Exceptional customer experiences must be first understood in terms of the desired results of a customer/employee interaction (how customers feel as a result of the experience). The following are three outcomes each customer service experience should enhance:

Action steps to ensure your customer service experiences are exceptional:

1. Gather data: Find out from your customers to what degree that they experience these outcomes as a result of their experience with your employees. Find out what your employees do (and don’t do) that interferes with your customer’s intent to repeat and recommend.
2. Define high priority expectations: Use this data to better define what YOUR employees need to do at your customer/employee moments of truth. Data is essential because every organization is different and what value you are promising is not the same as even your competitors. For example, what drives intent to repeat and recommend differs between Target and Wal-mart customers, even though they are in the same industry. Find out what matters most to your customers.
3. Translate high priority expectations into clear employee performance expectations. Use the outcomes to drive decisions on how your employees need to behave. Create meaningful performance objectives tied into related measures that your leaders can use to help guide and coach your employees.

I have a long-held belief that brand strength directly correlates with customer satisfaction. A customer has to be consistently satisfied in order to move along the continuum towards becoming a brand lover (one that uses your products/services time and time again) to brand loyalists (exclusively uses only your brand) to ultimately a brand evangelist (actively recommends you to others.) See visual below.

What I appreciate about the book “The Ultimate Question 2.0 (Revised and Expanded Edition): How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World” is that is provides the following:

• Clear data that not only proves my belief that satisfaction leads to brand evangelism but also the connection between brand evangelism (my words) to sustainable profits.
• Distinction between good profits and bad (bad profits are the earnings that do not endure vs. good profits earned by the creation of value).
• The reality is that there are no short cuts to good profits. No silver bullets.
• The ultimate question that all customers should be asked: “how likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?”
• An approach for measuring success against this question and what actions to take that include getting your organization and employees aligned.

I believe that the principles that relate to customer service can be applied to improving employee engagement. For example, if you want to create employees who invest their discretionary effort with you (like we want our customers to invest their discretionary income with us), then you need to focus on trust. You can measure trust in that same simple question: “how likely is it that you would recommend working for this company to a friend or colleague.”

Trust is one of those often agreed principles that can be more theoretical and abstract to understand, measure and improve. This book provides an excellent means for quantifying what may on the surface appear to be unquantifiable. It takes out the mystery and replaces it with clear actions.

For more information on this book, check out: http://www.netpromotersystem.com/book/index.aspx