What the mouse can teach us about customer service.
By Pete Mercer
Take a moment to think about your favorite brands – whether it’s Apple, Chick-fil-a, Netflix, or Toyota, there’s a reason why each of these brands keep people engaged with their products. While each of those companies produces top-of-the-line products, their competitors by and large offer similar things across the board. What is it that makes a company stick out from the competition, especially when the offerings are practically the same?
At the end of the day, it comes down to the customer experience. The most important way for brands to differentiate themselves in an oversaturated market comes down to how they make their customers feel.
Repertoire Magazine recently spoke to Dennis Snow, a customer service expert, about what the customer experience should look like in 2024, the role that employee engagement plays in the overall customer experience, and how Disney has helped to shape Snow’s approach to the topic of customer experience.
Starting out at Disney
Very few companies have a customer experience impact like Disney. From media and entertainment to theme parks, Disney is a household name in a way that no other company can replicate or compete with. Each touchpoint is designed to cater to the specific interests of its customers, creating a truly immersive customer experience whether you’re walking into one of the parks at Disney World or using Disney+ from the comfort of your own home.
Snow’s career started at Disney World where he worked as a ride operator in the parks. He spent 20 years at Disney, serving in various roles and capacities, until he decided to set out on his own and help other organizations bolster their customer experience approach.
He said, “When it comes to the experience, it’s the entire journey that a customer goes through from start to finish, of which the product is certainly a part of that. But from the initial point of contact, the interactions, any negotiations that might be involved, the delivery – that’s all part of the product today.”
Because so many products serve the same function, it can be dangerous to rely on the product to do the heavy lifting for your customer touchpoints. You have to dig deeper to provide an experience that will stick.
“That’s one of the things that we really reinforced at Disney – we’re not selling rides because rides are commodities,” Snow said. “My guess is wherever you are, there’s probably an amusement park where you can get rides. Sure, Guardians of Galaxy is an amazing ride, but it costs half a billion dollars to build. They can’t compete just on that. It’s all the touch points throughout that experience. That’s what drives loyalty and connection.”
How company culture team impacts the customer experience
The culture of your organization plays a huge role in the customer experience, and the leadership team acts as the thermostat for the organization. There’s a trickle-down effect that often happens in companies, wherein the attitude and tone set by the leadership will trickle down to the rest of the departments and teams within the company.
This has a direct impact on the customer experience. Snow said, “You can go into any organization, even hospitals, and you can tell immediately when the culture is focused on the quality of the experience. You can also immediately tell when it isn’t.”
For Snow, the first step is to design what the customer experience is supposed to be – how it’s supposed to look, what processes are involved, and what it takes to make things right when it goes wrong. Early on, you need to establish a foundation for how your organization is going to treat its customers and how it’s going to shape the customer experience.
With that in mind, it’s important to ask yourself a series of questions like: Are you hiring people that are wired to deliver that kind of experience? Is the importance of the customer experience built into the onboarding process?
Additionally, you should figure out how your company is different from all your competitors and how your team can express that. All too often, organizations focus on the wrong things to build an ultimately ineffective approach. “I think where a lot of organizations get it wrong, they think it’s about just the product and the price of the product. But products are mostly commodities. Regardless of what the product is, people have a ton of choices out there.”
Building an experience that matters
In “Field of Dreams,” Kevin Costner’s Ray Kinsella hears a disembodied voice giving him a vague, somewhat ominous message – “If you build it, they will come.” Following those instructions, he builds a baseball field in his cornfield that will eventually bring hundreds of people to watch a baseball game.
This will also work with your customer base – if you build a customer experience that matters, the customers will come. Here are three key components to building an experience that Snow learned from working at Disney:
1. Use the lens of the customer – Put yourself in the shoes of the customer to see exactly what your customer experience looks like from the other side. Snow said, “Try to anticipate the issues, anticipate their needs and wants, and make it as seamless as possible. Many organizations design things for their own convenience, through their own lens.”
2. Every detail speaks – Every detail along the customer journey speaks to the overall experience, from the purchasing process to the tone of voice that the customer service uses on the phone. “As an example from my Disney days, there would be a significant disconnect from this place of great beauty if the parks were littered with trash,” Snow said.
3. Little moments of wow – While it might seem cliché, little moments of wow really do matter. “Those little wow moments add up,” Snow said. “Over the course of someone’s stay at Disney, there are multiple touchpoints. I believe those things can be applied to any organization – for example, the follow-up calls from a sales rep to check in and make sure everything is working the way it’s supposed to.”