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5 Ways to Discover Drift in your Customer Experience

What’s the difference between a good and bad Customer Experience?  

I was thinking about this after a small (but unwelcome) change at a sandwich shop I visit often.  After coming four days a week for the past year, something was different.  When I tapped my phone on the card reader to pay, a new message asked me to select the amount of “tip” I wanted to add.  Suddenly, I had to decide with a line of customers behind me. Even though I believe in great tips for great service, I was annoyed that I was now being asked to pay extra for service after I stand in line to order, pay at the counter, fill my own drink, get my own chips, clear my own table and toss out my own trash. In other words, am I now expected to pay a tip like I’m at a full-service restaurant when I’m not getting any of the same services?  And since I’m there often, do I really want to add $10 a week to my lunch budget for the same meal and service?

Here’s what bothered me the most: it felt like the rapport I had built with the cashier over many months seemed to evaporate when I hit “none” to the Tip Amount question and her eyes dropped and shoulders slumped.  So, within a few seconds, I went from feeling like a good customer to Ebenezer Scrooge.  Is it just me being “cheap”?  I began to notice that I wasn’t the only one that seemed to feel annoyed when that tip message appeared. Especially with older customers, there was frequent face twisting when they hit the “none” button and our cashier, again, looked crestfallen.  I’m guessing the change happened because the chain started working with delivery services, like Uber Eats and GrubHub, and had to make a change for driver tips.  But I wonder if they considered how this might impact the experience for customers paying at the counter.

All of this got me thinking about “drift” – small changes upon small changes that can add up to a big gap between a customer’s expectations and reality.  I was first introduced to the concept of drift early in my restaurant career as I was being promoted to Director of Operations, when our CEO gave me outstanding direction: “You have one job now – prevent drift in my restaurants”.  Over the years, as a student of Customer Experience, I’ve looked at ways to identify these small, potentially harmful changes. The old rules of strategic advantage don’t apply anymore – we can’t wait for customer complaints or sales declines to know we have unhealthy drift. We have to define, then proactively protect, the core elements of the customer experience that customers value most.  Here’s 5 ideas on how to get it done:

1.    Define the Critical Few

In discovering drift, it’s important to first make sure your team knows what’s non-negotiable in the delivery of your customer experience. You can’t monitor everything, nor should you.  Understanding those critical few aspects of your service delivery that creates loyalty is the key.  Start from the perspective of your customers: where can you be so truly great that your customers will pay – and continue to pay for your services?  A resource we love is the book, “Uncommon Service”, where Frances Frei and Anne Morriss show how service must become a competitive weapon, not a damage-control function. That means weaving service tightly into every core decision a company makes.  This includes deciding on where your brand will be truly great and where you will be intentionally bad compared to competition (such as letting the other guys be great at self-service or low-price).  The most important part of defining these critical few is building a process culture that ensures zero tolerance for “drift” in these core elements of your brand.

2.    Who’s Responsible for the Customer Experience?

As the old saying goes, “If it’s everyone’s job, it’s nobody’s job”.  Insights from the 2019 Annual Franchise Marketing Report, just published by Franchise Update Media, shows that in franchised brands, responsibility for the Customer Experience is most often shared, based on a national survey of franchisor marketing leaders.  Specifically, when respondents were asked which department manages the “Customer Experience”, 45% shared that it is managed by multiple departments (with 35% stating that Operations manages and 15% stating that Marketing oversees).  Having clear accountability for measurable aspects of the customer experience is a key to making sure your critical standards are vigorously protected.

3.    Seek and Act on Customer Feedback

Once you’ve defined the core processes that deliver your differentiated customer experience and defined accountability, it’s time to build the mechanisms to help make sure they’re being delivered.  Of course, you can look at sales trends, call volume and product mix, but if these lagging metrics are decreasing, you’re probably too late to easily make improvements.  Seeking customer feedback in ways that make it easy for customers to share is important; outreach surveys via phone, email and mail are great, as are surveys in your brand app and on websites.  Social media listening and monitoring online reviews are also key to both learning consumer sentiment as well taking the opportunity to join the conversation.

4.    Consider the Root Causes

It’s easy to blame poor training or bad hiring when staff members take shortcuts or make changes that can impact the customer experience, but these tweaks can also be made by leadership, well-intended to benefit the business.  Managers that cut service staff, ignore employee credential gaps or skimp on ingredients might see a fast benefit to the bottom line – but, over time, they’ll see their customer loyalty erode. So, part of preserving a stellar customer experience is to understand the pressures that might lead employees to drift – with the support of managers or owners:

·     Franchise Satisfaction:  Franchise Business Review (FBR) recently shared powerful insights gained from 23,604 franchisee satisfaction surveys completed in 2018.  They found that brands with high satisfaction dramatically outperform brands with lower satisfaction on every key financial metric for a brand, including unit growth, turnover and – most importantly – franchisee income.  In fact, highly satisfied franchisees (top quartile) had almost double the income vs. less satisfied franchisees (bottom quartile).  Knowing this can tell you about your operation’s potential for drift in many ways.  Most obvious is economic – simply put, if the business is making a good income, there is less financial pressure to cut corners in any area, including customer experience.  More broadly, highly satisfied franchisees are less likely to allow drift.  As FBR’s CEO Eric Sites puts it, “Engaged franchisees participate, are passionate about the business and feel a deep connection to the brand.” 

·     Recruiting Pressures:  What impact can a great economy have on drift?  With unemployment rates nearing a 50-year low, recruiting and retaining qualified staff is a challenge.  Being able to merely fill shifts is difficult enough, but finding those stars with the core values the brand needs to deliver a special customer experience is extremely tough when candidates are scarce.

·     Cost Pressures: tougher recruiting often leads to higher wages.  Combine this with other rising costs of insurance, regulation and commodities and the economic incentive to find faster, cheaper and easier ways to serve customers heats up.

·     Competitive Pressures:  Moves by others in the industry to charge new fees, reduce service aspects or modify products can seem like justification for managers and owners to make their own changes – even if their brand leaders are trying to hold firm on core aspects of the service delivery.

5.    Outsource your Eyes and Ears:  

Yes, most brands have customer service supervisors, trainers and field consultants charged with preventing drift.  These internal roles are important, but have limitations because their perspective is just that – internal.  Their impact grows exponentially when they have the benchmarking data, industry insights and technology tools that make their jobs more efficient and effective. For example, online audit platforms can help onsite visits result in uncovering small, but potentially catastrophic examples of drift in your customer experience.  The leading online audit platform, FranchiseBlast, recently published “59 Customer Service Audit Questions Your Franchise needs to Know.” These questions, from a variety of types of businesses, help auditors focus on items that directly impact the customer experience (such as speed of service, staff offering friendly greetings to guests) as well as less direct, but still impactful elements of the overall experience (each crew member wearing a clean uniform, background music sound quality, saying thank you after every transaction).  At ServiceScore, we review recordings of actual phone call inquiries to thousands of businesses so that we can provide brands with real-life call conversion metrics, brand compliance concerns, ideas for new products/services and more – all from listening to (literally) the voice of the customer.  

If drift is when identified early, these small changes can usually be reversed through great coaching. Even better, it can be the spark of an idea that leads to positive changes in the customer experience. Knowing what’s truly important to your customers and leveraging the right tools can help identify these opportunities – and take the lead in protecting those critical aspects that create customers for life.

References:

Franchise Blast Customer Service Questions: franchiseblast.com/customer-service-audit

Uncommon Service:  https://www.amazon.com/Uncommon-Service-Putting-Customers-Business/dp/1422133311

Annual Franchise Marketing Report:  https://afmr.franchiseupdate.com/

Franchise Business Review:  https://tour.franchisebusinessreview.com/the-importance-of-franchisee-satisfaction-and-engagement/