Building up Great Customer Experience

Aiming at Excellence in Customer Service – This is a first part of a blog series in which we explore how to achieve the world’s best customer service.

It goes without saying that customers are the most important part of a business. Without customers companies die out. When considering the customer point of view, it is not only products or services they are looking for. Instead, they look for experiences. That is why it is vital to think about how to build up great customer experiences.

Here are three steps which we have found useful in planning and organizing our annual main event, Nordic Business Forum. Besides providing customers with good content, we also want to take care of the overall experience customers have when they attend our events. Here the customer service plays a significant role.

1. Define the ideal customer experience

The very first step is to define what kind of experience we want to offer our customers. So how would you describe your customer’s ideal experience?

Our ideal customer experience can be described in three words: frictionless energetic experience. These three words emphasize the feeling we want our customers to get when they attend our events and this acts as a foundation for everything we do in our customer service.

Our ideal customer experience can be described in three words: frictionless energetic experience.

2. Define how to achieve the ideal experience

The second step is to think about the concrete actions that help you to create the ideal experience. It is good to identify the most significant situations that affect the customer experience and how to make these situations work for the customer’s benefit. The key is to understand the customer point of view and how you can affect the impressions they get. This can be achieved with a well planned customer service.

For example in our case, the key to providing customers with a frictionless feeling is to take into consideration all the little details the customer encounters during the seminar days. We pursue to make the customer service situations effortless and the customers to feel at ease when they are dealing with our customer service people. In order to achieve this, we think it is important to make the service easily accessible and available to our customers. In addition, we have a 30-minute guarantee in our annual event. This means that we promise to deal with any customer inquiries in 30 minutes and if we don’t manage to solve the issue, we will at least try to make it up for the customer.

The energetic feeling is created through our young and energetic customer service people. In addition, we pursue to give the customers a genuine experience. It is also very important for us that the customer service people embrace our goals and values. Thus, one good tip is to make sure everybody in your organization knows what their role is and what the goal of customer service is.

3. Understand customer expectations and exceed them

If you want to give the customers the best service and experience they can get, you need to understand the customer needs and expectations. It is important to be prepared for the various needs the customers may have.

Just to give you an example, we provide our customers with toilet baskets with a few important items people might need during the seminar days, e.g. pantyhose, hairspray etc. We believe that simple things, like mending a customer’s cloak in the cloakroom, can make a difference in the customer experience. This is actually a funny story: the customer who left the cloak in the cloakroom apologized our customer service people that the cloak was broken. Our customer service people decided to mend the cloak without asking. You can guess that the customer was pleasantly surprised when he came back to fetch his cloak.

In order to be able to fulfill each of these three steps, we also need people who understand what these steps entail and most importantly we need people who embrace the entrepreneurial mindset. You can read more about this in the next blog post.

Meet our customer service managers!
We have divided our customer service at NBForum2014 into six different departments. In each blog we introduce one of the departments and its managers. Here’s the first introduction!
Elisa Tervo Jenna Koivistoinen	Customer service department: the biggest department with around 50 workers takes care of the customer service and info desks is responsible for the general customer experience the department managers are Elisa Tervo and Jenna Koivistoinen The customer expectations can be exceeded even with small acts. This completes the customer’s seminar experience and makes it comprehensive,” say Jenna & Elisa.

Photos of the customer service managers by Jesse Kämäräinen.