The COVID pandemic ushered in a new reality for business executives and owners alike. With enormous competition for customers (with significantly reduced purchasing power), customer experience has become far more crucial.

What more, statistics further consolidate the sacredness of customer experience:

1 in 3 customers will never do business with a brand again after just one ugly experience

1 in 2 customers have bought impulsively after a remarkably personalized customer experience

The big question now is how do you provide a world-class customer experience in a COVID era where the customer is exponentially irritable?

The convention is that the customer is always king. But this doesn't work much these days. Today, the trend is going towards endowing your frontline with the royalty you erstwhile bestowed on your customer.

This is by making your frontline employee your number one priority and the customer your number two priority. This way you get a word-class customer experience team that delivers exceptional service that keeps the customer stuck to you for life.

The truth is customers don't really care where you place them on your scale of preference provided their customer journey is flawless.

Let me use a personal experience of how I lucratively executed this strategy of making frontline employee #1 and customer #2.  

The context

Our

customer experience was failing; our customer-brand relationship was miserable

at best. We had close to no reputation in our space.

Actually, we were concentrating largely on customer-based solutions like custom

giveaways, and branded merchandise, the best we got was a temporary least in

sales. Always, we were PUTTING THE CUSTOMER FIRST AS IT WAS POPULARLY AGREED

THAT THE CUSTOMER WAS KING.

After a few weeks, the tempo miserably fades, and we are back to zero again, trying to

climb up. We do this branding campaign again, and we jump temporarily only to

collapse back to zero, practically dancing in circles.

We needed sustainable results from our customer experience. We were getting

it essentially wrong: our customer experience team lacked the capacity to sustain

new customers regardless of how outstanding our customer acquisition campaigns

were.  We were keeping new wine in old wineskins, and we are paying a great deal for that error.

What I did

I discovered that the best customer experience we could achieve wasn't by

necessarily putting the customer first but instead making the employee #1 and

customer #2.

This involved us REFURBISHING THE FRONTLINE EMPLOYEES FIRST. Deploying my innovative customer experience approach of making the frontline employee the #1 concern

and the customer #2, we were able to project a unique brand of excellence

internally to the forefront.

Instead of investing all we have on customer-focused campaigns, we decided to

internally refine our company by intellectually rebranding our sales team into

top performers.

To shut off such spontaneity in sales (up-down hikes) and replace it consistency in

profitability, I decided to divert the resources we were spending on

customer-oriented branding in intellectually beefing up the frontline employees.

How did we achieve this?

We spent significant money on educating them, sending them to seminars, and also

invested in courses and programs all targeted at cognitively revamping them and

raising their performance rhythm.

So by the time they came out from this intellectual rebranding process, they were adeptly

refined and exceeding enhanced versions of themselves.

Our next step

I gave them operational freedom by unclasping them from conventions. I dished them

more autonomy and inventive freedom to solve customers' problems uniquely.

This way, they didn't have to be perpetually recourse to the upline at the slightest

challenge they had. I let them do it their way and lavish excellence on the

customer on the spot!!

The results

This unleashed their creative genius. From day to day, we were overwhelmed with the

out-of-the-box miracles these supposedly lamed sales guys were pulling off at

the frontline. They didn't even have to reach out to the executives for

direction.

Ready for a shocker? Sales spiked sustainably by over 43%. Our customer experience became

a miracle almost overnight. An almost closing retail store suddenly became the

talk of the town, and word of mouth marketing from our happy customers was the best PR we could get!

Customers suddenly became terribly in love with the same products they were passing up on

before now. Effectively, we have overflows and were lavished with referrals.

Michael D. Brown

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