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Podcast Episode #44 – What’s the Secret of a World-Class Customer Experience
This episode of the Power to the Small Business podcast features John DiJulius, author of What’s the Secret: To Providing a World-Class Customer Experience? Customer satisfaction is at an all-time low. It’s never been worse according Dijulius. In fact DiJulius calls it a “crisis.” A few weeks ago on this blog, I decried The Sorry State of Customer Service in America. It’s time to so something about this crisis.
Listen to the conversation in the player below as John DiJulius and Jay Ehret discuss why customer satisfaction is so low and how you can take steps to improve the customer experience at your business. The secret is out…
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Guest: John DiJulius – The DiJulius Group, Cleveland, Ohio
Length: 36 minutes
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Show Notes:
Key Takeaways
- You are probably not doing as good as you think you are at customer satisfaction
- You are asking employees to deliver a superior customer experience that they themselves have never received.
- Charge an experience tax on top of the price of your goods and services. Then decide how to deliver an experience that justifies that tax.
- Create an employee service aptitude test.
- Give your employees soft-skill training.
Selected quotes from John DiJulius:
“Sometimes we (entrepreneurs) get arrogant. And sometimes we feel that our product, or our service, or our knowledge is just that superior. But at the end of the day, it’s not. And we really have to understand that there has to be an experience.”
“It ends up making, if we do it well, price irrelevant. Based on the experience they receive, your customers feel your prices are a bargain.”
“It’s more than a coincidence that we’re having two crisis in America right now. A customer service crisis as well as one of the worst economic crisis we’ve ever gone through. And they go hand in hand.”
“Service has a cost, it’s a line item on a P&L. An experience is memorable. The only time a service is memorable is when it’s screwed up.”
“The employee, who is touching the customer more than anyone, makes between $8-$18 an hour, has never flown first class, stayed at a five-star resort, or drove a Mercedes Benz, yet we want them to deliver that type of experience to those types of clients… who are used to getting it.”
“Service aptitude is not innate, it’s not common sense. It has to be bridged.”
“I would rather increase value, then chase price. It kills the margins and it kills your perception and your reputation.”
Show Links:
The DiJulius Group
John Robert’s Spa
Book: What’s the Secret: To Providing a World-Class Customer Experience
A complete archive of all past episodes can be found here: Power to the Small Business
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