Like many companies VBO Tickets has built our business around having a solid vision and having a defined mission statement. Having a solid mission statement is important in guiding many of our decisions and the direction of our company. At VBO Tickets our mission statement is To make a difference. To make a difference in our customers’ everyday work life, to empower them to be even more productive through our innovative ticketing solution. To make a real difference we want to deliver a total customer experience.
What is a total customer experience?
Customer obsessive, customer focused, customer centric, the idea is to take customer service to a higher level. Here are four areas that help to deliver a total customer experience.
Listening to the customer
We may not be able to solve every customer’s problem, but we can actively listen to each and every customer. Listening to the customer is very important to implementing a successful total customer experience. Sometimes, the simple act of listening to the customer can turn a negative experience into a positive one. We can learn from the experience, adapt our service levels accordingly, even improve our product from what we learn.
Actively listening to customers demonstrates real interest in their business and their needs. Customers want to feel you are genuinely trying to understand their concerns and then they want to see you deliver solutions to those concerns. Just like a doctor, we frequently ask our customers what their pain points are so we can learn what prescription is required to alleviate those pain points.
Asking the right questions, actively listening, and documenting insights from the customer is one of the most effective ways to deliver the right solution. Customers often are the ones who provide the best means of enhancing the total customer experience.
Take a whole company approach to the customer experience
Involving everyone in the company with the customer experience changes the entire dynamic. Every department should feel the customer’s pain and know how to eliminate it.
To provide a total customer experience all of the customer touch points need to be reviewed and assured of becoming a great experience. While the customer service team is crucial to the company’s purpose, each employee should feel equally responsible for providing customer satisfaction.
If the whole company is focused on the customer experience, everyone can better understand the customers needs and what matters to the customer. Every employee will consider how their actions impact the customer and try to give them what they value most. This whole company approach to the customer increases the organization’s effectiveness at delivering a successful total customer experience.
Engage the customer
Today’s customers expect a relationship with who they do business with that goes beyond just using products. The goal is to involve the customer in a relationship with the brand that becomes a part of their daily lives.
Engage the customers by providing helpful content in blogs, emails, social media posts, videos, or podcasts. For this strategy to work, the content has to be truly useful and not just a sales pitch in disguise. Instead of asking how we can sell to customers, we ask them how we can support them. When uploading videos, make sure they are in their best quality. For example, if your video is in MOV format, it’s a good idea to convert it to MP4 first. This will help you save space on your hard drive and make it easier for people to watch. We want to offer customers something they want in exchange for their valuable time and attention.
Another effective customer engagement strategy involves opening a means for customers to converse with the brand and other customers on a regular basis. Breaking the ice in social media forums such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram is a great way to get the dialogue rolling. To engage customers in this way we want to keep the conversations frequent and relevant.
Engaging customers is also done well through stories. Inspiring your customers by sharing the brand’s vision and its impact on the lives of other people.
Engaging with customers means building a positive ongoing connection. This process doesn’t occur over one transaction. It is sustained through ensuring each and every customer touch point is a consistently great experience.
Invest in your people
To deliver a good customer experience, we want to hire great people who enjoy helping others and solving problems. Taking time to properly hire, train, and motivate new hires will prove well worth the investment.
Hiring people with the right attitude is even more important than hiring people with the right skill set. The organization’s attitude determines how they interact with customers and how far they are willing to go to help provide a great total customer experience.
To find the right people, look for a good blend of empathy, initiative, and shared values. Empathy enables employees to put themselves in the customers’ shoes and understand how they feel. Initiative enables employees to identify the customers’ problems and take action to fix them. Shared values empowers employees to be enthusiastic about the company’s core values. At VBO Tickets, we believe in making a difference, that our ticketing technology should help people. We investigate each touch point to assure the customers’ total experience with our business is a positive experience. Then we hire and train a staff that truly cares about the total customer experience. This approach follows our vision and is guided by our mission statement to make a difference.
