Consistency in the Customer Experience Creates Mediocrity
If you have returned a gift this holiday season, you might have been hoping for a smooth and consistent customer experience so the exchange could go quickly and conveniently.
Consumers often believe that consistency in service is what makes for a great customer experience.
But they would be wrong.
Consistency in the customer experience actually creates mediocrity.
To avoid variability in service, businesses and providers impose controls and rules on frontline workers to bring experience and expectation closer together.
This helps to eliminate negative experiences and provide a common and seamless interaction. By reinforcing standard operating procedures, less variability is ensured.
Unfortunately, the lack of difference in the customer experience also eliminates truly remarkable service as well.
By moving customers into the zone or sweet spot of what they expect, providers usually receive fewer complaints, thereby reducing stress and costs.
But consistently hitting the strike zone negates truly memorable experiences that solidify loyalty. It’s not that service providers should purposively create inconsistent experiences, but the extreme focus on repeatability negates exceeding expectations in ways that promote surprise and delight.
For the best providers, even a terrible experience is an opportunity to produce an exceptional outcome, so they don’t shy away from taking the chance to amaze their customers.
Great customer memories are a product of providers who go above and beyond, sometimes in the smallest of ways.
Remembering a name and preference, searching for a best product recommendation to meet their needs, or following up to see how things worked, among many other details, are exceedingly difficult to bake into standard procedures.
That’s why the best service providers attempt to achieve both goals at the same time: baseline consistency and delight.
Giving frontline service providers the guidelines to provide consistency and the freedom to enchant customers is what great service is really all about.
If customer loyalty is priceless, the cost of admission is the delivery of a unique experience that delights and amazes the customer. Too much consistency is a recipe for mediocrity, and the best service providers avoid it.
Though uniformity reduces errors and mitigates risk, it is the unexpected kindness, the unplanned effort, that builds loyalty.
When the rigid structure of standardized service accommodates human warmth, magic happens.
Another excellent observation! This same phenomenon plagues education as well with educators privileging homogeneity and non-controversy over education. Bold teachers dare to challenge student assumptions, but they often pay a high price. Student and parent complaints prevail over pedagogical goals. This dumbing-down happens at every level.