Provide customers with a WOW experience & Take the lead over your competition

Generate word-of-mouth advertising you couldn’t buy if you wanted to and Drive your business to the next level!

I used to think the answer to building a great company was technology, capitalization, funding, people and the market. But do you think Apple, Disney or Tesla was sitting around the conference room wondering “Hmm, how do we sell what people need?!” No, they were asking “How can we disrupt the awful experience? And let’s think about everything in detail to make the customer experience as remarkable as possible.”

What I have learned is people buy from companies that they believe in what the company believes and when they are inspired. For example, Disney believes in creating happiness by providing the finest in family entertainment for people of all ages, everywhere. Disney employees believe in helping people reach their dreams. People, including myself, believe that Disney is the happiest place on earth and it inspires myself and others to watch their films, visit their theme parks, dress up as Disney characters and actually live the dream. It is the basis for their mission as a business; it represents what they stand for and why they exist.

In this article I have included some really useful information, motivation and a handful of lessons I’ve learned about how to create a WOW customer experience, that’ll help your business stand out from the crowd.

Everything in life is always changing. The economy changes, the weather changes, technology changes. Change is automatic but progress is not. Take control of your progress and don’t just hope it’s gonna work out. Make it happen.

Start with a vision. What you’re going to create. An inspiration that is going to excite you. Joy comes when you receive positive compliments and feedback for your accomplishments. That’s when the energy comes alive. That is the tool to enhance your energy to provide a positive performance on the job.

Rituals are where the power is. The way you get results is to do rituals — The little things you do each day, that after you do them, it makes it easy to succeed, and therefore you’re not overwhelmed. You can have these victories day after day on little things. Successful people follow little rituals each day. Success is not some overnight event. Success is having a vision, it is making it compelling, really seeing it and feeling it everyday, saying I’m here to grow and here to give something to the world more than just myself. You need to have some cool things you do that nobody else does that gives you a better life than anybody else has. All the little stuff, that’s where success comes from.

In business, it comes from delivering more than anybody can imagine, all those little things add up and people go “WOW, that’s who I want to do business with”. It’s true in any area of your life. People are rewarded in public for what they practice for years in private. Do so much behind the scenes to make things right so when you go out there, you can give it all and give your peak state of mind.

Never Stop Setting Goals to Improve. Customers who are satisfied might or might not come back. The goal of WOWing a customer should be to exceed their expectations instead of simply satisfying them.

Always remember that you can never stop improving, no matter how good you get. One of the potential traps is to think you’ve finally reached your peak so that you stop trying, but be careful to avoid that. So, let’s say you really knock it out of the park today. You may make a customer especially happy, and your employer takes notice of your work ethic. Great, now plan to do it again tomorrow and every day after that. And plan to do it, not just for one, but for every single customer you encounter. The point is to never stop trying and never stop pushing yourself to be better than you were yesterday.

Make a standard in yourself to always do something better. Like:

• Spend time with your customers and see what is going on
• Help as many people as you can every day
• Pursue great ideas. They don’t just happen
• Everyday demand more from yourself
• Be a great role model

The only thing that is going to make you happier is to step up, it’s to raise your standard, to discover what your capable of and become the best of yourself.

Raise the standard. Keep making yourself better; that’s what makes you happy.

An area where you and the company can improve is bringing the company to the next level and this can be achieved together by WOWing customers every day, in every new project. Work as a team to support each other. Starting with you, if you make a change in yourself, your going to be proud of yourself. And once you do that, you will have something you can give to other people.

Wowing a customer is so exciting, so attractive that can make the customer feel special and then the customer will provide you with a sense of achievement. You’re going to gain success and happiness in life.

Hewlett Packard’s Paul Horstmeier and his team focus 100% on communicating with customers online to Grow Customer Relations.

“Customers don’t want to click on something that is an unknown. Most customers already come to the Web with a task in mind. You have to understand why they are going to come to that site and how can you complete their task as quickly as possible. Customer-centric sites can go awry if you are not meeting the customer’s needs.” Paul Horstmeier

Think about what separates you from your competition?

• The level of attention and care you give your clients
• Proactively supporting your team or clients
• Transferring your knowledge
• Helping clients and companies to grow
• Providing your team and clients with an environment that motivates and inspires them on a daily basis

In a rapidly changing world; strive to be a superhero, driven by a passion and making it your mission to create awesome experiences by embracing extraordinary challenges.

Here are a few essential steps for ensuring that you give your customers optimal customer service:

• Motivated employees move projects forward more than anyone else
• Have a relentless desire to learn and grow, and consistently push yourself forward. Put simply: You’ll never need to hold anyone’s hand
• Have a proven discipline in development techniques that make projects successful in the long run
• Disciplined people never get comfortable providing work they aren’t proud of
• Be a pioneer in proactive communication, consistently delivering detailed progress updates and resetting expectations when needed
• Know that trust is built through consistent actions, not words
• Achieve what’s best for long-term maintainability
• Take ownership of your work on every project you join, ensuring the bar for quality is raised and deliver work you are proud of.
• Understand Your Customer. Every potential customer is at a different stage with different goals, and you must learn how to cater to all of them.

Stop Treating Your Job Like a Job. Many people go to work, do a job, collect their pay, and go home. That’s very formulaic and dispassionate, and we want to motivate you to be better than that. Don’t just show up to do a job. Show up to be the best employee you can be. Go the extra mile whenever you get a chance, and show customers, your employer, and even yourself how valuable you are. Don’t get overwhelmed and think you have to swoop in and save the company from ruin like Superman or anything. It’s actually the little things that build up over time and make people take notice of you and, by extension, the business you work for. When people see that kind of motivation and willingness to over-deliver at every opportunity, it reflects back on the company and makes customers want to do more business with you. So, you get to improve yourself while advancing your career and the business gets a whole new round of loyal customers because of you. That sounds like a win-win.

“I don’t want you guys sitting behind desks. I want you out in the park, watching what people are doing and finding out how you can make the place more enjoyable for them.” — Walt Disney

Customers are the backbone of your business. Do some businesses do okay with pretty good customer service? Yeah, they do. But we bet you want to do a little better than “okay” and, if so, one of the most important components of scaling your business to the next level is improving your customer service.
Once upon a time, customer loyalty was almost guaranteed if you need a respectable job. People went to the same barber for their entire lives. Nowadays, though, that has drastically changed, and businesses have to work much harder to ensure true customer loyalty.

In essence, Disney leaves no stone unturned when it comes to creating a WOW customer experience through process improvement and implementation, resulting in a 70% return rate of first-time customers. In fact, Walt Disney himself was hugely obsessed with process optimization and customer engagement, and often visited his theme parks disguised as a common man to experience the thrilling rides for himself. On occasions he didn’t like what he’d experienced, you could be sure some drastic changes were to follow.

Various customers will have different needs. The way to really knock it out of the park, every single time, is to also understand your customers on a personal level. Get to know them well, and then treat them like a close, personal friend. For example, restaurants offer different items on their menu because not everyone wants to eat the same thing. However, if a restaurant is good, they will start making a customer’s order when they see them coming because they already know that person well enough to know what they want. Anyone can walk up, order, and get what they want. But we’re looking to give the kind of experience where people don’t even have to ask.

Clients are likely to have a wide range of emotions; some are positive, they may feel proud and excited with their new purchase, some are negative, they may feel impatient or apprehensive after their purchase. The goal is to create a positive emotional experience either way.

Start thinking long-term with your customers and how you can go the extra mile, not just right now, but in the future as well. For example, if you know that a customer is going to have to come back to you, be ready and holding whatever they need in your hand (figuratively or literally). Part of your goal in providing excellent customer service is to make the process as simple and painless for them as you possibly can, and people often get frustrated quickly. Make it your absolute mission to eliminate that frustration for them, not just by doing well at the moment, but by planning ahead.

A successful company considers a complaint as feedback, and Tesla is one of the best examples of high-value customer service and prompt feedback-to-action implementation. Just recently — a Twitter user complained that drivers left their cars parked in front of charging stations even after they were fully charged — resulting in a queue of waiting Teslas lined up to charge. Elon Musk agreed it was ‘becoming an issue’, and only six days later, the company introduced a ‘fleet-wide idle fee’ for better supercharger availability. What can we learn from this? Prompt feedback consideration, response, and implementation go a long way in ensuring customer loyalty.

All of this boils down to providing a WOW experience for customers. Think about when you went on a first date with someone you really liked. Did you want a cheap meal and a wave goodbye, or did you want an entire night full of experiences? Your customer is the same way. Treat them like a romantic partner you are trying to woo and you’re sure to go far.

Remember, many businesses survive and do just fine with good customer service. But the goal is to get people raving about you. You know how it feels when something is so exciting that you just can’t wait to tell your friends? With your help, you can be that secret.

You are the Front Line and that makes you the Bottom Line“The team you build is the company you build.” — Keith Rabois

If you can create a customer experience in your organization. If you can make it easier for people to do business with you. If you can create this experience where you value and trust the customer, you can become a Disney, a Tesla, a Hewlett-Packard or an Apple company.

Creating a wow customer experience is the answer to building a great company.

What are your insights into how to create memorable and WOW experience for customers? Do you have any lessons you’d add? Let me know in the comments.

Originally published at www.prodops.io.