CHAPTER 3

THE JOURNEY TO EXCEPTIONAL
CUSTOMER SERVICE EXPERIENCES

Customer service is dead. Gone. Buh-bye. If you’re using customer service as a way to lead your market segment—in fact, even if you’re just trying to deliver good customer service—you’ve already lost.

Good customer service = bad customer experiences.

What? Isn’t customer service what it’s all about?

No. The way you “serve” a customer is only one sliver of the total customer experience. “Good” customer service will kill your business because most customer service initiatives are not enough to allow you to compete effectively in today’s market. So not only is good customer service dead, it can be deadly. If you’re just trying to deliver what customers expect, you might as well kiss your business good-bye.

In the “good old days,” those who were part of the customer service–industrial complex could bully their customers into telling them the kind of experience they wanted. For example, for years patients who needed to see their doctor had to make an appointment at the doctor’s convenience and at the doctor’s location. Waiting times were notoriously bad, and people often had to sit for hours in germ-ridden waiting rooms until the doctor saw them. Now, there are programs such as Anthem’s LiveHealth^® Online, where you can wait in the comfort of your living room, go online from your favorite device, and chat or speak to a doctor in minutes—at your convenience, at your location, and with little or no waiting time. Afterward, you can even rate your experience.

Today we have empowered and engaged consumers who express their experiences, loves, and hates using hyper-influential social media. They have an almost unlimited number of options for where and how to spend their money. It is no longer about customer service. Instead, it’s about customer experiences, and those had better be exceptional and relevant ones.

In this chapter, I use a very different definition of an exceptional customer experience, because not only do most businesses not know their customer, but they also don’t know what exceptional service is.

DESIGNING EXCEPTIONAL INTO
THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

There is no one set of exceptional customer experiences that will work across an entire range of companies and customer types. You must invent the experiences that fit your market, service, product, and customer types.

The good news is inventing is easy.

The bad news is it’s hard to know what to invent.

Fortunately, the precursor to knowing what to invent is knowing whom you’re inventing for. Once again, it comes down to customer types. When you’ve taken the time and energy to truly understand your customers and identified and refined their types, you will be light-years ahead of your competitors in designing exceptional and relevant human experiences. You will know what each customer type loves and hates; you will have peered into their souls.

My wife and I just celebrated our twenty-fourth wedding anniversary, and I’m fortunate in that we have a really good marriage. We have an enthusiastic, fun, and nearly 100 percent conflict-free relationship, and we’ve raised four maniac kids along the way.

Early in our relationship, I made a commitment to understanding what my wife hated and what she liked or loved. (Of course, in retrospect this was a precursor to What Customers Crave, although I didn’t know it at the time.) For example, if my wife says the trash is full, I know what she’s really saying is take out the trash. If she says it’s hot, what she really means is that I should turn on the AC. In order to be relevant to her, I had to figure out the things she loves and hates. I had to be able to lean into our relationship to understand what her customer type was (although I didn’t know it as a customer type at the time).

Like most companies that provide bad customer service, most people in bad relationships are completely self-absorbed. The best way to create a healthy relationship is to identify what the other person’s needs are and have an ongoing and meaningful commitment to deliver on those needs. As in business, so it is in life.

Success doesn’t come from just providing customer service. It’s about engineering a complete customer experience that’s exceptional and relevant across a range of customer types. Understand this or watch your business die in the face of today’s heated competitive environment.

WHO BENEFITS?
LOOK OUT, NOT IN

So what exactly are “exceptional customer experiences”? Throughout the years, I’ve interviewed thousands of CEOs, middle managers, frontline service representatives, and every other level of “service provider” all the way down to janitors. Each time I asked for a definition of customer service, I got either a different answer or a canned, meaningless mission statement.

The real tragedy, however, is that most of the people I interviewed who had a definition of customer service centered it on increasing profit and driving revenue. Most customer service initiatives are centered on approaches that are highly fractional (inconsistent service within a company) and highly internalized (inward looking). For example, in a company, the finance department manager’s idea of customer service focuses on something to do with finance. The marketing department guru’s approach has something to do with marketing. The IT department head’s idea has to do with technology and support. All of these examples show how fractionalized and internalized this company’s process has become: Everyone views their role and success from the perspective of their individual department, not as a unified company with a unified message. What’s more, they’re looking in at themselves, not out at the customer.

Underlying each of these fractional and internalized views are questions like these:

•How can the company make more money?

•How can the company keep customers from going away so it can make more money?

•How can the company build more brand loyalty so it can make more money?

•How can the company develop policies and procedures, utilize Customer Relationship Management and Voice of the Customer data pooling . . . and blah blah blah . . . so it can make more money?

THE EXTRA MILE:
IT’S WHAT YOU DO

Recently, I stayed at a luxury hotel in San Jose, California. At the extravagant price charged, I expected an extraordinarily high level of service. However, I found a plastic card informing me I’d be paying $29.99 a night for Internet service. If I’d been staying at the Hampton Inn down the road for $100 a night, Internet access would have been free. In addition, there was a large bottle of Evian with a card hanging from its neck reading “Enjoy for just $9.95,” as if I was supposed to think that was an awesome deal. To make matters worse, on the back of the remote control was a sticker warning me that I’d be charged if I stole the remote. This is not exceptional customer service. My message to this hotel is that you may be able to perform “cashectomies” for a while, but it is not likely a sustainable model.

The problem occurs when we look at innovation as a way to create new profit centers rather than as a way to deliver better human experiences. If I ran a luxury hotel, I would charge $1,050 a night and give every guest a gift basket that included bottled water, delicious snacks, and other small amenities they would appreciate. My clients would most certainly never pay for Internet service. And that remote control? For that kind of money, and the unlikelihood of a remote control heist, I would forgo the warning label that insults my guests’ integrity.

The impetus for designing an exceptional customer experience is not to make more money. Customer experience is a derivative of a holistic system that loves and honors the customer. The money will follow. If your customers love you, they will buy more and stay with you longer, all the while referring their friends and family. To achieve this, you cannot look inward. You must look outward at your customers and know their loves and hates. You must understand their customer type. The best companies in the world do exactly this.

EVALUATING CUSTOMER SERVICE:
THE NET CUSTOMER VALUE STRATA

Everybody talks about exceptional customer service, and many if not most people might think they deliver that type of service, but what does exceptional customer service mean in practice? In today’s world of hyper-influential social networks and connection architecture, “exceptional” looks far different than it did in the days of the bullying customer service–industrial complex.

To illustrate this point, I created the Net Customer Value Strata. It is organized in layers, or strata, ranging from the death zone to the superstars. Figure 3-1 illustrates the concept of exceptional service in relation to its evil cousins: criminal, bad, sub-baseline, and baseline service.

Figure 3-1. Net Customer value Strata.

The Death Zone

Criminal Customer Value: At the bottom of the value strata is what I call criminal customer value—for example, the restaurant where the service is terrible, the food is awful and overpriced, and you end up with food poisoning.

Criminals take something of value, and instead of delivering something of value in return, they deliver pain. It would have been better for that restaurant owner to have broken into my home and stolen $100 from my wallet and saved me the indigestion.

This is the death zone, and in time, organizations here always go out of business. Until they do, though, there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of businesses delivering criminal levels of customer value.

Bad Customer Value: The bad customer value stratum also resides in the death zone. These organizations are one step above criminal, but it won’t take much of a push—something along the lines of a new competitor, one influential angry customer, or a new step up in technology—to drive them into the abyss. They’re a twin-engine airplane with one engine blown and the other overburdened and in need of repair. It’s just a matter of time before that engine fails and the plane crashes.

Maybe these organizations are doing things they think will benefit them, like hiring cheaper labor and cutting back on expenses. What they don’t realize is that they are so internally focused that they’re sacrificing the customer in the process. It’s not a matter of if they will fail. It’s a matter of when.

Customers are smart. They understand the connection between how much something costs and the experience they should be getting. The baseline level of expectation is what customers universally expect from a product or service. Service below this level is subpar and death for a business. Service above this level is service that exceeds a customer’s expectations. Superstar companies reside far above this baseline level, delivering exceptional and relevant human experiences.

The Danger Zone

Sub-Baseline Customer Value: Amazingly, 60 to 70 percent of businesses occupy this stratum. Companies in this stratum might be making money; they might even be growing. The problem is they have a terminal illness and don’t know it. These companies may hear about problems and dissatisfied customers, but although they believe they’re fixing the issues, they carry on much as they always have. What they are missing is that these “issues” are much larger than they realize and are eating away at their customer base. Usually, but not always, sub-baseline companies sink into the bad and criminal levels of service.

An average business hears from 4 percent of its dissatisfied customers. This means a whopping 96 percent of dissatisfied customers don’t tell companies they’re unhappy. Plus, 91 percent of dissatisfied customers don’t ever come back.¹

Baseline Customer Value: Every consumer has a baseline level of expectation for a certain product or service. If I check into a Hampton Inn, I expect to pay a low price for a small, clean, and hopefully quiet room. I’m satisfied. But if I get a small, clean, and quiet room when I check into the Four Seasons, I’m going to be dissatisfied. I’m expecting awesome.

This baseline expectation exists in every industry and with every customer. The problem is that companies think this is the level of customer service they need to be delivering. After all, if customers get what they expect, they’ll be happy, right?

Wrong!

If you deliver only what customers expect, you will lose them to the competitor that wows them. Therefore, the baseline stratum belongs in the danger zone. It’s not a guarantee of death, but it’s the next closest thing.

For example, the Kindle delivers exactly what you would expect: It’s a great product that gives users the ability to read books and provides other convenient functionalities. However, when the iPad was introduced, it was far above the baseline level of expectation across a broad range of customer types. In fact, it was coined the Kindle Killer, because the phenomenal success of the iPad had such a major impact on both sales and market leadership that most people now see the Kindle as an app, instead of a device.

The iPad also has dynamic—continually improving—value because it has an active and enthusiastic app-developing community, which means it is going to continue to get better. This is incredibly important because the baseline is always changing. Consumer needs and tastes shift, technology changes, market economies rise and fall, and customers want faster and cheaper options. Companies delivering baseline expectations can easily slip down into the death zone without even realizing it.

Recently, I took a twenty-hour international flight on a major international airline. The entire time, I sat in business class and stared in disbelief at a piece of duct tape holding my tray table up. It was just a little piece of tape, but over the hours it made me wonder about the underbelly of the airplane. What other parts were duct-taped together? What sort of commitment did the airline have to its business?

As I mused, I noticed that several gadgets were broken and one of my side panels had a long grease smear. Then, ten hours into the flight, we were all asleep when several attendants began laughing hysterically literally a few feet away from us without regard for all the sleeping—and paying—passengers. Now awake, we stared at each other in absolute astonishment.

I’ll never fly that airline again if I can avoid it, and I doubt many of the other passengers will be rushing to do so any time soon either; the experience was simply that bad. This is a classic example of a company slipping down the strata of customer value. These companies are no longer providing even baseline value. They’re approaching the death zone, and, without serious changes, they might not recover.

The Innovation Zone

This area is where it starts to get interesting and, ultimately, what this book will help you achieve. The innovation zone is where you begin to exceed your customers’ expectations. You are no longer providing what they expect; instead, you’re beginning to provide exceptional customer service. As you reveal and refine your customer types, and therefore learn how to design these exceptional and relevant human experiences for people, you will shift above baseline expectations. The better you get at this, the further your company will rise.

Fair Customer Value: This level is where you exceed expectations to some extent. You know what customers expect and you know what they love and hate. As a result, you are now beginning to engineer some exceptional customer experiences. You’re not finished, but you’ve begun your trajectory toward superstar status.

Excellent Customer Value: At this point, you’re beginning to hone your competitive edge. You are delivering truly exceptional customer service, and the growth and success of your business is taking on a life of its own. Your customers are turning into your marketing machine through social media and word of mouth, and you are rapidly building a reputation as the go-to place for your product or service.

Exceptional Customer Value: This highest tier in the Net Customer Value Strata is where the superstar innovators reside. They are inventing and delivering exceptional and relevant human experiences across a range of customer types throughout the five touchpoints and across both digital and non-digital channels. They’re already doing what I’m teaching you to do in this book, and because of it, their growth is exploding.

THE BUSINESS KILLER:
PSEUDO-VALUE CLAIMS

Customer value is one of the most misused terms in the business world today. The value you provide your customers must be real and relevant, because pseudo-value will kill your business faster than anything I know in our world of hyper-influential social media.

The Customer Value Claim

Companies create a policy for their benefit—to increase profits—but target their appeals to their customers’ personal values. For example, take the water bottle company that tells you it has cut back on the percentage of plastic to save the environment. Did the company really do this to save the environment? Or did it cut back on the percentage of plastic to make a cheaper product that saves money but in the process creates an inferior product?

What about resort hotels that ask you to reuse your towels to save the planet? Good for the planet, or good for the hotels? You be the judge. As I see it, we all know that reusing towels saves money, but when hotels misrepresent their intentions—which are far more obvious to the customer than they may realize—they can leave the guest with a bad opinion of them. Clearly the hotels’ motive is to save money, and perhaps incidentally save the planet. Be careful how you represent what you’re asking of customers.

Forget hyped-up promises. Make sure your value is real because customers can smell the stench of “phony” a cyber-mile away.

Recently, I was staying at a hotel in Indianapolis. On my dresser was a bottle of water accompanied by a note stating the hotel had made the water available for my convenience for $15. Don’t tell me that’s convenient! The hotel was attempting to sell overpriced water to increase its profits. In the same hotel, I went looking for a vending machine to buy a bottle of Gatorade. In the corridor was a sign saying that for my convenience, vending machines were located on every other floor. Going up and down stairs and walking through corridors in my boxers to find some Gatorade wasn’t convenient for me or anyone else.

The “It’ll-Be-Too-Expensive” Claim

Amazingly, some people think providing exceptional customer experiences is more expensive than providing the poor service they’re currently giving. A basic financial analysis reveals the depth of this erroneous concept.

Compare the cost of customer acquisition to the benefits of employee satisfaction and productivity. We know that acquiring new customers is far more expensive than keeping current ones. Well, there is a connection between keeping customers and having satisfied employees. Companies that deliver exquisite customer service also offer a far better quality of work life, and their employees are happy. Think about it. Have you ever had a job where you were asked to deliver substandard products and services or to enforce punitive policies? It felt terrible, didn’t it? If you have ever been yelled at or scolded by a customer, you know how miserable that can be. Organizations are beginning to realize that there is a direct corollary among organizational profit, quality of work life, and customer satisfaction. Good people seek out good organizations, and organizations that have a high quality of work life attract better talent—and today there’s a premium on good talent.

According to an article in the Harvard Business Review, one of the biggest challenges today is attracting millennial talent (those born between 1982 and 1996).³ These young, talented, and educated people were raised with social media. Being hyper-connected isn’t new to them; it’s the way things are. In fact, many potential millennial employees research the company using social networks before deciding to apply. They want to know the company’s reputation before they spend their time and energy applying for a job. Not only are your customers researching you, but so are potential quality employees.

The moral of the story is to deliver exquisite experiences in order to build an amazing reputation. This means you have to create an ecosystem that attracts the best customers and the best employees. This in turn saves you money because delivering exceptional experiences means your customers will stay with you longer and your employees will have a better work life. You will attract better talent, reduce absenteeism, and increase attendance. The benefits, including higher profits, to your organization far exceed just having happy customers. But you must start by looking out toward your customers, not in toward your company’s own desires.

THE NEW MANDATE:
EXCEPTIONAL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

So what is exceptional customer experience?

Exceptional customer experience means delivering non-fractional human experiences across both digital and non-digital channels throughout a wide range of customer types that are far above the customer’s baseline level of expectation.

This service is both dynamic and layered in that it’s constantly changing and improving and appeals to a variety of customer types. Don’t expect to create one great experience and be done. As your consumers’ needs and tastes change, as technology and the market changes, so your innovations need to keep pace.

Blended Experiences:
Digital and Non-Digital

Today, rather than clearly delineated digital and non-digital (or physical) channels, companies are building blended experiences. Blended experiences are an important part of the customer journey.

Most companies have delivery silos. For example, an employee working in inbound telemarketing delivers an experience. The warranty department person delivers another experience, as does customer support. Social media and digital marketing deliver yet more and different experiences. As a result of this silo structure, companies deliver fractional solutions.

You must deliver exceptional and relevant customer experiences across all touchpoints and to all customer types. Otherwise, you deliver fractional experiences. Fractional solutions are deficient when competing in our digitally connected world.

Fractional customer service can take an exceptional experience and turn it on its head so your customer never returns. If I walk into an expensive, high-end restaurant, I expect a certain level of service and food. Perhaps my car is valeted by a friendly, well-dressed young man; I’m greeted by a professional, cheerful hostess; my wife and I are immediately seated at a table by the window with a view overlooking a lake; and the menu and wine list are impeccable. But my waitress smells like cigarette smoke, and she messes up my wife’s order so we’re not eating at the same time. That’s fractional service, and it can quickly kill your business. Exceptional customer service, in contrast, is a holistic experience across all touchpoints and customer types.

It’s a rare and successful company that understands that there has to be a master plan that manages each touchpoint across all departments. Your consumers’ entire experience must be seen holistically, and customers must receive exceptional experiences all along the way. This is what today’s great companies do.

Recently, I bought a beautiful European luxury car. Most people who buy cars like these have a high level of expectation about quality and service, as I do. They’re probably educated, successful, and demanding.

The showroom was clean and spacious, and I was immediately offered an espresso. Nice start. In the waiting room were comfortable leather seats, and my salesperson, Sedrick, was smart, professional, and well dressed. He exuded caring throughout the sales process.

He talked to my children, eliciting details about their sports and academic interests. Every time I asked him a question about the car, he professionally and quickly answered it, and then got back to the business of talking about our family (my favorite subject, by the way). It almost seemed as if he didn’t care if he sold me a car; he just wanted to enjoy the human connection.

It was an amazing human experience: I bought the car and felt I had made a friend. I purchased my car believing I would receive this level of service throughout the company.

Boy, was I wrong.

A couple of months later, I took the car in for its first service. I walked up to the man at the service podium, who was busy writing notes from the customer before me. Several awkward moments followed, then he looked up and brusquely said, “What?” Not even a “hello.” Unsure how to respond, I explained that I was there to get my car serviced. He walked away and didn’t return for a full fifteen minutes. I will never buy another car from that dealership as long as I live. I wrote the experience up on Yelp. Not surprisingly, I wasn’t the only one to write about such an experience.

This is a fractional customer experience, and something like this can kill your business. The cost of advertising and promotion to make up for non-repeat business is huge.

CUSTOMER SERVICE TRAINING AS CURE-ALL:
THE MYTH

I would be remiss not to address the quite prevalent myth regarding customer experience and customer service training, which is that everything will be just fine if organizations can just get their customer-facing employees to be nicer to the customer. This attitude is so prevalent as to be epidemic. Leaders assume all customer experience problems—and therefore opportunities—reside in training their customer-facing teams. This thinking is extremely flawed.

Part of the problem involves policies that actually punish the customer. I’ve seen it thousands of times (and explore it extensively in Chapter 9): Far too many organizations have developed organizationally focused, customer-punitive policies without regard to the impact these policies have on the customers. Have you ever tried to return a product to a retailer only to have an employee tell you all the reasons why company policy says you cannot return it? This happens more often than you might think. Would great customer service training fix this problem? How about if the employee had been trained to say “no” using a positive, chirpy tone of voice? Would that make it better? Of course not!

If great employees are forced to deploy bad policies, they will not be immune from an angry customer’s wrath. Worse, depending on their personality type, your good employees will either embrace your attitudes toward your customers or they will leave you. Either is bad for your business.

The following story shows the positive results that come from empowering your employees, rather than forcing them to uphold punitive policies that end up damaging customer relationships. Two sisters were going through the belongings of their recently deceased mother. Needless to say, this was an emotional and stressful time. Among their mother’s things was a new pair of Zappos boots that had never been taken out of the box. One of the sisters called Zappos about returning them, unaware that Zappos had a 365-day return policy and more time had passed. Complicating matters further, the sisters had already cancelled their mother’s credit card and weren’t sure how a refund, even if given, could be processed.

To their surprise, the Zappos representative stepped up. She explained the company’s return policy but offered to make an exception under the circumstances. And that’s not the end of the story; it gets better. A couple of days later, their father received a beautiful bouquet of flowers with a note from “Tamika T & the Zappos.com Family.” The sisters and their father so appreciated the gesture and exceptional customer service that they have shopped with Zappos over and over again and have tweeted and blogged about their experience.

Zappos could have rejected their refund request. Instead, the company not only made customers for life but recruited advocates who are now helping do its marketing for it.

THE “SOUL OF THE CUSTOMER” PROGRAM

I have learned that the only way to create a profitable and sustainable training program is sequentially, and the Soul of the Customer Program does just that.

Your strategy needs to:

Articulate a beautiful and meaningful mission that attracts good people. Of course, you must act upon that mission and prove that everything you say about it is true. Your stakeholders want to look up to you, and they want to know that you are doing the right thing for customers. Hiring good people means creating an enterprise infrastructure of goodness. Sounds ridiculous, I know. But the best companies in the world have created a culture around treating customers exceptionally well. Because they do this, they attract quality people, and quality people are interested in learning new and exciting ways to deliver better quality and customer experiences.

A bad culture attracts bad people, and as a result, you will deliver bad experiences. Then, in the end, you will be displaced by organizations that deliver good experiences. This is ridiculously simple but incredibly profound.

Customize your customer experience training to meet your brand’s unique needs. Yes, you are special, and your organization is exceptional. This is why just-add-water strategies never work and why the generic training programs used by hundreds of different companies will never hit the mark for your business. When I am asked for a copy of our training program, I say we don’t have one. Instead, we have thousands of customized training programs—designed specifically to meet the individual and particular needs of each client, and which now belong to that customer. If someone tries to sell you an off-the-shelf solution . . . RUN!

I recently had the great opportunity to work with Polaris Industries, one of the best managed companies in the country. Polaris had secured the rights to the Indian Motorcycle, which it planned to relaunch in a very big way. I was brought in to interview dealers and create a customized training program that would communicate the brand promise and uniqueness of the Indian brand. Polaris’s commitment to truly understanding the needs and opportunities of both its customers and its dealers makes it one of the best companies in America. Polaris understands that its training program had to speak to the uniqueness of the amazing brand.

Motorcycle dealers have many monsters in their mental attics. They harbor preconceived ideas about manufacturers, projections, and expectations. Polaris management took the time to gain unique insights into what types of dealers sold its motorcycles and to understand its dealers’ distinct needs. Then, the company put together a program that was relevant across all dealer types by creating pinpointed brand messaging and training programs that spoke specifically to each of those dealer types. The result could only be described as poetry. Training programs for customer-facing teams require an insane amount of research and customization to deliver value to both the enterprise and your customer, but such programs are more than worth it.

Create collaborative environments with customer-facing stakeholders and other key team members. This collaboration should be ongoing and should leverage enterprise social networks and other digital solutions that use game mechanics and social engagement.

No longer is customer experience development about pushing your ideas down to the minions about how a customer should be treated. It just doesn’t work. Think about it. Why should employees treat the customer well? Why should they care if the customer hates you? Why should they go the extra mile? If you have not collaborated with them, they will not be engaged or incentivized to participate in the customer experience game because you never taught them the game in the first place, you never socialized it, and, even worse, you never created a way to win it.

When you engage your employees and allow them to take part in the actual development of customer experience programs, they’re far more likely to deliver those programs because they’ve participated in their creation. Most organizations don’t provide meaningful incentives—for example, weekly recognition or financial rewards—to improve the quality of the customer experience. Some organizations have regular customer experience breakouts where the team is asked how they could have done things better, and their peers review what their teammates might have done wrong. Being exposed in front of one’s peers is a huge incentive for employees to make sure they have made customers happy.

Today it’s not about customer experience training. It’s about customer experience development. It’s about:

•Building a complete and total ecosystem around the customer-centric enterprise

•Building great cultures where great people want to work

•Creating collaborative environments that allow the very stakeholders who deploy policies to your customers to help create them

•Leveraging game mechanics to increase the returns on your customer experience strategy

THE SECRET TO EXCEPTIONAL CUSTOMER SERVICE

If designing exceptional human experiences is the key, why doesn’t everyone do it? One word: commitment.

Many people join gyms. This requires signing up and making a financial commitment. Sometimes people even add a personal trainer to the package, requiring an even larger financial commitment. But this alone doesn’t mean they achieve physical fitness.

Statistics show that 80 percent of those who join a gym in January stop going by March. They signed up, but they didn’t continue to show up. Of the remaining 20 percent, there are two types: watchers and workers. Watchers show up but don’t do much. They stand around and, well . . . watch. Only workers, a much smaller percentage, are committed to the actual process of getting fit. Workers can do in five minutes what it takes a watcher to do in an hour.

Fitness, like business, means signing up, showing up, standing up, and—most important—never, ever, ever giving up.

To design exceptional, dynamic, and layered human experiences, you must be truly committed. Don’t waste your time otherwise. You might have to endure months of pain as you identify customer types and learn how to deliver exceptional customer experiences. But it’s in these tough times that you learn more about yourself and build your greatest strengths.

If your organization makes the commitment to sign up, show up, and stand up, you reap the rewards for many years to come. A daily commitment to a smart plan is how all great organizations are built.

At a workshop, someone asked me, “What’s the one thing everyone in this room should leave with?”

My answer: Every one of your customers has a baseline expectation. Customers understand the relationship between price and the experience they should be getting. They are smart. Therefore, the way to deliver exceptional customer service is to go far beyond the baseline level of expectation and deliver surprisingly beautiful experiences across a wide range of customer types throughout the five touchpoints both digitally and non-digitally.

That’s the secret.

Shockingly, many experts argue that companies should deliver the lowest level of customer experience necessary in order to profitably sell products and services. In fact, there is a whole new range of experts propagating this idea. The thought makes my head explode!

Doing the bare minimum is why most organizations that fail do so. Were this to become a widely used practice, it would be absolutely toxic. It is a myth that you need to increase costs in order to deliver better human experiences. Exceptional customer service isn’t about spending more money. It’s about using your creativity and intelligence to invent better experiences.

Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes you have to spend more money and work much harder in order to be truly exceptional. The good news is that customer experience superstars that have made this investment have received multiple returns on that investment.

I consult for one of the largest restaurant chains in the world. Its problem is that it cannot make its product any cheaper or any better. The product is essentially perfect. Unfortunately, so are the products of all my client’s competition. This leads us to the issue of, when consumers can buy anything at almost any price and still expect almost perfection, how do you differentiate your brand in a way that’s meaningful to your customer types? The answer is simple. The secret weapon is your ability to deliver beautiful human experiences, highly targeted to a wide range of customer types. Deliver this range of amazing experiences across each and every touchpoint in both digital and non-digital channels. Creating perfect human experiences is worth the effort because, by doing so, you can expect an exquisite return.