A friend of mine Bill Quiseng, who is a Customer Service and CX [Customer Experience] guru, often comments on my personal blog articles that I share on LinkedIn, with these very wise words, which he aptly calls a QUI TAKEAWAY:
“Customers pay for their experience, not your product or service. And it’s THEIR experience, not yours.
They buy with emotion and justify their decision with reason.
Customers seek the best emotional value in their experience, not your logically reasonable best price, product, or service.
The best emotional value to your customers is your personalised interactions with them, not their ‘cash or credit’ business transactions with you.”
These are very strong words indeed.
There are five very powerful sentences that comprise this message.
Let’s start with the fourth sentence:
“Customers seek the best emotional value in their experience, not your logically reasonable best price, product, or service.”
Often purveyors of goods and services get bogged down in the detail of what their good or service is constructed of, and how it has been constructed, when the true value of that good or service is the EMOTIONAL VALUE that the customer experiences when they receive that good or service.
For example: when a customer walks into a hardware store looking to buy a drill, the transaction and the emotional experience are not at all connected with the brand of the drill or the material used to make the drill…
The emotional value of purchasing that drill is that the customer can now go home and drill a hole in his loungeroom wall that will allow him to hang a lovely framed photograph of his wife as a beautiful younger woman, years before she was taken to soon from this world after a short battle with ovarian cancer.
And he misses her every day…
Deeply.
As we move on to the fourth sentence from Bill:
“The best emotional value to your customers is your personalised interactions with them, not their ‘cash or credit’ business transactions with you.” ….
We quickly understand that the conversation that is needed [above] in the hardware store from the sales assistant is not to explain the FEATURES of the drill, but to ask the customer the lead question as to what he is wanting the drill to do for them…
And then following on empathetically with the customer to the purpose that the drill is going to be used doing…
Because, as the third sentence states so clearly:
People “buy with emotion and justify their decision with reason.”
And they do this with every big ticket purchase for sure.
If we as the purveyors of wonderful goods and services can OVERDELIVER to our clients each and every time, then we will fill those customers’ buckets to overflowing with emotions of pleasure and happiness, so much so, that their need to justify their purchases with logic will be far outweighed by the endorphins they enjoy from the experience.
The first two sentences of the QUI TAKEAWAY are our grounding.
They are our reminder of reality for the vendor.
“Customers pay for their experience, not your product or service. And it’s THEIR experience, not yours.”
Our transaction should never be about us, as vendors.
Our transaction must always be about our customers, and about exceeding their expectations, by using our secret service skills and our intel that we have developed in ourselves, by always being customer service focused in the customer experiences that we are aiming to deliver.
And that then means that everyone on our team needs to always be focussed on helping to make our customer’s experiences for today better than they had ever experienced before, or ever hoped for….
As Bill reminds me:
Tom Peters says:
“Customers perceive service in their own unique, idiosyncratic, emotional, irrational, end-of-the-day, and totally human terms. Perception is all there is!”
Providing World Class Service and Experiences to our clients is about over-achieving with respect to each of our customers’ expectations.
Keep doing this.
Keep over-achieving with your level of service.
And you will always be successful in creating World Class Experiences for your customers.
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Dr. David Moffet BDS FPFA CSP is a certified CX Experience coach. David works with his wife Jayne Bandy to help SME businesses improve their Customer Service Systems to create memorable World Class experiences for their valued clients and customers. Click here to find out how David and Jayne can help your business