Upfront S3, Episode 8 - CX Appeal

Emmanuel: All right, let's get into the upfront question of the day. Do you think it's getting harder to prioritize customer experience?

Amanda Stevens: Well, that is a big question. Perhaps some people would say yes. But in an organization with all of the other pressures, I think the bigger theme we want to unpack today is that it's never been more important. There has never been a greater opportunity for a brand, a business big or small, to create a competitive advantage through the client or customer experience.

Emmanuel: Do you feel customer experience is one of those things that some businesses feel they can get away with? Like, if customers are still buying from us or using our products now, why would you spend more money in this department?

Amanda Stevens: At the point that we're at with the economy and with consumer expectations changing, I think the customer experience, the customer journey and how to build long-term, not just loyalty, but also customer advocacy is something anyone in financial services needs to be doing deep right now because it's no longer a nice to have; it's no longer about the warm and fuzzy. It's mission-critical.

Emmanuel: What difference does good and bad customer experience make for a business?

Amanda Stevens: I think it can make or break a business because, as many of your listeners would know, the holy grail of growing a business is having customer or client advocacy. So not just having satisfied clients, but, you know, super loyal clients, but then that next step, when they become advocates, those clients that we all love and we'd love to have more of, the ones that refer their friends and family, that do a lot of our marketing for us, that, you know, can't help themselves but talk about us at a dinner party or a barbecue. Tapping into the potency of customer advocacy can grow your business exponentially and be the thing that future-proofs it.

Emmanuel: Everyone talks about exceeding expectations, but you talk about making something epic. What does that look like?

Amanda Stevens: This is my bugbear with customer experience or customer service. Way too many brands and businesses are striving for the wrong thing. Here in Australia, we have some of our biggest banks. One of them is very open about its purpose. Their goal driving their business is 100 per cent customer satisfaction, and I think to myself, what a lowball thing to strive for. Satisfied customers don't generate customer advocacy. I don't go to a dinner party with my girlfriends tomorrow night and say, Oh girls, you've got to go and visit this business. I had the most satisfactory experience. Customer satisfaction doesn't get people talking about you at a dinner party or a barbecue.

Amanda Stevens: So I talk about the three levels of customer experience. There's expected, which is you get an experience that you're expecting and may deliver a satisfied customer. Right? You might have a level of satisfaction that was exactly what I expected. Then there's the next level, which is extraordinary. So that's where it exceeds your expectations. It's not what you're expecting. It was a nice surprise and delight that may deliver a loyal customer. But then there's the next level of what I call epic. And epic customer experiences are those experiences that you have that you can't help but talk about. You write a Google review. You can't help but talk about that brand and entrust your friends and family. Tapping into that level of advocacy where you have passionate, raving fans. Brand advocates who do your marketing for you are literally walking unpaid advertisements. For your business, that's the ultimate. And that's what we should all be striving for. Not customer satisfaction. That's very 1989.

Emmanuel: Amanda, I loved what you had to say, but I can hear the cynics now. Is it difficult to do?

Amanda Stevens: It starts with putting your customer at the heart of everything that you do and doing the small things really well. You know, we are operating our businesses in this exciting opportunities galore era where we're able to do things with technology in our business that we couldn't do five years ago. But when we can harness the best of high tech and the best of high touch, you have a very magic formula because it's about thinking about the human touch points that an algorithm or a piece of technology can't replicate. Those human-customized little magic moments are going to mean more than ever.

Emmanuel: How do we get other business areas to want to change?

Amanda Stevens: I think that the mistake that a lot of people make in large, particularly service-based businesses and particularly in financial services, is you might have one department or one person in the organization that gets it, and they get super excited about the power of the client experience, and so they start trying to implement it, but the opportunity is to take a step back and get everyone on board around customer centricity as the first step. I spoke recently at a million-dollar round table, and a couple of larger financial services companies took this one idea I gave them. They said it's such a simple thing, but its difference in our business is massive. And so I talked a lot about who your ideal customer is and personifying that person. For example, our ideal customer might be Janine, who is 45 years old. She's earning this amount. She's also making decisions on behalf of the family. And some of these organizations have literally gotten that avatar and had a cardboard cutout of that person made and given it a seat at the table in the boardroom. It's a bit gimmicky, but it works, right? It's that reminder that we are all here because of our customers, and we need to make our customers part of every conversation and every decision that we're making. Talking about customer insights and what keeps our customers awake at night, that question unifies everyone because everyone will have different perspectives. When everyone gets on board and gets on the same page and has radical customer obsession, that is where real magic happens.

Emmanuel: So is this something that can be googled? Is there like a customer experience crib sheet that people can get?

Amanda Stevens: I want to share a little bit of a framework called The Five Cs to building a robust, sustainable, profitable customer experience strategy:

1. Curiosity - being insanely curious about your customers' needs and pain points. Setting up a customer advisory board that you can use as a sounding board for ideas is such a simple, cost-effective way to have that customer-centric view of your business.
2. Commonality - which is the new platform for trust. As humans, we gravitate to people, brands, and places that we have something in common with because it makes us feel safe. Whether you're a large organization or a business owner, when you break it all down, isn't 'safe' the overriding emotion you want your customers to feel? That they're making the right decisions, getting the right advice, and their money is safe, but more importantly, you want them to feel safe to advocate for your brand.
3. Community - I always ask, "What are you doing to become a visible, active part of your local community?" The answer could be tapping you into a whole new stream of customers and solidifying loyalty with your existing customers.
4. Customization - think about personalising different parts of your touch points. Personalization can go a long way to enhancing the perceived value of your service and create that point of difference.
5. Connection - this is such an evolving, exciting opportunity for us to go deeper with our clients, to get to know them, have that human connection and that level of trust with you that you're playing such an important role in their life.

In the next few years, I think we'll see a clear delineation in financial services. We'll see brands and businesses that are very transaction-focused and very relationship-focused. And I have to say that if you're not on the right side of that ledger in the next few years, you are simply not going to win the battle for relevance.

Emmanuel: Wow, the value today. I mean, listen, I feel like I'm gonna have to play this back a few times myself. Is there a secret to getting customers to advocate for you?

Amanda Stevens: It's not a set-and-forget strategy. It's the Japanese concept of Kaizen, which is little bits of improvement continuously. That's how you win over time. That's how you get to customer advocacy, true brand love and raving fans. And it has to start from the inside out. So, if you want your people or team to create customer advocates, start by making them advocates and that will have a flow on effect to your customers.

Emmanuel: What are your final words to motivate our listeners that this is worth doing and something every business should invest in?

Amanda Stevens: Change your mindset around customer experience and customer service. It's not an expense. It's an investment. And if you get it right, you can get monumental exponential return on that investment compared to other marketing investments. And I would also say what are you doing each and every day to demonstrate that you have radical customer obsession? What are you doing to make your customer's days and lives better? I get excited about the opportunity and the potential for particularly smaller businesses in financial services to create a strong, sustainable, future-proofed, competitive advantage by really dialling into their customer experience and striving for those epic moments that create advocacy.

Listen to this episode here