CHICAGO — In his book, I’ll Be Back, Shep Hyken, customer service/experience guru, writes about creating something he refers to as the “I'll be back experience.”
This involves six questions or steps for a business to take to create an experience where customers want to do business with you and want to keep coming back for more.
Hyken shared these questions/steps as a sidebar to the recent “Understanding Current, Potential Laundry Customers Better” series (Parts 1, 2 and 3).
1. I want to know why our current customers like doing business with us.
Why should someone do business with us instead of someone else? We need to know what we do differently.
We can’t be the same or else somebody’s going to figure out a way to beat us because they’re going to come up with something different.
2. Why do customers do business with the competitor instead of us?
If we’ve lost business in the past, have we asked that customer who we made a proposal to, “Hey, just out of curiosity, why didn’t we get the business?” That’s important to know.
3. Once we find out what the competition is doing that we might not be doing, we need to adapt or adopt some of that into what we do.
I’m not suggesting we copy what they do, but I am saying this seems to be what some customers really like and we’re not providing that.
Let me give you an example.
Many years ago, I refer to this as the amenity wars in the hotel business, where one day a hotel owner said, you know what we need to do for our business customers? Let’s give them a newspaper, so when they check-in or they come down to get something to eat or on their way out, grab a newspaper at the front desk free of charge. Somebody across the street said, did you see what that hotel’s doing? We need to do the same thing, but let’s make it a little bit better. There’s the twist. Instead of them coming down to pick up their newspaper, let’s drop it off in front of the door.
And then another competitor said, you know what, let’s give them a choice of what newspapers they want when they come in ask if they would like USA Today or Wall Street Journal at your doorstep, or would you like both. You see what happened? They copied the idea, but they made it their own.
4. Sit down with your team and ask what companies outside of our industry do we love to do business with and why.
They could be B2B, B2C, it could be a restaurant down the street. It could be Amazon. It doesn’t matter, but I just want to know why you really like them. Not just that you do like them, but why you love to keep coming back and doing business with them.
5. Once you hear those answers, the next question is what is it that these other companies are doing that aren’t in our industry that we love so much that we could be doing as well?
In other words, we’re breaking out of our industry and looking at what other companies are doing for their customers to determine if it’s something that we can implement which not only makes us best in the industry but maybe best in class, period, outside of the industry.
6. Now that we’ve gone through this process and we understand why customers love us, what customers love about the competition, what we might be able to do that is similar to them, what we love about companies outside of our industry and what they’re doing that we might be able to use.
Once we have all that information, we start to implement it and then ask why would a customer want to do business with us?
And when you answer that, I think that’s when you start to get that experience where customers want to do business with you and want to keep coming back for more.
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Matt Poe at [email protected].