"It IS possible to connect emotionally with your customers and make them feel so good that they are bursting to tell their friends about you!" This is exactly how I began to introduce myself at a meeting this past Monday night.

What a blast! I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel as a customer experience expert. There were four of us on the panel: a marketing guy: a communications guy, a Web guy, and me. The evening was an interesting one. We were blasted with one question after another about all different kinds of challenges that the attendees were having. I actually love this format...no time to prepare, straight from the gut.

On the way home from the meeting as I reflected on the event, I began to wonder whether good customer service is dead. What do you think? Have your experiences in retail stores left you feeling so good that you rush to dial a friend on your cell phone to tell them? What about that last visit to your doctor's office or the hospital? Did you feel warm and fuzzy after the experience? What about that last visit to your bank? How are the banks doing at providing great customer experiences?

I don't know about you but I haven't had great experiences lately. Maybe I'm hypersensitive to service levels because of what I do for a living but it just seems to suck everywhere. Don't companies get it? Customers are leaving because they don't think the company cares about their business. In fact, the latest research from The Customer Experience Company reveals that:

    68% of customers will leave after just one bad experience with your company

So, how can you prevent customers from leaving? How can you connect emotionally and leave your customers feeling really good about your company?

Connecting emotionally with your customers starts by understanding a concept called touch points. Each time you interact (either directly or indirectly) with your customers, you can identify it as a touch point. The more you understand all of the ways that you "touch" your customers and then manage the resulting emotions, the better the customers' experiences will be. The end result: happy customers that come back again and spend more money.

A customer's feelings about your company start to form the very moment that they hear about you. Someone can find out about your company as they are searching on the Web. They can hear about you from a friend. They can find your telephone number in the phone book or maybe they received a direct mail piece one day. The first time someone hears about your company is known as the initial touch point. Some times you can manage the emotional impact of this initial touch point (because you developed the direct mail piece, for example) and some times you can't (because their friend shares a bad experience about your company, for example).

After the initial touch point, other interactions can happen and the resulting feelings can result in many different ways: a call into your customer service department, a Web site visit, a drive to one of your retail stores, and so on. Let's use a corporation with retail stores as an example. We'll examine an average retail store visit and compare it with an exceptional retail store visit. As you read the example below, I encourage you to think about how to apply these concepts at your company. Maybe you don't sell the same products as I use in the example, but you sell something.

Let's set the scene first. It's very cold outside, say -25 degrees Celsius or -5 degrees Fahrenheit. It's snowing like crazy. You work inside the retail store at the counter. As you finish up with one customer, you notice that another customer is pulling into the parking lot.

The average customer experience
You hand your current customer a bag with their purchases in it and he walks out the door. Your next customer walks in and you say "Hi. Can I help you?" The customer asks for information on a specific product. You answer the questions to the client's satisfaction and then sell the product to him. The customer leaves your store to go on with his day.

The exceptional customer experience
As you bid farewell and wish your current customer good wishes for the day, you jot down the licence plate number of the car that your next customer is driving. After entering the plate number into your computer, the customer's information displays on your screen. Just at that moment, your next customer walks in the door. You greet the customer using a warm tone, "Good morning, Mr. Boyd! Crazy weather eh? Would you like a nice hot cup of coffee to warm you up?" As the customer is pouring and then preparing his cup of coffee, you ask "The last time you were in you purchased a welding machine from us. How is it working out?" You chit chat with the customer for a couple of moments to find out not only how the machine is working out but you use this opportunity to learn about other equipment or supplies the customer needs. The visit goes on from here with you helping the customer with his purchases and wishing him a great day.

Lessons learned from the exceptional customer experience
How much extra time do you think the exceptional customer experience took? The answer may surprise you...about 31/2 minutes. In those 31/2 minutes, though, you showed the customer that you actually cared about him by offering a much-needed coffee. Then, you took the time to ask how his last purchases were working out for him. The cost to the company might be 25 cents for the coffee and then an extra $1 or $2 for the employee's time. What do you think the long-term affects of this experience are going to be for your business though? HUGE! GIGANTIC! BIG TIME PROFIT!

At the end of the day, it really doesn't take much to show customers you care and most of the time it doesn't even have to cost the company any money. You can show customers that you care, connect with them, and leave them feeling good about you without a lot of effort. Go ahead. Try it!

Do you agree or disagree? Let me know. Send me an email and share your thoughts.

Ruth-Anne Boyd is the Business Development Director at The Customer Experience Company. She is an award-winning writer, consultant, speaker and trainer with over 15 years experience in plain language communications and workflow simplification. Ruth-Anne has won 11 awards for her communication material. She is a frequently invited speaker, and a member of PLAIN (the Plain Language Association International), Canadian Women in Communications (CWC) and DigitalEve.