Every touchpoint a customer has with your business tells them something about you. The question is what it says, and how deliberately you’ve shaped it.
Think about the last time you had a really poor experience with a business. My guess is it was a series of small things – a call that took too long to be answered, someone who clearly didn’t know the answer to a simple question, a follow-up that never came. Add them together and you walk away thinking ‘I won’t bother with them again.’
Your customers are making the same quiet judgements about parts of your business right now.
The customer journey
Every customer who deals with you goes on a journey – from the moment they first make contact, through every interaction along the way, right to the point where the job is done and they decide to come back. Most small businesses have never mapped that journey out. Some of it works brilliantly, other parts are inconsistent or clunky, and the customer experiences all of it.
This is where your Service Systems come in – the nuts and bolts of the customer experience – the simple, logical, repeatable way each stage of the journey gets delivered, every time, by everyone. Without them, what your customer gets depends on who’s available, how busy the team is, and on memory.
The four system sets
Service Systems are one of four sets of systems that hold a well-run business together.
- Your Sexy Systems drive your marketing, brand and sales.
- Your Security Systems keep the business legally and financially safe.
- Your Sticky Systems – the ones that make all the others stick – cover everything people-related, from hiring through training to feedback.
Together, these four system sets are the foundations of a business that runs the way you want it to.
A real example
I worked with a manufacturing client once whose customer journey, when we mapped it out on a roll of brown paper, stretched to twenty-five feet – twenty-five feet of touchpoints, overlapping teams, and four different people a customer had to speak to just to place an order. It had just grown, and the inconsistencies had grown with it. We stripped it back, looked for the simplest route for the customer, and redesigned it around what actually needed to happen. The journey shrank to ten feet, the team had clearer roles, and customers found it much easier to do business with them.
That’s what well-designed Service Systems deliver – they take the customer experience and turn it into something anyone can deliver to the same standard.
Your starting point
Pick one part of your customer journey – first contact, enquiry handling, how you follow up after delivery – and ask yourself honestly: would every member of the team handle this the same way? Would the customer get the same experience on a busy Friday as on a quiet Tuesday morning? If the answer is no, you’ve found your starting point.
Your customer is deciding to come back based on every day.
