We’re doing some renovations in our home. These include changes in the Master Bedroom and Master Bath. As A result, my wife and I have temporarily moved to a guest room and are having to use a guest bath. It’s been interesting–and a little embarrassing — at least thinking of what we’ve put past guests through.
There wasn’t anything glaringly bad about the guest bedroom and baths, just a whole series of little annoyances—bad lighting in one room, inconvenient switches and outlets in another, the bed was a little soft in another. In the shower, something was up with the faucet. It was easy to get extremely hot or cold water, to get something in between, you couldn’t move the faucet handle more than a quarter of an inch.
A couple of weeks living where we put guests was eye opening! Without the renovation, we never would have discovered these annoyances. We never would have had reason to stay in any of the guest rooms, so we would have continued to be embarrassed by these little annoyances (and, at least so far, our guests have been far too polite to mention anything.)
Too often, we subject our prospects and customers to similar things. We never experience what we put them through. Whether it’s our marketing campaigns, the way we sell, or the experience we create in doing business with us. We seldom actually experience what we inflict on our prospects and customers.
Generally, we design our demand gen, marketing, sales and customer experience approaches based on the most efficient and effective ways for us to work, forgetting what the customer experiences in the process. Inadvertently, rather than really creating great customer experiences, we are doing the opposite.
As much as you can, put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Visit your company’s website, looking at it as a prospect might. Sign up for your own newsletter, or white papers to see what happens in the process. Call your customer service desk with a problem, see how it’s handled. Talk to your customers, get their feedback on every interaction they have with you.
Use these opportunities to learn what you are taking your customer through, use them to learn how you might create the customer experiences you intend to create.
Leave a Reply