Are You Doing Enough to Wow Customers? - Part 6

How One Director of Marketing and Communications Raises the Bar

Emmanuel Trenche is Director of Marketing and Communications at Rex Three. Before joining Rex Three, he worked in the banking industry where the customer’s experience was treated as a brand differentiator. When attempting to entice Fortune 500 brands to tour their South Florida facility, their marketing department mails eye-catching, personalized invitations to prospects offering a ride to the plant in a Hummer during their lunchtime. They’ve even incorporated PURL campaigns to allow visitors to select their lunch preferences prior to an important lunch meeting on-site.

“You can’t make a wow experience all the time,” Emmanuel said. “However, you can create a company culture where everyone feels a duty to create a wow experience.”

One way Rex Three does it is by focusing on customer relationship management. They invested in a CRM system as part of their strategy to touch customers frequently and in meaningful ways, and took the extra step of tying it into their MIS system. “You spend a lot of money and time to acquire a new account. Once you have a customer, it’s important to manage the relationship to maintain and grow it. To do that, you have to continuously improve the customer’s experience,” Emmanuel said.

Improving the customer’s experience is often easier than we think if we focus on every day interactions. For example, a customer calls and is in the mood to chat. When you’re having a crazy-busy day it’s easy to adopt a brisk tone of voice to encourage the customer to tell you what they want and get off the phone.

Wowing the customer could be as simple giving customers the gift of your full attention because we all love it when people are interested in what we have to say. When customers want to spend time talking, be grateful they’re talking to you instead of your biggest competitor. Recognize the way you conduct on the phone is an opportunity to build stronger relationships and different yourself.

There is no better time than today to start creating more wow experience for a customer. Find a way to surprise and delight them. Deliver more than expected sets you apart from your competitors, creates a competitive advantage and stops you from losing business. Roger Staubach put it well when he said, “There are no traffic jams along the extra mile.”