An Easy Exercise to Build Customer Experience Thinking

Photo Credit: Fuelrefuel via CC License

This post was originally published on the FCR blog on July 15, 2016. Click here for the original.

I was sitting in a meeting with one of our program managers recently and she shared an exercise she regularly does with her team. I thought it was so good that I wrote it down and told her I would likely steal it for a blog post. So she was warned, right?

We’re so busy cranking out customer emails, phone calls, and chats in customer service operations that it becomes difficult to step back and take a 35,000 foot look at the customer experience. Sure, a good quality assurance process can help with this, but it can be tricky to talk objectively when directly critiquing someone’s work and it also doesn’t typically foster collaboration.

On this particular team, someone brings to the table an experience they had as a customer dealing with customer service. Given that this team primarily handles email support, they brought an email they received from another company. The group took time to evaluate and critique that email and collaborate on ways to make it better.

The end result of this exercise was a deeper understanding of some of the ingredients for a great customer interaction that agents could directly integrate into their own style. It’s extremely powerful for anyone in customer service to step back and think about the service they want to receive and then apply it to their own work.

Try this exercise with your team and let me know how it goes. If you have a regular meeting cadence with your team, this can easily be done then. This is a great way to make incremental improvements to your overall customer experience and it will really pay off in the long run!

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