Pictured above left to right: Travis Veit (Founder & CCO), Caleb Gilbertson (Founder & CEO), & Zach Sussman (Partner & CMO)
This article is a snippet from our recent article in Authority Magazine, part of Medium.com – Read the full article here
There’s many things that go into creating a “culture of wow”
I’ll provide some insights on the most critical components, but the most important thing is to think of everything you do as a business in terms of customer experience as opposed to thinking of customer experience as its own initiative or focus area for the business. Customer experience is everything.
Start with your employees.
We consider our employees to be our most important customers, so we start with creating a wow experience for our employees. That includes benefits like: unlimited PTO, flexible schedule and the option to work from home, fully paid health insurance, a fully stocked breakroom with whatever snacks and beverages they want, fun company outings that they get to pick, a dog friendly office, and competitive compensation.
Incentivize a wow experience.
We’ve built the prioritization of the customer experience right into our employee compensation model. While we value metrics like revenue and margin, we value customer experience more because we believe customer experience to be the true driver of those other metrics. Wow your customers and the rest will follow. To make sure our employees are motivated to that specific purpose, we’ve built in a bonus structure around customer service and special “wow” bonuses. I’ll address the importance of customer feedback next, since that’s how we identify and track this part of their compensation, but the “wow” bonus is based on our customers mentioning specific instances of excellent customer service via email, social media, or survey response. Our employees know if they go above and beyond to deliver excellent customer service, they will receive a tangible financial reward for making it happen.
Ask your customers for feedback.
We can put together all the programs, policies, and training in place, but then we need to rely on our customers to tell us if we’re meeting and exceeding their expectations. We’ve built a strong customer survey program into our system, ensuring that upon the completion of every project our customers receive a quick survey to tell us how we did. These survey results are analyzed on a monthly basis to see where we’re doing well and where we need to focus on improving. This feedback is shared with every member of our organization so that they have visibility to what our customers are saying about us. It’s further reinforcement of how important the customer experience is to us as a company.
Act on the customer’s feedback.
This is a step many companies skip, but it’s an extremely important part of the process, and skipping it can negate all of the effort you’ve put into your customer experience prior to this step. When you ask someone for feedback, it’s critical to respond to what they tell you. We’ve all been there before when we’ve responded to a customer survey asking about our experience and provided negative feedback and then never heard from the company again. Why did you ask us for our feedback if you weren’t going to do anything about it? It’s frustrating and can make a bad situation worse. We ask for feedback because we care deeply what our customers have to say. We respond directly to that feedback, addressing any issues or specific concerns they have, and then we take action to address the issues.
Each one of these steps is critical to building a “culture of wow” and we’ve found that to be incredibly impactful in our growth.