Balancing Policy with Personalized Experiences

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.

Hello, hello. Welcome to the Experience Action podcast. I'm Jeannie Walters and you have questions, so let's get right to it.

Hi, Jeannie. This is Pat. I love your podcast and all the work that you do. I'm a CX leader that has a team that does great. Our surveys come back great. I think they interact with customers really well, but sometimes we have unique customer situations that don't fall into our policies in a very specific way and I need to help the team have the ability to meet the customer's needs but still adhere to our policies. How would you suggest we approach that?

Oh, this is something that I think a lot of customer experience leaders are challenged with. How can our customer experience team really deliver for customers who maybe have unique challenges or situations when our policy isn't written for that? Maybe it doesn't allow something that we think should happen for the customer, or maybe we are trying to respect the policy, but we're feeling that pressure from the customer for a more personalized and customized experience. It's really a fine line to walk, and so today we're going to break down some strategies, share a few examples and hopefully give you some ideas on where to have that wiggle room and where to stick to your policy. [ding, ding] So, first things first, let's kind of acknowledge that there's a reason for policies.

We are often faced with policies that may seem kind of restrictive or baffling, but they're there for a reason, and usually it's because something happened. Something happened where somebody tried to return something way too late and it was way out of our inventory. Something happened where somebody tried to pull a fast one and buy a product and return it too quickly or alter it or maybe play some funny business with how they were billed. So that does happen, but most customers are not those customers. So sometimes we have to look at our policies and decide if they're worthwhile at all. If something happened because of one exception and we're making everybody else pay the price for that, we need to start asking bigger questions about what's really worth it. What can we do to allow the customer to get through their customer journey in an easier and more seamless way without risking too much? Now, there's risk anytime you do business anywhere. There's risk in just communicating with another person that they might misunderstand you. So, while policies have a place, if the policy really doesn't make sense for the majority, it might be time to start asking questions about that policy. Now, sometimes we don't know what to do with that feedback. That's why it's so important for customer experience leaders to empower and encourage employees throughout the organization not just customer-facing employees to really provide that feedback when they see something that doesn't make sense, isn't adding up in the right way for the customer, or just a policy that puts them in an awkward position that they don't feel good about. So start looking at policies with a slightly more critical eye and asking do we really need this here and, if so, how can we make sure that the expectations around that policy are clearly, clearly communicated?

So the challenge here is kind of twofold. We have adhering to the spirit of the policy while also addressing personalized needs and delivering a customized experience based on where that customer is, who they are, how long they've been a customer all of those things. We want to acknowledge and respect that as well. So how do we do this? Number one we want to lead with empathy. We want to lead with understanding, and one of the best ways to do that is to consider your own customer experience mission, your own customer values. Think about what is the experience that you want to deliver and have that empathy show up. So if somebody is having a point of friction or frustration on their customer journey because of one of your policies, it's really important that we are empathizing. Now that doesn't mean that we are acknowledging or encouraging breaking the rules. What we're simply saying is we hear you, we understand and we're going to work with you to try to get to the best possible outcome.

This is where creative problem solving can really help out. We want to look for alternative solutions. We want to look for how we can work within the bounds of these policies and still meet the customer's personalized needs. Now, some organizations allow for this a little bit more than others, but, as a customer experience leader, I would encourage you to brainstorm about when these things come up. How could we address that? What could we offer in an alternative way or maybe a parallel way that still respects the policy but also respects the customer? This does require that everybody understands where the organization is coming from. Having that clear view of your customer experience mission and your values helps everybody make the right judgment calls around when to kind of expand and look for alternative means versus when to follow the policy by the letter. And, of course, we want to have a feedback loop. We want to make sure that we are looking at these unique situations as learning opportunities.

How can we make sure this doesn't happen to another customer? How can we make sure that the customer who we help actually understands that you know what? We're going to keep working on this. We're going to make sure that this policy is addressed or we'll find a better way. We need to make sure that communication is not just clear but also ongoing.

One of the patterns that I'm seeing is that, in order to resolve an issue, sometimes a customer service agent or a contact center representative will say to the customer well, I resolved all of your problems today? Or did I resolve all of your issues today? And sometimes that's not so. Yes or no, that's a gray area. We might not know as a customer if our problem is resolved until we carry on with our lives, until we use the product again, until we run into that part of the customer journey again. And so by saying yes, it's all resolved, we're kind of absolving the organization of everything. So be careful about how you ask those questions. Be careful about putting things into boxes like yes, it's resolved completely, Check, and just going for that, because then it's limiting as to what you can really learn from it, what you can apply to next time, how you can prevent it from happening in the future.

We want to make sure that we're receiving that customer feedback in the spirit and intent that it was meant for. That means that we have to be humble, we have to be open and we have to realize that sometimes these policies work for 80% of our customers, but there are 20% where it's really not working and that's not their fault. So what can we learn from that? How can we adapt? How can we change? That's the type of thing we need to be very open to, because the world changes fast. Customer expectations are changing. If you're in an organization that delivers technology, you certainly know how fast things can change in the marketplace.

So let's make sure that, while we want to follow policy and have policy, we also need to acknowledge that this is an ongoing evolution. We have to keep updating those policies. We have to be open to the idea that they might not apply to every single customer in every single situation. There will be unique exceptions. So what can we learn from those exceptions and where do we share that feedback, both inside the organization, and how can we gather that feedback from the right customer so that we can continue to learn with them as well?

And then we also just sometimes have to say no, sometimes we have to say that is not part of our policy, and in that case, sometimes the best thing we can do is simply say that in a clear, compassionate way. We want to communicate that you know what? Here's why this is the way it is, here's what happened to lead us to this decision, here's what you could do instead. And sometimes that means losing a customer, and that's the reality of it. So, while we want to keep every customer, we want to keep them happy and we want to keep them moving along the journey. If they have expectations that our organization simply can't meet because it is misaligned with who we are, it's misaligned with our values, it's misaligned with the customer expectations, it's misaligned with our customer mission statement, then sometimes we do lose the customer.

But if we can do that in a way that we feel okay, we feel like that policy makes sense. We were clear about our communication, we approached it with empathy and humility, then we can let go and that customer can find a place where maybe they're happier and their expectations will be met in a better way than we can deliver. So transparency builds trust, even when it ends in disappointment. We want to make sure that we are transparent and honest and authentic and direct, and if we can feel like we have delivered on all of those qualities, then sometimes we do have to close the book and let the policy stand on its own. Now there are some great examples out there about kind of how this creative problem solving has come in. The important thing is that, again, you want to live up to the values of your organization, you want to live up to who you are, and so there are stories about how things that don't fit perfectly in a policy are solved creatively by adding some discounts, adding some retribution, adding some extra product, possibly changing the extension on a contract or things like that. So if you get stumped here, start getting creative if you really think that's the right thing to do. If you find yourself making those exceptions all the time, then something is probably wrong with that policy and that's why we have to keep these lines of communication open. We have to continue to listen and learn and evolve with our customers. So I wish you all great luck as you approach your own policies and think about where are those examples that maybe show us what we need to change, what we don't need to change and how to move forward on behalf of our customers and with them alongside us.

Thank you so much for listening to Experience Action Podcast. I love your questions, so leave me your voicemail at askjeannie. vip. And, if you haven't already, check out CXI Flight School™, cxiflightschool. com, where you can sign up for our waiting list, where we really guide you through group mentorship and specific curriculum to really get the foundations of your customer experience strategy right. I can't wait to see you there. Thanks, everybody! To learn more about our strategic approach to experience. Check out free resources at experienceinvestigators. com, where you can sign up for our newsletter, our year of CX program and more, and please follow me, Jeannie Walters, on LinkedIn.