A Customer Experience Blog to Grow Your Profits and People

Build a workplace where employees love to work and where customers obsess to purchase from. That’s all, after that, everything else will fall into place.

Think about the world’s most admired and profitable organizations for a second. What do they have in common? Their employees love to promote the brand and their customers obsess over doing business with them.

Case study: Apple

Walk into any Apple retail location and you will notice a few things, one of which is that their team members naturally go above and beyond for their customers. I emphasize naturally because it’s a genuine action for these employees since delivering amazing service is in their DNA. At one time within our careers, I’m sure we muttered “I don’t want to go to work.” I know I did when I was a dishwasher at a restaurant in high school. Now, this is definitely anecdotal, so take it for what it’s worth, but I believe that Apple employees genuinely like coming into work. Why wouldn’t they? They are given the freedom to be themselves, dress in casual clothing and do business with people who love their brand.

How do you equate happy employees to revenue growth? Simple. When an employee is happy they are more likely to want to go above and beyond for the organization and customer. Take for example an employee who has built genuine rapport with a customer leaving an opportunity to cross or upsell which adds to top line revenue. WARNING: make the upsell and/or cross sell genuine. People don’t like to be sold to and can smell a salesperson from a mile away.

Apple customers love doing business with them. A lot of that obsession is due to outstanding products but the process in which they obtain these products also encourages loyalty. If you’ve ever bought an Apple product you may have felt that sense of excitement. When you visit an Apple store or order online it’s painless. Many organizations are guilty of making it difficult to purchase but Apple has structured their sales system to be very pain free which influences repeat purchases. Of course, these repeat purchases lead to additional top line revenue which will grow your business.

When I sit down with friends or customers one of my first questions about their business is, “what keeps you up at night?” Sometimes the response is, “We need to take our business to the next level. We need to market more.” This may be true for some organizations but in most cases the business person simply needs to evaluate their work environment and then their customer experience. After that, your marketing initiatives will be more effective because you have a strong foundation.