CX Education 04: How to provide a personalized and seamless customer experience with Daniel Lafrenière
Right now, a remarkable customer experience is everything. If you want to stand out from the competition, you have to make customers feel valued.
But in today's over-crowded market, you need to go beyond B2B and B2C — you have to become B2Me or, in other words, business to me.
In this episode of the CX Education podcast, host Heather Garand welcomes Daniel Lafrenière, an Omnichannel Customer Experience Strategist. They chat about human-to-human relationships with customers, personalization, how to use chatbots to create good experiences, and why Apple is the perfect example of an enjoyable customer experience.
Guest speaker
Daniel Lafrenière
Host
Heather Garand
Key insights
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Customer experience is about human-to-human relationships
Customer experience should be about interpersonal relationships, not transactional relationships. Daniel explains, "We talk a lot about customer experience or B2C and B2B — business-to-consumer and business-to-business. But in reality, it's more H2H or human-to-human. Even if I work for a company, it's a human talking to another human who is the customer. So it's more H2H or a human-to-human relationship. And if you create a relationship, it's going to be perfect. That's the grail; that's what we're looking for as a business — to create a relationship as opposed to a transaction. If you're a mere transaction, you're a commodity."
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Personalize the customer experience
Businesses need to provide a seamless customer experience, and it should be personalized. Customers want to feel valued. Otherwise, they’ll choose another brand. Daniel says, "We call this at the time B2Me or business-to-me. We don't want B2B or B2C; we want B-to-me. Please know me, you know me — I've been doing business with you for years. The same thing as with a couple — ‘You know how I take my coffee in the morning? You've been living with me for years now. How come you don't remember?’ It would be very strange."
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Walk a mile in the customers' shoes
It all boils down to this: treat customers the way you’d like to be treated. Daniel says, "Put yourself into your customers’ shoes too. As simple as that. Treat your customer the way you'd like to be treated. As simple as that. There's a beautiful book on customer experience — it has been written by Jeanne Bliss — 'Would you do that to your mother?' I really liked this title. I wish I'd thought of it. So think about that. Would you do that to your mother? Would you like to be treated that way if you come into a store or call a call center or service department? So just do the right thing. It's as simple as that."