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Exceptional Customer Experience

Delivering exceptional customer experience in an age of instant gratification, where every encounter can be recorded with a cell phone, and where it can be instantly posted to social media can feel daunting, despite your best intentions.

What’s the best way to manage that process? Today’s guest, SCORE mentor extraordinaire, Mr. Carl Baumann has some strategies for you.

What You’ll Discover About Exceptional Customer Experience:

* What factors separate the exceptional customer experience from the rest

* Seven factors to focus on to deliver an exceptional customer experience

* Why even small businesses are compared to Amazon

* How an exceptional customer experience is correlated to employee satisfaction

* And much MORE.

Guest: Carl Baumann 

Carl Baumann is a certified business mentor with SCORE specializing in counseling in business planning, strategic planning, general management and management finance & accounting.  Carl has an impressive track record in helping clients successfully launch their businesses and create hundreds of new jobs in the local community in the process. 

Carl teaches business planning courses and seminars for SCORE at various continuing education venues in the Chapel Hill, NC area and his practical, down-to-earth teaching style has made him a popular mentor.

Carl’s work with SCORE is the culmination of a 34 year career, some of it in commercial banking with First Citizens Bank and most of it with the Miller Brewing Company in numerous financial positions including Brewery Controller, Corporate Controller and Group Director – Sales & Marketing Finance. 

Carl earned a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from UNC Chapel Hill and an Executive MBA from the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA.

Related Resources:

If you liked this interview, you might also enjoy our other Customer Satisfaction episodes.

Contact Carl and connect with him on LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Carl has also generously provided the following list of suggested resources on customer experience and satisfaction:

The Cult of the Customer by Shep Hyken

Be Amazing or Go Home by Shep Hyken

I’ll Be Back – How to Get Customers to Come Back Again & Again by Shep Hyken

Moments of Magic by Shep Hyken

The Convenience Revolution by Shep Hyken

The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences by Matt Watkinson

How Hard is it to be Your Customer? – Using Journey Mapping to Drive Customer-Focused Change by Jim Tincher & Nicole Newton

The Experience-Centric Organization – How to Win Through Customer Experience by Simon Clatworthy

What’s the Secret? To Providing World Class Customer Experience by John R. DiJulius, III

Great Newsletter: The Shepard Letter – Subscribe at https://hyken.com

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How to Unlock Remarkable Growth through Exceptional Customer Experience

Hanna: Delivering exceptional customer experience in an age of instant gratification, where every encounter can be recorded with a cell phone and instantly posted to social media, can make it feel impossible at times to – despite what your best intentions are to make it good for the customer. So, what’s the best way to manage the process? Today’s guest, SCORE mentor extraordinaire, Mr. Carl Baumann has some strategies for you. Stay tuned.

Announcer: This is Business Confidential Now with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, helping you see business issues hiding in plain view that matter to your bottom line.

Hanna: Welcome to Business Confidential Now, the podcast for smart executives, managers and entrepreneurs looking to improve business performance and their bottom line. I’m your host, Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, and I have a great return guest for you today. He’s Carl Baumann. Carl is a certified business mentor with SCORE who specializes in helping business owners with planning, general management, finance, and accounting.

He has an impressive track record in helping clients launch businesses that have created hundreds of new jobs in the local community. In addition to mentoring entrepreneurs, Carl teaches at various continuing education venues where his practical, down-to-earth teaching style has made his programs a favorite.

Let’s have him join us now. Welcome to Business Confidential Now, Carl.

Carl: Thank you, Hanna. It’s great to be here.

Hanna: It’s wonderful to have you. I always enjoy our conversations, and I’m especially looking forward to your thoughts about the exceptional customer experience. But before we talk about exceptionalism, I think it would be really helpful, at least to me and hopefully to the listeners, to have an understanding of what you mean by the customer experience. Can you help us out?

Carl: Sure. Basically, the customer experience is how the customers perceive their interactions with your company, and it – the important thing is it’s how the customers perceive it. So, it really doesn’t matter what the company thinks. It’s what the customer thinks that matters, and they are looking at your company. They are evaluating the experience they get with your company, and it’s all in how they perceive that experience.

And great customer experiences are made up, really, of three things from the customer’s perspective. Number one is it useful and does it give me value? Everyone that buys something sees some type of value in what they’re going to get when they purchase that good or service, and if they get that value, then they’re gonna be happy. If they don’t get that value, then it’s not useful to them.

The second thing is, is your product or service usable and is it easy to find and easy to engage with? This is where so many people will lose focus and that they make it difficult to do business with them, and so you wanna be making it easy for people to do business with you.

And then the third aspect is really making it enjoyable. You wanna make doing business with you emotionally engaging so that, again, the customers will see the value in that.

Hanna: That’s great. So, we have three items here. It’s got to be useful, usable and enjoyable, right?

Carl: That’s right.

Hanna: Okay. Well, why does exceptionalism matter? I mean, and what makes it exceptional?

Carl: The reason it matters, and to me this is a huge reason, is, today delivering a great customer service becomes a competitive advantage, and there are so many businesses out there that don’t deliver a great service that if you deliver a great experience, then that’s gonna give you a competitive advantage.

In transaction-based businesses, customers who had the best experiences spent 140% more than customers who had the worst experiences. So, people will pay for a great experience. People will come to you if they’re gonna get a great experience. There’s some other statistics that are really interesting here. Fifty three percent of consumers have scrapped a planned purchase or transaction because of bad service. They just walk away.

Forty percent of people walk away from their carts online because it’s so difficult to check out. Another good statistic, 74% are likely to switch brands if the purchasing process is too different, 49% say that companies are providing a good customer experience today, and that’s less than half, 49%. And then I love this one because when I work with clients, I’ll say, “Well, what type of marketing do you want to have,” and they say, “Oh, I want word of mouth.”

And if you want good word of mouth, you got to provide a good customer experience because Americans will tell an average of 15 people about a poor experience.

People will tell people about a poor experience more often than they will a good experience, and then because of bad experiences, a total of $62 billion is lost by US businesses each year because they don’t provide good experiences. And then 85% of folks have responded that they’ve had customer experiences so dreadful that they’ve yelled, cursed, hit and broken things, suffered headaches, felt their chest tighten, and even cried.

And I haven’t gone to that extreme, but I’ve had some experiences that really make you wanna do some of these things. So, providing a great customer experience is not only a competitive advantage just for businesses. Nonprofits need to do this as well because they need to provide great experiences to their beneficiaries, their donors, their volunteers, their board members who are usually or who are volunteers. Government agencies and departments need to provide a great customer service.

Educational institutions. You want to provide a great experience for your internal employees. So, customer experience applies both internally and externally. And if you want to provide a really great customer experience, you need to provide a really great employee experience first, because happy employees will deliver a much better customer experience than unhappy employees.

Hanna: Well, I can definitely relate to that. You can hear the frustration of the employees on the other end. They wanna help. That’s if you can reach them. That’s the other thing that’s so frustrating sometimes with these websites is that there’s no contact person.

Carl: Exactly.

Hanna: Or maybe there’s a dumb robot…

Carl: Yeah. Yeah.

Hanna: …which takes you to the website and just get you angry all over again. It’s like, “You’re wasting my time.”

Hanna: But let’s talk about – I mean, we understand why it’s important. It’s valuable for competitive advantage, for not losing out on customers and money or having people share complaints. You wanna be able to share some good information and good news to say, “Oh, wow. Talking to Carl was amazing. You’ve got to go to his website. You got to go see what he’s doing.” But let’s talk about the mechanics of what makes an exceptional customer experience. What does it look like? What does it feel like, Carl?

Carl: There’s a lot that goes into it. Customer experience just doesn’t happen. You don’t wish it. So, you got to put a lot of time and energy in developing it. It starts with really knowing your customer and the value proposition they’re seeking, and it’s important that you go after the right customer. And by the right customer, I mean those customers that are really going to find your offerings appealing. Often, I’ll ask people, “Well, who’s your customer,” and like, “Everybody’s gonna be my customer,” and I said, “Well, that’s just not realistic.”

You got to know who your customer is, and once you identify your customer segments, then you wanna – to really analyze them by writing an in-depth customer profile for each segment, and you want to dig deep. It’s not just demographics, but you want to get into the psychographics, how they think and how they make decisions, and what they like and what they don’t like, because if you’re gonna make a great experience, you’re gonna have to really appeal to the way they think and the way they feel.

Another thing is doing a competitive analysis and really taking a look at your competition, especially from the customer experience perspective. And number one, you can learn both positive things of what to do and negative things of what you don’t wanna do from that analysis.

So, looking at your competition because you wanna differentiate yourself from the competition. The next step is to really define your brand. And when I’m working with my clients, when I’m teaching my classes and I’m talking about marketing, I always start with defining your brand. People wanna jump into all the marketing activities and those types of things, but you really need to define your brand.

And to define your brand, what – I have just a real straight up exercise where you create two lists, and on the first list you write down all the words and phrases that you want people to think about when they hear or come in contact with your brand, because your brand is defined in the minds of your customers or the minds of people that come in contact with it.

So, you can talk about all these great things about your brand, but if you don’t deliver on those great things in the mind of the people that come in contact with your brand, your brand is gonna have a completely different definition. So, you wanna define what you want to pop in people’s heads when they see or hear or interact with your brand.

On the second list, you want to describe maybe three or four or five things that you absolutely don’t want people to think and things that you wanna stay away from with your brand, and then you wanna keep working on that brand definition and add some context of the desired customer experience because you want that customer experience to be buried in your brand, so to speak, so that when people see your brand, they think great customer experience. They think about all these great actions that you did to deliver the customer experience. So then, you follow up on that list with a list of activities and behaviors that really bring your brand to life and bring your customer experience to life.

And that’s an important list, because oftentimes people are great at listing down, “Oh, I want them to think this. I want them to think this. I want them to think this,” but people aren’t going to think that unless there are activities and behaviors that drive what you want them to think or feel, and it’s very, very important to focus on the details. The details are critical here.

It’s so important that you dig into and have the minute details of how you’re gonna deliver on the customer experience. Then you wanna hire the right people, and you wanna train them and retrain them and continue to train them. And hiring the right people is so important. I mean, not everybody is cut out to be frontline customer experience deliverers, if you will.

Some people just really don’t have it in them. Now, many people can learn and be trained, but it’s not for everybody. Tom Peters, who is one of my favorite management authors, wrote a book called “Passion for Excellence,” and you really need to have a passion for excellence. You wanna think about doing everything in when you’re delivering on your brand, when you’re delivering on your customer experience. You wanna have that drive for excellence.

And if you’re a leader, you wanna walk the talk. You wanna lead by example. You can’t just get up there and talk all this stuff, and then do something completely different. So, a lot goes into this, and you really need to think about when you’re planning this at a low level of detail, the end-to-end experience that your customers have with your company. So, don’t just cherry pick certain things that they do to interact with your company.

Start at the very beginning and go all the way through the whole journey that they have, and make sure that that experience is going to be flawless. And it goes from the higher-level stages down to the individual detail steps, and you got to look at all of that. So, customer experience just doesn’t happen. It – there are a lot of steps to make it happen.

Hanna: You’re not kidding. [Laughter] I’m exhausted listening to this. And I can just imagine a business owner saying, “Well, I don’t know if I can do all of that.” And it’s one thing to talk about these things in the abstract, and I appreciate that you’ve broken it down into these bite-sized pieces, but would it be possible for you to give us an example so that we could learn by example of some organization that – if there is one – that really does an exceptional job? Because I know we can think of dozens that don’t. [Laughter]

Carl: Yeah. Yeah. Let me answer the first part of what you said, and that when I’m working with clients and we go through this process, we do one step at a time because I know it’s overwhelming. I just listed off a lot of things that you have to do, but if you do it one step at a time and really pretty much in the order that I talked about it, it’s very doable. It does become overwhelming if you think about the whole list.

But I’ve worked with many, many, many clients and when I go through this process, we go one step at a time and it goes very, very well. So, for the example, I use Amazon. I mean, Amazon hits all the right buttons. They make it very easy for you. They make it easy to order. They make it easy to – you don’t even have to leave your house. It’s delivered to your house. If there’s a problem with your order, you can get a refund very quickly. You can – they can – they work with you.

They set the example for delivering a great customer experience, and that’s why they’re doing so well. And I hate to promote Amazon because I work with small businesses, but this is something small businesses are gonna have to figure out because Amazon is the competition for many of them, and they need to find ways to make it easier for people to do business with them and reduce the friction around doing business with them.

And so, the example I would use is Amazon, and I believe probably all the listeners have had some interaction with Amazon.

Hanna: I’m sure they have because it’s just ubiquitous, especially around holidays.

Carl: Yeah.

Announcer: I mean, yeah, people are familiar with Amazon for sure. But it’s interesting you talk about smaller organizations, smaller and mid-sized businesses, looking at this behemoth Amazon, how am I supposed to compete with it? In your experience, where does delivering exceptional customer experience often fall short with these other businesses?

Carl: Oftentimes, the other businesses don’t hire people that are pleasant to work with. That’s one of the biggest complaints I hear, and people get frustrated. If you’re a smaller business and you want people to come in, make it super user-friendly when they come in, make coming into your business very pleasurable for people. People will go out to dinner to a nice restaurant because it’s pleasurable, and they will come into your business if you have a great atmosphere, if you’re friendly, if you’re nice and make it as easy as possible to do business with you. Does that make sense?

Hanna: It does make sense. It brings to mind a situation at a local business that just specialized in breakfast items, biscuits and donuts and things like that. And I remember at one of their locations, the person behind the counter looked totally bored, like they didn’t want to be there, and they wouldn’t answer any questions, and it was just like, grudgingly, we’re at the register. [Laughter] It was just all this attitude.

Carl: Exactly.

Hanna: It’s like, “Okay. I don’t think I wanna come back to this location again.”

Carl: Exactly. Exactly.

Hanna: Oh.

Carl: I’ve often – I’ve seen this written in – the most important person in a medical practice is the receptionist. And I’ll ask people, “Who’s the most important person,” and they’re, “Oh, the doctor.” Of course, it was the receptionist because the receptionist sets the tone for the whole visit. So, it’s so important that to have somebody that – who is dealing with the customers, facing the customers be really pleasant and accommodating.

So, yeah, I know exactly what you mean, but that hurts. That hurts a lot of businesses.

Hanna: Yeah.

Carl: People don’t wanna go in there.

Hanna: It does. And the thing is, I can appreciate how the war for talent makes it difficult to find the right people to hire, and even if you hire them, the training. I know of one local business that actually shut down their location because of turnover. They had a lot of students from the local universities. They trained them and they’d be there for a few weeks and leave. And so, they spent all this time training, training, training, and it just – it got to be prohibitive, so it’s a dilemma.

Carl: But that’s where the – that’s where creating a great employee experience comes in. If you create a great employee experience and the employees are really happy, then they’re gonna – they’re more apt to stick around and they’re gonna be delivering a better customer experience to your customers. Too often, they’ll hire people and train them to serve the customer, but they don’t really focus on how do I create a great experience for my employees, and to me, that’s a – that’s much overlooked.

I was in a place of business about a year ago, and I had the same thing that you did. Somebody really grumpy at the register. It was a fast-food place, and so I was overeating, and then the manager came in and started berating all the employees, and the customers could hear it. And if you just – if you create a customer experience like that, it’s gonna flow through to the customers and you’re gonna lose employees.

Hanna: Absolutely. I mean, there’s just so much turnover these days. And the whole topic of employee engagement and satisfaction and retention, we could spend a lot of time talking about that, Carl. [Laughter]

Carl: I know.

Hanna: But since you brought it up, I was just wondering. In comparing the two types of exceptional experiences, if you will, do you see key differences between creating the exceptional customer experience versus employee experience, or are they pretty parallel?

Carl: They’re very parallel. I mean, you use the same concepts. And, really, I mean, you wanna know – like when I say for the business, you wanna know your customers. For the employee side, you wanna know who your employees are. If they’re college students, how do you relate to the college students? What makes the college students happy? What are – what’s gonna make them happy enough so they will stay. Go through really much the same the same analysis, and hiring is very important.

And there are a lot of good interview questions that you can ask that’ll kind of give you a feel if – for somebody if they’re gonna be able to provide a good customer service or not.

Hanna: Absolutely, ‘cause I think you’re right. Not everybody is cut out for it. And that’s not a bad thing.

Carl: No.

Hanna: Other people have different strengths that make them valuable to an organization in different ways. But if you can find somebody who really excels at it and not burn them out in the process, giving them time to recover and recuperate, because dealing with complaints all the time is not easy.

Carl: Exactly.

Hanna: And so, it’s a tough job that I think sometimes doesn’t get enough credit that it deserves.

Carl: But…

Hanna: In wrapping up here, Carl, I was just…

Carl: But can I say one thing?

Hanna: Of course. Of course.

Carl: Yeah. That’s where the customer experience comes – the employee experience comes in. Because if you have an employee that’s dealing with complaints all day, how do you make their experience better? They’re dealing with people on the line and it’s not a fun job, but then how do you make their job better? I don’t have the answer to that right off the top of my head, but that’s a great example of a challenge to create a great employee experience for that type of a job.

Hanna: Well, and maybe creating, well, less reasons for customers to complain is one place to look. [Laughter]

Carl: To look. That’s the goal. Yeah, that’s the goal.

Hanna: Oh, goodness.

Carl: That’s the goal. And you’re back to the customer experience and making that great.

Hanna: Exactly. Yeah.

Carl: It’s a circle.

Hanna: It’s a circle. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Carl: Yeah.

Hanna: Is there anything else you’d like us to know about the customer experience? I understand that there’s a lot of detail involved, but as far as the 10,000-foot view, is there anything else you’d like to share with our listeners before we wrap up here?

Carl: Well, I just – I’d like to just hit a couple of the highlights one more time.

Announcer: Sure.

Carl: Because you wanna look for friction points. You wanna look for points that are making it difficult for the customer, and you wanna find ways to eliminate them or at least make them more tolerable. So, you wanna make it easier to do business with you. You want to make sure that your services and deliverables occur on time, that your products are easy to use and services are meeting the customer’s needs.

You wanna make sure your website is easy to navigate and use, and if something does go wrong and things go wrong, if something does go wrong, you want a quick recovery. You wanna be very responsive. You don’t wanna play the blame game. You wanna recover quickly because many great customer experiences are created out of great recoveries.

Hanna: Absolutely. People will remember that more than the problem that initiated, most likely that.

Carl: Exactly. Exactly.

Hanna: ‘Cause it shows that the company cared.

Carl: Yes. Yes.

Hanna: All right. Well, Carl, thank you so much. This has been wonderful. I knew it would be. I appreciate your time and the insights that you shared with us today, and also, how you’ve just broken this down into bite-sized pieces. You’re absolutely right that looking at it all at once is like it’s huge, it’s overwhelming. But if we take it one step at a time and we drill down into these little aspects, those small improvements can add up and add to the customer experience, making it more exceptional.

Carl: Absolutely.

Hanna: So, thank you for graciously providing that. You were also just wonderful in giving me a list of books about information that concerns delivering exceptional customer experience that I’m going to be adding to the Business Confidential Radio website as part of the show notes to this episode. So, for those people who are interested in diving deeper and learning more about this important topic, I encourage you to go there.

So, if you’d like to know more about Carl Baumann, his work, and the amazing resources that he has listed for us, as well as a transcript of this interview, those can all be found in the show notes at BusinessConfidentialRadio.com. Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to tell your friends about the show and leave a positive review. We’ll be back next week with another information packed episode of Business Confidential Now.

So, until then, have a great day and an even better tomorrow!

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