BUSINESS ADVOCATES VS. ANTAGONISTS
The customer experience is a movie of you and your business that the customer witnesses. It is a story of every interaction between your business and your customer.
So how you engineer this experience in the mind of the customer determines how the customer sees you.
It’s like wearing sunglasses. If I make you wear clear glasses, you’ll see the environment in its true colour. But if I want to change how your eyes perceive the environment, I can change the clear glasses into tinted sunglasses, and the way you perceive the environment will change depending on the colour tint of the sunglasses.
Your customer experience is the glass your customer wears, and your customer will always see your business based on your customer experience.
Still using the glass analogy. Give two people separate sunglasses with each of them having a distinct colour tint — say one has a yellow tint, and the other has a red tint. If you then place a white paper in front of them and ask them what colour they see, they’ll each see different colours. One would believe the paper is red and the other would claim the paper is yellow.
Your customer experience would either make your customer an advocate of your business or an antagonist.
If you treat your customer like royalty and make him/her feel on top of the world. The customer automatically becomes an advocate for you. People like people who like them and make them feel good. People want to talk about their status. If they don’t say it explicitly, they’ll say it coded. And positioning yourself to be the person that confirms your customers’ status by your actions, scores you extra points.
Instead of the client simply saying “Last weekend, I had my birthday portrait session”, the client says “You won’t believe what happened last weekend, I had a portrait session, and these guys, Data Studios made it the best weekend of my life. First, they picked me up in a limo, gave me drinks, I had ushers at my beck and call, they treated me like a celebrity, they even played my playlist and I don’t know how they found out the songs I love, and to kill everything, they’ll show me on TV next month on their reality show”.
Look at these scenarios carefully, in one of them the client did not have so much detail to say. She summarized it all into a sentence because she didn’t want to bore her friends with discussions about “how the camera shot me”, “what type of lighting they used on me” etc. Those things do not interest her one bit. She didn’t even name the company she had the photoshoot with.
In the other scenario, she had details, details that would make her friends know that she had “the time of her life” during the photoshoot. And she wants people to know she did. She was treated like a celebrity, and there’s no point in being treated like a celebrity if no one knows about it. So she would tell anyone that cares to listen. And notice how she also included the name of the business that made her feel that way.
That’s undiluted advocacy. You didn’t ask for it, yet they go out of their way to tell others about you.
Customer experience is the key.
My name is Akorede May-Las.
See you soon.
Follow me on Twitter and Instagram @akorede_maylas for more updates and you can always find me on akorede.disha.page.
