National Clothesline

Everything is changing when it comes to customers. To lock in loyalty, drycleaners need to think differently about how they interact with consumers.

The combination of increased customer expectations and declining budgets is placing more demands on your customer service than ever before. But new best practices hold the key to lower costs and enhanced customer experiences.

Anyone looking to improve customer experience should understand and comply with certain underlying realities. Let’s take a look at what they are, and how you can use them to your advantage.

Experiences are totally in the eyes of the beholder. The same exact experience can be good for one person and bad for another.

As a matter of fact, it can be good for someone at one point in time and then bad for that same person at another point in time. Basically, trying to design the same experience for everyone will satisfy no one.

• While it may not be possible to individualize every interaction, focusing on several different types is important.

• Since you need to design experiences for specific types of people, experiences will become optimized for those customers.

• This requires you to have a very clear picture of your important, and not so important, customers. Customers should be prioritized.

• Design a voice of the customer program to get customer feedback about their individual experiences.

• Employees need to be empowered. Since every situation can be somewhat different, the needs of customers may vary each time. That’s why front-line employees need to have the latitude to accommodate the needs of key customers.

You (or your counter personnel) need to understand each customer’s personality and, thus, their perspective.

Customers care intensely about their own needs and desires, but they don’t generally know or care about how your business works. They just know they want to be satisfied.

Unless instructed otherwise, employees will make work-related decisions based on what is most practical for the company and not what works best for the customer.

• You know more than your customers: just deal with it. You can’t eliminate your frames of reference, but it’s important to understand that customers usually don’t understand the steps required to process and deliver their clothes.

• Always try to build customers’ experiences from the customer’s point of view. Look at all interactions as an opportunity to help customers.

• Don’t make customers jump through hoops just because it makes it easier for you to run your business. Your job is to make life easier for your customers.

Make the shift from self-centeredness to customer-centeredness.

Not many people wake up in the morning saying, “Today, I want to make life miserable for our customers.” Yet, every day, employees make decisions that end up frustrating, annoying, and upsetting customers. Often, it’s not their individual actions that cause the problems — it’s the lack of coordination and cooperation within your organization that causes the problems.

Given that most people want their company to serve customers better, a clear view of what customers need, want, and dislike, should dictate their actions.

• Once employees tune into the individual needs of key customers, they will make better decisions on how to create harmony between the customer and your business.

• While we all know that front-line employees affect customer experience, almost everyone in your company also has some impact on how customers are treated.

Successful drycleaners think of their companies as large production crews making the stars (front-line employees) shine on stage, during customer interactions.

An external focus is the best way to solve internal problems.

Unengaged employees can’t create engaged customers

If you want to improve your customers’ experiences, then it might seem obvious to focus on customers. For most drycleaners, though, that’s not the right approach.

Where should your focus? On employees. While you can make some customers happy through brute force, you cannot sustain great customer experiences unless your employees buy into what you’re doing and are aligned with the idea. If employees have low morale, then getting them to “wow” customers will be nearly impossible.

Back in 1994, three Harvard marketing professors published their Service-to-Profit Chain.

In it they said: “Profit and growth are stimulated by customer loyalty. Loyalty is a direct result of customer satisfaction. Satisfaction is largely influenced by the value of services provided to customers. Value is created by satisfied, loyal, and productive employees.”

• Just about any change to customer experience requires some employees to change what they do and how they do it. You can’t just change a few rules and processes and hope that customers will be treated better. It takes a lot to re-train employees.

• If it’s hard for employees to do something, they are less likely to do it — and more likely to get frustrated. Give your employees the authority to do the right things to help customers.

• If you want to have employees feel like they’re a part of your company, you need to tell them what’s going on. Develop a communications plan that not only tells employees what the company is doing, but also explains why you’re doing it. And it helps if you sincerely solicit feedback.

• When employees do things that help customers, find a way to celebrate those actions. Celebrations can be anything — a handwritten note, acknowledgement on your website, or an on-the-spot bonus. Look for opportunities to catch people doing the right thing.

You can fool some people some of the time but, eventually, you run out of customers to churn through, and people figure out what’s real and what’s not. This shows up in a couple of ways.

First of all, employees can sense if the customer’s experience is not really a top priority with the executive team.

Additionally, no matter how much money you spend on advertising, you can’t convince customers that you provide better experiences than you do.

• If you’re not committed to bettering customer experiences, don’t start. It is a lot of hard work. And if good customer experiences aren’t a top priority, the initiative will likely fail, and result in frustrated employees.

• Since customers ultimately know how they are treated, the best you can do with marketing is to reinforce the truth. If you want to change how your business is perceived, start by treating customers better and use advertising to reinforce the new way that they’re being treated.

By carefully applying these five steps, you will better position your company to deliver highly effective customer experiences and empower your employees to deliver great experiences to your customers.