Continuing a new exclusive series with AM-online, Dr William Holden, chairman of Sewells, is providing his monthly Executive View sharing insights into people and performance management to help automotive retail leaders to inspire, motivate and guide their dealership teams more effectively.

To be brilliant at delivering the best Customer Experience you need to be obsessed by it – totally obsessed. You, and your team, need to live, eat and breathe delivering amazing customer experiences – everywhere, by everyone, every time. (ACE³)

The ultimate driver of how well your business will do isn’t you - shock, horror; it’s how what you and your team do makes your customers feel.

The focal point for all your customer experience delivery has to be: Customers may forget what you do and what you say, but they’ll never forget how you make them feel.

Make a customer happy and they’ll tell one, maybe two people. Upset a customer and they’ll tell 10 people and, if they’re on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, they’ll tell a lot more.

A recent survey revealed 40% of people now take to social media to complain about bad customer experiences.

So, what would it mean to your organisation to totally eliminate bad experiences for your customers?

Our 59-year experience is that it’s not about doing extraordinary things. It’s about doing simple things extraordinarily well.

When money is tight, like now with the cost of living crisis, how can you make sure customers’ pounds are landing in your bank account and not your competitors?

Here’s how…

1. Would you buy from you and every single person in the sales team? Really??
2. Listen to all members of the customer facing team in action.  Impressed? Every single time??
3. How many of your team actually have a genuine “desire to serve”? A real, genuine “desire to serve”?
4. Establish what barriers to amazing customer experience exist, everywhere, by everyone, every time? Now remove them!
5. Continually ask your customers what they think. Listen and take action.
6. Be very clear about specifying the behaviours the team are expected to deliver, with customers. Don’t practice them until you get it right … practice them until you can’t get them wrong!
7. Involve the team in coming up with new and better customer experience ideas. Implement them and give praise.
8. Train everyone in the customer excellence culture as soon as they are hired. Don’t “throw them in the deep end
9. Be flexible - There is more than one way to amaze the customer
10. Be brave - Remove anyone at the frontline who isn’t amazing your customers

To become a totally and truly customer centric organisation, everyone from the top to the bottom must believe they work for the customer. Ask everyone who pays the salaries (by the way, it’s not payroll – they just handle the money – it’s the customers).  

You need inspirational leaders who create an infectious culture of customer experience excellence.

Implementing these 10 tips will give you the biggest return on investment in your business this year.  

Instead of using the economy as a reason for taking shortcuts in the customer experience, you can now focus on making sure you create customers for life and not just customers for now.

Author: Dr William Holden, Sewells