When we talk about the idea of the Customer Experience or the Customer Experience Lifecycle, there is often times a focus on the process that is involved or the touchpoints that are involved to create an expeirence that is unique or shareable. The one thing that we often forget about though is something that really can make or break an experience for any of us with a company we are doing business with, Empowerment.
If you call into a call center because you have been charged by your service provider for something that you did not purchase, what do you hope that they will do?
If you bring back a faulty DVD player to the store because it just stopped working one week after you bought it, but already threw out the receipt, what do you hope that they will do?
If you go to a restaurant and the food that you ordered comes out cold and has a hair in it, what do you hope the restaurant will do?
I am sure that we all have our answer to each of these questions and it probably goes something like, "I hope they would understand the situation and empower the people at the front line to just make the situation right. And treat me the way in which they would want to be treated in the same situation."
But, what happens when companies don't empower their people to make common sense decisions at the front lines? What happens when the people that have the most potential impact on the customer experience in that exact moment are not given authority to make a decision that would make all the difference?
A quick story for you about an experience I had at Target recently. I went in to buy a few assorted items. (As an aside, why is it that I can never get out of Target spending less than $100?) So I was walking through the store, buying a few groceries, some diapers etc. Then I just happened to walk down the vaccum aisle and I saw a new vacumm that we had been wanting to get for some time. It was a Dyson. It was the exact one I had been looking for and it happend to be on sale for something like $150 off the regular price. I snapped it up and went up to pay for all my stuff. The cashier scanned all my items and then got to the Dyson. She scanned it and the price came up with a much higher price than what was shown in the aisle. I told her this and she called someone to go check. Low and behold, the sign on the rack said the sale was good up until a certain date and that date had passed by two days. But the sign was still up. So I looked at her, fully expecting her to charge me the full price. But something awesome happened. She was empowered. I am not clear if she was a manager or not, but she looked at me, said she understood what the issues was, empathized with me about how she would be bummed if that happened to her and then over rid the system to give me the price that was the sale price.
What a fantastic experience that all was enabled by a company giving their people the authority to make common sense decisions that were going to create a very positive customer experience. She didn't think twice. She didn't hem and haw about how she was doing me favor. She didn't have to call anyone over and make some big show out of the issue. She simply put herself in my shoes, applied some common sense, took ownership of the situation and made a call. But it all would not have been possible if Target would not have empowered their front line to make judgement calls like this that will create an experience for their customers that will bring them back over and over again to spend that $100.....
