Have customer expectations changed?

As we are more than two month since lock down started in the majority of the world, it is interesting to see how customer expectations have changed.

If you try to order groceries online, it is taking anywhere from 7 days to up to 4 weeks with some online grocers. Is this acceptable under normal conditions? Absolutely not. But during these times, it is palatable. I mean if you don’t want to step into a grocery for the fear of contracting the COVID-19 virus then this service is definitely critical.

When you order things from Amazon online, some things have a delivery date of over a month. Again, people understand and they have adjusted their expectations accordingly.

Does this mean, as a business, that you don’t have to focus on the customer experience. Absolutely not. The key is to do the best that you can under these extenuating circumstances in order to get your product out the door.

If you are one of the organizations that have closed their doors or perhaps are still working from home with a decreased workload. Then you should be using any downtime to strategize on what you are going to do differently as an organization in this new world. You should have Plan A where things go back to normal and Plan B where things are forever changed due to the pandemic.

Plan A should focus on:

• what you can improve on each customer touch point
• how can you improve your processes so that there are so many touches. Too many touches lead to the potential of having errors as more people have to touch it. Streamlining is the key
• having an updated customer journey roadmap
• getting buy-in from everyone on the customer journey. I don’t mean just lip service. This is evident in so many organization. You won’t find one organization say, we intentionally aim to provide bad service. Yet in reality, they are providing a sub-par customer experience. Their banners will say, “we are all about the customer”, yet their actions will say, “we are all about short thinking in order to make the most profits”. That’s why it’s important to walk the talk and make sure that everyone realizes how their actions impact the customer experience. Once your whole organization has bought in, then you will have well oiled CX machine that will build loyal customers. An Apple anyone?
• Making sure you IT team knows who their customers are. It’s not about having people fit the technology that they roll out but having the technology meet the needs of the people. It should be intuitive to use instead of having to spend a month trying to learn what the programmers had in their heads.
• Make sure you hire people with the right competencies. There do exist people that love serving customers. Don’ hire people that love their paycheck more than your customers.
• Training based on people’s learning habits
• Make sure that you provide regular feedback to your employees through coaching or providing regular feedback on results to show them how their actions are making a difference

Plan B’s focus will involve:

• making sure that your employees feel safe and secure in their work environment. This would involve glass partitions, face masks, disinfectants
• You will need to develop an new mode of operation so that you guide your people on the do’s and dont’s so that that everyone is on the same page
• re-adjust your KPIs as this will definitely have an impact on productivity
• once things stabilize in this new environment, then you start executing Plan A

As you can see, there is a lot of things that could you could be doing as an organization to prepare yourselves during this down time. I encourage you to use this time productive so that you could come out running when things start to normalize. The successful organizations will be the ones that adapt and change while keeping the customer experience in the forefront.

Yes, customers are expecting less from you at the moment, but this won’t last for very long as the new norm sets in and customer expectations start to rise again. Be ready!