we improve on your customer experience?
29. If you are unhappy with us, what can we do to get you to come back?
30. If we apologized for poor service, was it sincere?
31. Um...did we apologize for poor service?
32. Was it easy for you to tell us you had a poor experience, so that we could apologize and take the appropriate steps?
33. And how can we better serve you in the future?
So what have we missed?
These are things you, as a company, need to think about and consider every single day. We spend a lot of time here at Intrepid talking to our customers about these things, and find that in the daily process of running a business, it is easy to lose sight of how your customers might answers the questions listed above. You must discipline yourself to focus on this.
The final lesson? You can ALWAYS improve. There is NOT ONE company that handles all these issues perfectly. You need to consistently look for ways to improve, adjust, or fix breakdowns in your customer's experience.
[cartoon by @gapingvoid]