Experiences For Business: How to Delight Businesses And Drive Growth

Colin Shaw is a pioneer of customer experiences for business and one of the world’s top 150 business influencers. In this episode, Colin challenges us to think beyond the customer experience philosophy and do something to impact our customers and potential customers. He shares his area of strength: to have a strategy or theory but to go beyond it and do something. To provide the best possible customer experience, Colin believes we must invest in the relationship with customers and potential customers and understand what’s important to them.

He also argues it takes a shift in mindset, leadership, diversity and curiosity to discover what we don’t know. He’s seen first-hand how improving customer experience can drive business growth and profitability through data points such as Net Promoter scores and the SP Index. In this blog post, Colin will unlock business growth and show us how to delight customers with rational, emotional, subconscious, and psychological experiences. He’ll outline how to create the best customer experience and drive increased value.

About Colin Shaw

Colin Shaw is a pioneer of customer experience, recognized by LinkedIn as one of the world’s top 150 business influencers. In 2002, he realized that improving customer experience would become a critical business issue, and wrote one of the first books on the subject. He then left his corporate job to found Beyond Philosophy, which has been recognized by the Financial Times as one of the leading management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Colin’s personal area of strength lies in “going beyond philosophy” to do something to impact customers and potential customers. He believes that investing in the relationship with customers is key to providing the best possible customer experience and that it takes leadership, diversity, and curiosity to facilitate a shift in the mindset and culture of the organization.

Why is it important to delight businesses and drive growth through experiences?

Delighting businesses and driving growth through experiences is important in creating a successful customer experience. Experiences tailored to the customer’s needs, preferences, and values create a strong connection between the business and the customer, encouraging loyalty and repeat purchases. This, in turn, leads to increased revenue and customer lifetime value. Businesses prioritizing customer experience are more likely to receive positive word-of-mouth, which can lead to organic growth and customer acquisition.

Creating an exceptional customer experience can help businesses differentiate themselves from their competitors. By providing unique and customized experiences, businesses can stand out from the competition and create long-term customer relationships. This drives growth and increases customer satisfaction and trust, leading to increased sales and revenue. Delighting businesses and driving growth through experiences is essential to creating a successful customer experience that will pay dividends for the business in the long run.

Here are the steps you need to follow:
1. Recognize that the customer experience comprises of rational, emotional, subconscious, and psychological aspects.
2. Invest in the relationship with customers and potential customers by taking the time and energy to understand them and what is important to them.
3. Create an organizational culture with an operating system that focuses on thinking about customers and understanding the impact of decisions on them.

1. Invest in the relationship with customers and potential customers by taking the time and energy to understand them and what is important to them.

Invest in the relationship with customers and potential customers by taking the time and energy to understand them and what is important to them. Investing in the relationship with customers and potential customers is an important step in providing a great customer experience. This involves taking the time to understand what is important to them, their needs, and how they interact with your product or service. It also means understanding their feelings, emotions, and subconscious cues that they may be sending.

This can be done by actively engaging with customers and potential customers in meaningful conversations and gathering data on their behaviors, preferences, and interactions. Taking the time to understand customers and potential customers also means building trust and showing that you care about them. This can be done through personalized service, providing useful and relevant information, answering inquiries, and being there for them throughout their journey.

It means showing them that their opinion matters and that you are open to feedback and suggestions to improve the customer experience. Investing in the relationship with customers and potential customers is an important part of providing a great customer experience and can lead to increased trust, loyalty, and satisfaction.

It is also important to consider the customer journey when investing in relationships with customers and potential customers. This involves looking at the full customer experience from beginning to end, including the steps customers take, their channels, and their touchpoints with your product or service. By understanding the customer journey, you can identify areas of improvement and create an experience that meets their needs and exceeds their expectations. Finally, investing in relationships with customers and potential customers means leveraging data and insights to create a tailored experience. By utilizing customer data, you can identify areas of opportunity and develop strategies to better understand customers and their needs. This includes leveraging data to understand customer behavior, preferences, and interactions and using insights to develop personalized experiences. By investing in the relationship with customers and potential customers through data-driven strategies, you can create a customer experience tailored to their individual needs and expectations.

2. Create an organizational culture with an operating system that focuses on thinking about customers and understanding the impact of decisions on them.

Organizational culture is key to creating a customer-focused operating system. A customer-first mindset should be pervasive throughout the organization and ingrained in how employees interact with customers. This means that everyone in the organization should be aware of the impact of their decisions on customers and be focused on delivering the best possible customer experience.

To create this organizational culture, it is important to hire customer-centric people with a good understanding of the customer journey. The organization should also invest in training and development to ensure that employees are updated with the latest customer experience trends and best practices.

It is necessary to have proper communication channels to ensure that customer feedback is heard and incorporated into decision-making processes. This can be done through surveys, focus groups, and customer feedback forums. By following these steps, organizations can create an organizational culture that focuses on customers and understands the impact of decisions on them.

To ensure that the customer-centric operating system is successful, measuring and tracking customer experience metrics is important. This can be done by monitoring customer feedback, tracking customer satisfaction scores, and measuring customer attrition rates. These metrics provide insight into how customers perceive the organization and can help identify areas for improvement.

Using customer feedback to inform decision-making processes is critical to the process. Organizations should take a data-driven approach to decision-making and use customer feedback to inform decisions. Organizations should create mechanisms for customers to give feedback about their experience and to voice their opinions. This can be done through surveys, focus groups, and customer feedback forums. Organizations can create these feedback channels to ensure that customer feedback is heard and incorporated into decision-making processes.

Creating an organizational culture that focuses on the customer experience is essential to creating a successful customer-centric operating system. Organizations can ensure that their customer-centric operating system is successful by hiring customer-centric staff, investing in training and development, and measuring customer experience metrics. Additionally, by creating mechanisms for customers to give feedback and voice their opinions, organizations can ensure that customer feedback is heard and incorporated into decision-making processes.

Creating a great customer experience involves understanding the different components of customer experience, such as rational, emotional, subconscious, and psychological experiences. It also involves investing in relationships with customers and potential customers and building trust.

It also requires creating an organizational culture with a customer-first mindset, which involves hiring the right people, investing in training and development, and listening to customer feedback. By taking these steps, businesses can drive growth and delight customers, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty and, ultimately, higher profits. Take this challenge and invest in understanding your customers and creating an exceptional customer experience – you have the potential to unlock business growth and success.

Some topics we discussed include:

• The four areas we need to understand and have a handle on to improve the customer experience
• Why asking customers what they want or need isn’t a good idea and what to do instead
• How to build relationships to further customer experience
• How to take a data-driven approach to improve the customer experiences for business
• How to get the customer experience insights you need
• How to determine the emotions and experiences that we evoke in customers
• How to best utilize insights and data to improve the customer experiences for business
• And much, much more …

Listen to the episode

Related links and resources

Connect with Colin

• LinkedIn

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