A Scary CX Story

Experience Action. Let's stop just talking about customer experience, employee experience, and the experience of leaders. Let's turn ideas into action. Your host, Jeannie Walters, is an award-winning customer experience expert, international keynote speaker, and founder of Experience Investigators, a strategic consulting firm helping companies increase sales and customer retention through elevated customer experiences. Ready, Set, Action. One, two, three, four.

Hey, hey, and happy Halloween. It is Jeannie Walters here for another episode of Experience Action, where I answer your question about customer experience. And guess what? We have a spectacularly spooky question.

Hi, Jeannie, with Halloween coming up, I want to know what is the scariest CX story you've ever heard. Thanks." Now, when we think about scary, spooky customer experience stories, of course, we go to those places that we all know. I've heard about so many situations that you all tell me on airplanes and after I speak, and I get emails and LinkedIn messages about these things because people can't believe how bad it gets. I will say that a lot of the situations that get complex, that cannot be solved with one call or one message or anything else, those are the things that seem to leave us feeling the most spooked.

So one example, I talked to somebody at a conference. It was actually a healthcare conference, and they came up to me and said, "can you believe I'm the third generation still getting invoices from a hospital in my town? And I said, I cannot believe that. How did that even happen? And she said well, her grandparents went in for some routine thing, and insurance or Medicare maybe was supposed to cover it and for some reason they didn't. So they started getting these invoices for something that they, frankly, shouldn't have been invoiced for. So she said her grandmother called every week and said please remove this bill. And they always said every week of course we're happy to do that. Now they had other appointments. They would show up, they would ask about the bill and every time they'd be told no, that will be taken off, you do not have to pay that. Well, unfortunately, her grandparents passed away and, of course, when her parents, their next of kin, were taking care of this bill, they called the hospital again and they said, "hey, this looks like something we haven't paid, but it was covered, so can we take care of this? Oh, yes, of course. Of course, no worries. Well, you know what happened next? It kept going. Wait, there's more. Whoever was responsible, or whatever process was responsible, for removing that invoice that should have been never sent out in the first place, should have done it, and they didn't. The process should have worked, and it didn't. And my hunch is that nobody quite knew how to fix the problem. Just fix it. Something in the system was automatic and nobody could quite figure out how do we get this done? And on top of that, frankly, nobody cared enough to get it done. And so, after three generations dealing with this invoice, the person who came up and talked to me said she was still dealing with it. Now, the kicker here is that that hospital system had been bought and sold a few times, had different names above the doors. So how do things like this happen?

I would say that many, many times, when we look at the results of something like this scary customer experience, we don't take the time to really take a step back and look at what part of the journey is broken that's actually creating this outcome. What is happening where we can't even figure out how to fix something because we don't know how it works to begin with? This is why I'm such a big believer in not just defining what great customer experience means for your organization and for your customers, but taking that a step further, looking at what is the actual customer journey that's happening, so not just relying on what our processes and our systems are telling us, but actually reaching out to customers, finding out from them. Are you getting these communications the way we intend? Are you able to do things in the easy way that we planned? Customer journey mapping can be a really powerful tool here, as well as customer interviews. And finally, then we want to intentionally design better customer experiences, and we want to do that with tools like service blueprinting, where you figure out the ideal customer journey and then you actually build the customer journey and then you actually break down what are the processes, systems, technologies, locations even, people, employee training, all of those things that have to happen on the back end in order to deliver that ideal customer journey.

If we take the time to be intentional and proactive about designing a great customer experience, what happens is when we have these moments where we have to be reactive because somebody is telling us something isn't going right. We then have a game plan of knowing where do we need to go to fix this problem, who do we need to involve, what teams need to actually make the changes in order to deliver on correcting this problem. Otherwise, we are spending all of our time in reactive mode and we are the ones who then have to figure out wow, where does this come from? What systems are included? Which team is involved? That's why being proactive and intentional can be such a winning business strategy. It helps you not just gain trust with your customers so that they spend more with you, they buy more, they refer more all of those things they don't leave but then we also are going to make sure we are operationalizing what we do so that it's as efficient and cost effective as it can be for the organization. It is literally a win-win.

But if we don't pay attention to these things, then guess what? We have really scary customer experiences that haunt people, literally. So let's make sure that we are not haunting our customers with bad customer experiences because we are spending all of our time being reactive about the journey instead of being intentional and proactive and designing them in the best possible way we can. So I love this question. I hope you're all getting lots of treats, not so many tricks, as you celebrate Halloween. As you approach your job in customer experience, look for those moments that you can make the customer journey just a little sweeter for your customers and reap the rewards of doing that well. Thank you so much for being here. Don't forget, we have lots of resources for you at ExperienceInvestigators. com and I can't wait to hear your next question. Don't be scared. Leave me a voicemail at SpeakPipe. com/ Experience Action. I'll talk to you next week.