Do your customers serve you or do you serve your customers? It seems like an easy answer but does your company’s culture and actions “walk-the-talk”?
At Crossroads chat we have one word that encapsulates our worldview: WOW. Daily we ask ourselves “are we delivering a WOW experience better than anyone else?” It is this focus on the customer and their satisfaction that not only drives every chat, but also our every decision for changing our business. Whether it’s a new software feature or a new way of handling a chat scenario, the first question asked is “how does this improve WOW?”
One way this recently went down (slang for ‘occurred’) at Crossroads was a discussion about how to schedule service appointments on our dealership websites. The debate was whether or not to just give the link to the service appointment form to the customer or to take their information down and send it to the service department as an email. The easy-button for us would be to say “Great! Here is a link to our service form to schedule your own appointment.” We actually did this for a while, but when we asked ourselves “How do we improve WOW?” the conversation took a hard right turn. We realized that by asking the customer to fill out their own form we weren’t serving them. We just simply gave them more work. In many cases it was the difficulty of the service form that caused them to chat with us in the first place!
So after our discussion we made the change to ask the customer what they preferred. “Great! Would you like us to schedule a time for you or would you like to use our service appointment form?” Just this simple change has made a world of difference in the WOW experience at Crossroads Chat. Which is to say that it’s made a huge difference in the conversion and retention of business for our clients as well.
This conversation prompted us to seek out the best service scheduling tool for automotive dealers. After a number of meetings and vetting cycles we have formed our first vendor partnership with AdWorkz in Seattle, Washington. Adworkz provides us the best-in-class automotive service scheduling tool with customized features to provide a turn-key experience for our chat clients. We can now also provide several other service-based tools we would have never thought of offering. Our focus on a superior customer experience has netted us a new relationship with another customer-centric business and has added a synergy to our business model we would have never had experienced if we hadn't asked ourselves, "are we offering a WOW experience better than anyone else?"
I would like to know what your business does to enhance WOW. And if you can’t think of some, let me know what you think your obstacles are to WOW. Either way let's help change the world by delivering WOW!
