Ask someone about a bad customer experience and they will not usually start with what went wrong. They will start with how it made them feel. Ignored, rushed, talked down to, treated like an inconvenience or just a number.
That’s worth paying attention to, because it means the thing that decides whether a customer comes back is not the transaction, it’s the feeling attached to it.
At Business Life Support we assess every touchpoint against six of them. We call them the 6 Feels, they are our Customer Experience Principles and each one is written as a question from the customer’s perspective, not yours.
Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and ask yourself for each of the below. “Do I…”
1. Feel Noticed
Did anyone acknowledge that I was here?
This is the cheapest one to get right and the most commonly missed. A customer standing at a counter while two staff finish a conversation has already formed an opinion, and it took four seconds. Being noticed is not the same as being served immediately. A look up and a “won’t be a moment” buys you time. Silence does not.
2. Feel Heard
Did they actually listen, or were they waiting for their turn to talk?
You can tell the difference instantly as a customer, and yours definitely would too. Being heard means the answer they get matches the question they asked. If someone explains their situation and gets a scripted response back, they know they were not listened to, no matter how polite the script was.
3. Feel Confident
Do I trust this business to do what it says it will?
Confidence is built through small consistencies. The quote arrives when they said it would, the price matches what was discussed, the person who answers the phone knows what the person on email promised. Every inconsistency, however minor, chips away at it.
4. Feel Valued
Did I matter, or was I just today’s transaction?
A customer can be processed perfectly and still leave feeling like nobody was particularly pleased they came in. The gap between those two is small and usually the reason one of them comes back.
5. Feel Respected
Was my time, my money and my situation treated properly?
Respect shows up in queue management, in how a price rise is explained, in whether a customer has to repeat their story to three different people. It also shows up in accessibility. An experience that only works for able, confident, tech-comfortable customers is disrespectful to everyone else, even when nobody intended it.
6. Feel Reassured
Do I know what happens next, and can I trust that it will?
Reassurance is certainty, and most of it is needed while a customer is waiting rather than after something has gone wrong. Do they know what happens next, when, and who to contact if they need to. When it fails, the customer is left filling in the gaps themselves, and people rarely fill them in optimistically.
How to use these
Do not try to audit the whole business at once. Pick one touchpoint, the phone, the front counter, your enquiry form, and run it against all six questions honestly. Then if you can ask someone who doesn’t work for you to do the same thing, and compare their answers to yours. The difference between those two sets of answers is where your work is.
If you find you have gaps that you weren’t expecting, we have built training programs to help you with your Customer Experience. Our Customer Service Essentials course works through all the 6 Customer Experience Principles with you and your team, onsite, using your business rather than generic examples, so they leave knowing what each one looks like in their own words.
For managers and owners setting the standard rather than delivering it, the CX Workshop goes further, and the Service Standards Program puts the whole thing in writing so it holds after everyone has gone back to work.
The ‘Six Feels‘ are easy to agree with. Getting a team to answer all of them the same way, every time, is the actual work.