Little Things Count

When interacting with customers, it’s often the little things that leave a lasting impression on them.

Here’s my personal example.

Having travelled very extensively on business over many years, one tiny experience which had a huge impact on me has always stuck in my mind.

After a lengthy flight from London to Singapore I checked into, somewhat wearily, a very large international hotel. I was just one of hundreds of guests arriving there that day. But when I got to my room, I unexpectedly felt I wasn’t just another number.

It was when I looked at the stationery on the desk, consisting of headed notepaper, envelopes, and postcards.  My name was embossed on them in gold!

This was in the days when digital printing wasn’t around.  So someone had gone to the trouble of commissioning a local printer to prepare it. That personal touch made me feel immediately at home and, in a subconscious knock-on way, that all the hotel staff really cared about me. I started to take more notice of all the little things they did to make my guest experience more comfortable and pleasurable.

That was the way staff made me feel about the brand – internally.

Turning to ways that brands overall are marketed externally, compared with the days when we were bombarded with messages via high impact media such as broadcast TV, we are now surrounded by lots of messages across multiple digital channels. Through them all those ‘little things’ add up to a cumulative impact.

But, to use a favourite expression from an ex-client of mine ‘The devil is always in the detail’.

When pushing out lots of little messages through social media, savvy marketeers know that control of content can rapidly become lost. Which is why more and more brands have now withdrawn from X, for instance. Uploads on this platform can quickly become toxic.

Back to my experience from that little ‘defining gesture’ in Singapore.

All employees, when interacting with customers, either directly or indirectly, must be made aware that little things always count.

This isn’t just down to these employees having the right CX training. Sure, that will cover important topics on responsiveness, selling skills, empathy and complaint resolution. But all too often the outputs from these involve a prescriptive set of standards.

It’s much more effective to give employees freedom within the framework of these standards to apply their own styles when dealing with customers. With call centres, you can always detect when a standard script is just being followed. But the positive CX experiences we remember are the ones where, just in a little way, some rapport has been established. My recent example of this has been when dealing with AO. They are beyond helpful compared with their direct competitors.

And sticking with call centres, Bob Ayling, when he was CEO of British Airways, faced multiple challenges. But there was a stand-out quote he made when referring to their call centre – ‘One lousy experience on the phone can destroy millions of pounds worth of advertising investment’.

That ‘lousy experience’ may be over something little. But getting those little things right can often have the biggest positive consequences – in customers’ eyes.