What is the Customer Experience?

Do you remember full service gas stations? I mean REAL full service, fill your tank, wash your window check your oil. etc. Do you remember the days long gone of personal/friendly service when you walked into a store. I remember my mother going to the bank to cash a check for her elderly mother. The bank called her; "Mattie, did you send Sandra down here to cash a check?" They knew my grandmother was vulnerable and could easily be taken advantage of. A quick phone call was all that was needed to verify the check hadn't been stolen.
There is no excuse for a poor customer experience and Social Media is here to make or break you. You can never over communicate but when doing so you must be honest, sincere, say what you are going to do then do it. Most of the time an excellent customer experience can cost you little to nothing and yet return far greater than any amount of money could.
Even in the most difficult of circumstances you can always appologize and fix it.

Personal Examples

Feb 14th 2007 and the week following were the worst ever for the JetBlue Airways. A 3 day storm in NYC grounded flights, stranding thousands of customers and ultimately cost JetBlue millions of dollars in refunds, vouchers and lost revenue.
I was called in at 3:00 am a few days after the storm in an effort to do what I could to help in the call center. Most of us were calling customers to reschedule flights. What I noticed was the extensive manual effort required. There were physical sheets of paper with a single customer name and phone number being handed out. People were using any phone they could find, including their own cell phones. I observed that one person could make one phone call to one customer. I wanted to do more. Over the next several hours and into the next couple of days I built a utility to export excel lists of customers and their itneraries, eliminating the singe sheets of paper with a single customer. Within a few more days I calculated the total cost of refunds back to the customers and issued vouchers for future use. Within the next few weeks I built a tool to automatically issue vouchers according to JetBlue's first ever airline Customer Bill of Rights.

Examples From Others

• "Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning." – Bill Gates
• "Everything starts with the customer" – Louis XIV
• "Our attitude towards others determines their attitude towards us." – Earl Nightingale
• "Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless." – Mother Teresa
• "You will get all you want in life, if you help enough other people get what they want." – Zig Ziglar
• "When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion." - Dale Carnegie
• "We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts." – Jeff Bezos

The best thing you can do right now? Treat your employees well and let them treat your customers even better.