How are you raising customer expectations too high?

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Evolving customer expectations present an enormous opportunity for organizations to differentiate service, but at what cost? Economic unpredictability and raising customer demands have put a strain on contact centers everywhere. But are you part of the problem? Are you raising customer expectations too high? Are you the cause for the bar being raised higher?

How are you raising customer expectations too high? Click to Tweet

This is exactly what author and keynote speaker Chip Bell made me think when I met up with him at the Contact Center Expo. It happened when he introduced me to the concept/practice of value-unique. Don’t look it up, Chip made it up. He’s good for inventing new words that cause you to pause.

Raising Customer Expectations – Again

Chip makes an excellent point about trying to differentiate your service by focusing on value-added. Value-added means taking what the customer expects and adding more. While it’s great to be generous, you’re continually raising customer expectations.

And as you continue to raise customer expectations, they continue to expect you to add more. So, what happens is that you run out of room…quickly.

As you continue to raise customer expectations, they expect more. Click to Tweet

The solution: innovative service (value-unique)!

When you create an experience that is surprising and unexpected, it gets people talking. What can you do that will trigger a story? How can you get customers to become advocates that tell people, “Guess what happened to me?”

Value-unique service engages people to become advocates for your business. Value-unique service comes from your core and it evokes an experience of genuineness, a sense that its source is deep, not superficial.

Value-unique service engages people to become advocates for your business. Click to Tweet 

Make a deeper connection

Make an emotional connection. This is critical. Emotion is the most important thing in customer experience. There’s been a lot of research that has been around proving the importance of emotional connection in customer experience. It’s a vital step on your success path.

Value-unique is about more than service put together with over-the-top imagination; it’s about creating the kind of experience that profoundly touches the emotions of customers, leaving them forever changed by the encounter.

Why organizations lose

When you review organizations that don’t make an emotional connection with customers they tend to stop growing. They lose market share. They become commoditized and are measured merely by price.

Companies will lose money that try to compete on value-add. Emotional connection is an absolutely critical part for you to gain value.

Companies will lose money that try to compete on value-add. Click to Tweet

Gain Emotional Awareness

For organizations to best create a value-unique service, they first need to gain awareness about emotion. They need to improve their emotional intelligence. Many contact centers talk about raising the level of empathy towards customers, but there’s more to it.

Learning about the competencies of emotional intelligence (54 Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Competencies List) is a vital learning step in becoming a better leader in customer experience and designing an experience that results in financial gains. An experience that is value-unique.

Stop raising customer expectation

To continue to raise customer expectations is a negative sum game. It’s a lose-lose for the entire contact center industry. Stop focusing on adding value and instead create value! The kind that’s unique.

Stop focusing on adding value and instead create value! Click to Tweet

Kaleidoscope: Delivering Innovative Service That Sparkles

Value-unique and ideas about what is needed to bring innovative service to life is in Chips’ latest book, Kaleidoscope: Delivering Innovative Service That Sparkles which is the third book in a series on innovative service. The first is The 9½ Principles of Innovative Service and second is Sprinkles: Creating Awesome Experiences Through Innovative Service.

Get access to more of Chip’s wisdom at: http://www.chipbell.com/blog/

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Jim Rembach
Jim Rembach is recognized as a Top 50 Thought Leader and CX Influencer. He's a certified Emotional Intelligence practitioner and host of the Fast Leader Show podcast and president of Call Center Coach, the world's only virtual blended learning academy for contact center supervisors and emerging supervisors. He’s a founding member of the Customer Experience Professionals Association’s CX Expert Panel, Advisory Board Member for Customer Value Creation International (CVCI), and Advisory Board Member for CX University.

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