Delivering an Exceptional
Customer Experience
Sarah Cook is managing director
of The Stairway Consultancy Ltd.
She has 20 years of consulting
experience in leadership development,
coaching, and customer experience.
She has designed and delivered
global development programs
resulting in higher levels of customer
loyalty, employee engagement, and
improved business performance.
She can be contacted at HYPERLINK
mailto:sarah@thestairway.co.uk
sarah@thestairway.co.uk.
Cook Delivering Exceptional Customer Experience.indd 1
Sarah Cook
Abstract: Most organizations recognize that delivering
exceptional service plays a key part in customer retention,
yet few companies stand out as consistently delivering
exceptional service. This article describes the steps that
are needed to create an outstanding customer experience.
It includes practical tips on how to create a vision for
customer-centricity, get close to your customers to un-
derstand their explicit and implicit needs, employ people
with the right service attitude and then engage them in
delivering an exceptional service as well as techniques to
help understand the principles and practice of sustaining
a true customer-focused culture.
Keywords: Close to the customer, customer centricity,
customer complaints, customer experience, customer
retention, customer service measurementcustomer vision,
employee engagement, exceptional customer experience,
exceptional service, outstanding customer experience,
Recruiting for attitude, service culture, service excellence,
service standards,
Introduction
Welcome to Delivering an Exceptional Customer
Experience.
Every business is reliant on both gaining new custom-
ers and retaining them. Repeat, loyal customers are key
to sustained growth, value, and profitability. Most orga-
nizations recognize that delivering exceptional service
plays a key part in customer retention, yet few com-
panies stand out as consistently delivering exceptional
service.
In this article, I set out to describe the steps that are
needed to create an outstanding customer experience.
This article is divided into eight sections:
1. Create a vision for customer-centricity
2. Get close to your customers
3. Recruit for attitude
4. Set service standards
5. Put service on every agenda
Expert Insights 1
27/02/17 3:15 PM
 Delivering an Exceptional Customer Experience
6. Be positive when things go wrong
7. Measure and recognize
8. Close the loop
Throughout the article, youll find tips
and techniques that will help you un-
derstand the principles and practice of
customer-centricity. At the end of the article
youll find a handy assessment tool to help
you identify where you need to improve
your organizations service experience.
I hope that you find the advice and tools
in this article practical and helpful in creat-
ing a culture of exceptional service in your
business.
Create a Vision for
Customer-Centricity
In the developed world, todays consumer
is more informed, skeptical of big busi-
ness and digitally savvy than ever before.
The challenge for organizations to survive
and grow, no matter what sector they rep-
resent, is to meet the ever-increasing de-
mands of the customer.
Customers today are hyper-connected.
They want to interact with organizations
via whatever medium they choose and
when they choose. Business channels need
to be accessible 24/7, 365, be more joined
up, effortless, and more efficient for the
customer than ever before.
Yet the focus on digital transforma-
tion is only one part of the challenge of
customer-centricity. Studies show that ex-
isting customers can be up to five times
more profitable than new customers. Sat-
isfied customers use more products and
services than new customers, typically
spend more, make more repeat visits, and
recommend the organization more often.
Research shows that 68 percent of the rea-
sons why customers leave an organization
are due to perceived indifference. Human
interaction and emotional connection play
an important part in consumers choice of
staying with an organization.
So where do you start when it comes
to improving your customer experience?
2 Expert Insights
Cook Delivering Exceptional Customer Experience.indd 2
Certainly, digital transformation must be a
key strategic intent but, equally, engaging
employees to create a truly customer-centric
culture is key. As Peter Drucker famously
said, Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
In this article, I focus on the actions you
can take to create an exceptional customer
experience from a cultural perspective. I
outline eight steps based on best practice,
which will help you turn the wheel and
get traction in delivering exceptional ser-
vice. Some of these steps you may have
already embedded into your culture, oth-
ers not so. There is a copy of the Customer
Experience Wheel at the end of this article
to help you identify where you need to
improve.
Changing culture takes time and is a
long journey. The starting point is to be
clear about what your ambition is for cus-
tomer experience and to communicate this
story consistently and transparently to all
employees.
Customer experience is the perception
that customers have of their interactions
with an organization. The experience of
what customers see, feel, hear, do, and say
determines their memory and perception
of the experience. When customers recount
a memory, they are sharing the experience
of the emotional story they created about the
organization, not just the actual experience
itself.
Make sure therefore that you can answer
the question: what do we want customers
to perceive about our service? Consider
what you want customers to feel about
your organization and the emotional con-
nections you want to engender. For exam-
ple, organizations such as Apple, Burberry,
and Virgin have created strong brand repu-
tations via the stories, legends, values, and
lifestyle that they embody.
Tip 1: Create a clear vision/ambition for the
experience you want customers to receive
and engage your team in this so they can
see how they can make a difference.
27/02/17 3:15 PM
 Delivering an Exceptional Customer Experience
Get Close to Your Customers
How can we deliver exceptional service if
we dont understand the emotional and ra-
tional needs of our customers?
Organizations that deliver outstanding
service make sure that they get close to
their customers. They segment their cus-
tomer base and create products and ser-
vices that meet different customers needs.
In the heritage sector for example, an orga-
nization we work with recognizes that there
are many different customer segments who
visit their attractions: young families, re-
tired couples, coffee-shop users, etc. Each
segment has different needs and levels of
emotional engagement during the visit.
The organization has mapped out the
customer journey for each segment and
identified key touch points where they can
create powerful emotional stories for each
customer type.
Other organizations regularly listen to
their businesses via qualitative and quantita-
tive research. As well as online surveys and
feedback, they use customer focus group
and verbatim feedback to bring the voice of
the customer to life. In the supermarket sec-
tor, we worked with a business whose execu-
tives not only took calls from customers in
their call centers but also each shadowed a
customer. This meant going to the custom-
ers homes to find out more about their shop-
ping needs, how they planned their shop,
and then shadowing the customer as they
went in store and returned home as well as
when they shopped online. In this way, the
executive team discovered more about the
consumers met and unmet needs.
When was the last time you used your
own or your competitors products and ser-
vices? Remember, customer expectations
are set not just by other businesses in your
sector but via the experience of the service
they have received across sectors. Con-
sider the efficiency and effortlessness of
the Amazon ordering process, for example.
What can you learn from other businesses
in terms of customer experience?
Expert Insights
Cook Delivering Exceptional Customer Experience.indd 3
So, ask yourself what is your company
doing to truly get close to the customer?
Once you do this, how well are you com-
municating customer needs to your team
and how is this knowledge driving innova-
tion in your business?
Tip 2: Get close to the customer: Segment
your customer base and map the customer
journey for each segment. Use a variety of
methods to listen, understand, and act on
customers current and future needs.
Recruit for Attitude
In the UK, when you go into the depart-
ment store John Lewis as a customer you
can be 99.9 percent sure of receiving a high
standard of service, no matter who you
deal with.
This, however, is an exception. The chal-
lenge for many businesses is how to con-
sistently deliver an outstanding level of
service. Many organizations have an ambi-
tion to do this, but customers still encoun-
ter indifference, arrogance, and cynicism,
which makes them become detractors, not
promoters, of the organization.
Net promoter score (NPS) is an index
ranging from 100 to 100 that measures the
willingness of customers to recommend a
companys products or services to others.
It is used as a measure for gauging the cus-
tomers overall satisfaction with a compa-
nys product or service and the customers
loyalty to the brand.
Dons Mobile Glass in California is a
small business that in 2016 attained NPS
scores of 89.8 (just above Apples score of
89). The company epitomizes best prac-
tice in customer excellence in that it hires
people who: are great with customers and
have a desire to be great at what they do.
Like renowned service businesses such as
Southwest Airlines and Ritz-Carlton, they
hire for attitude rather than skills.
Think about your current (or desired)
culture and consider which attitudes pre-
dict success or failure with customers. Make
3
27/02/17 3:15 PM