My mantra, expressed decades before the term “customer experience” was coined, sounded like this:

“If we provide our customers with a level of service that exceeds their wildest
expectations, we will never lose one of those customers to a competitor’s price.”

That was true then, remains so today, and will be true as far in the future as I can predict. This mind-set was seeded by my earliest mentor, the late Paul Goodman. “NEVER sell by price,” he would admonish me.

After completing customer surveys, I would ask our teams how they would score our performance provided for a particular customer. In most cases I found we had a loftier perception than our customer’s, my mantra notwithstanding. Don’t be afraid to get your customers’ perspective. Take a walk in their shoes and embrace the feedback with passion. Turning your customers into annuities takes being a change agent. Your customers will notice!