The Ultimate Customer Experience: 5 Steps Everyone Must Know to Excite Your Customers, Engage Your Colleagues, and Enjoy Your Work

By Scott McKain

In The Ultimate Customer Experience, Scott McKain, award-winning speaker and author, reveals the five steps for connecting with customers in today’s changing workplace.

When was the last time you were a customer and received the Ultimate Customer Experience? Can you even remember?

I’ve received great service from companies that I know didn’t give a damn about my business. You have, too, I’ll wager. How did that happen? Here is one possible answer: an individual cared about customers and overcame the obvious deficiencies in their organization’s inferior approach and lack of values.

There are five fundamental aspects to create the Ultimate Customer Experience for the clients and prospects you deal with every single day. Even during this post-pandemic period as we come to grips with—and try to learn how—business has been changed forever, the level at which we connect with customers has never been more important.

The five steps to creating an Ultimate Customer Experience are:

1. Don’t Make It Right . . . GET It Right!

2. Make a Great Impression

3. Serve with Empathy

4. Connect with Emotion

5. Take Personal Responsibility

If your company gave you this book, it means they are committed to improving the experiences you create for customers and colleagues. No organization invests in an activity—or asks their employees to invest in an activity—in which they had little interest. Your company believes that you are its most important asset!

If you are investing your own resources reading this book, that means you’re taking the most important step any of us can ever take—a step toward personal growth. You wouldn’t read this book if all you want to do is tread water and remain the same.

You must take personal responsibility for how you engage your customers—let me show you how.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Forefront Books
• Release date: Jun 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781637632130

Scott McKain

Scott McKain’s experiences have been diverse and remarkable. From playing the villain in a Werner Herzog film that esteemed film critic Roger Ebert named as one of the fifty great movies in the history of the cinema, to being inducted into the Professional Speakers Hall of Fame; from having been chosen (along with Zig Ziglar, Dale Carnegie, and Seth Godin) as one of thirty members of the Sales and Marketing Hall of Fame, to a decade as a globally syndicated television commentator on the entertainment scene, it’s not a stretch to say Scott McKain’s life has been distinctive. He has spoken on platforms in all fifty US states and forty countries. His audience members have ranged from the president on the White House lawn to farmers in a small hut with a dirt floor in Brazil. His clients include the icons of global business: SAP, Cisco, Apple, Porsche, Fairmont, CDW, Canyon Ranch, BMW, and many more. He is the founder of the Distinction Institute and is one of the most requested and iconic professional speakers in the world. He and his wife, Tammy, live in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Book preview

The Ultimate Customer Experience: 5 Steps Everyone Must Know to Excite Your Customers, Engage Your Colleagues, and Enjoy Your Work, by Scott McKain. Author of Iconic, Create Distinction, What Customers Really Want, and All Business is Still Show Business!. Designed for Today’s Changing WorkforceThe Ultimate Customer Experience: 5 Steps Everyone Must Know to Excite Your Customers, Engage Your Colleagues, and Enjoy Your Work, by Scott McKain. Forefront Books. Designed for Today’s Changing Workforce

DEDICATION

The purpose of this book is to assist you in delivering Ultimate Customer Experiences to your customers and colleagues!

All of us are obviously dealing with the changing workplace and challenging workforce precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This means you may be wondering: Where should our focus be when the economy is volatile and the marketplace unsettled?

The research I’ve reviewed — combined with my decades of business experience — moves me to conclude that it has never been more important to create compelling engagement with your customers than it is right now!

That’s why I dedicate this book to you. It’s for anyone who strives to create better experiences for customers and colleagues.

After you have finished this book, check out our website at UltimateCustomerExperience.com

! There you will find additional cutting-edge resources. There are downloadable e-books, links to podcasts on the customer experience, and more. These are all to assist you in your efforts.

And please know we stand ready to assist you. We offer everything from in-depth, ongoing educational programs delivered online and in person to keynote speeches and content-rich virtual seminars. We have myriad formats ready to customize specifically for your organization’s unique needs to assist you in delivering Ultimate Customer Experiences® in this rapidly changing marketplace!

Contact:

Shelley Erwin

Chief Operating Officer

Distinction Institute, LLC

5371 San Florentine Avenue

Las Vegas, NV 89141

800-838-6980

ScottMcKain.com

The purpose of any business is to profitably create experiences that are so compelling to customers that their loyalty becomes assured.

—from All Business Is Show Business

INTRODUCTION

WHAT IS AN ULTIMATE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE?

THE ULTIMATE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

When was the last time you were a customer and received an Ultimate Customer Experience?

Take a moment to write down what it was, specifically, regarding the way you interacted with a customer representative, clerk, salesperson, or member of a support team who made your situation stand out as being an Ultimate Customer Experience. Perhaps it was a terrific product that made your heart sing, a service that made you feel like you were a highly valued client, a specific compliment from a sales associate, a movie that made you laugh or cry—or all of these! Maybe it was someplace where you’ve done business that reached out simply to check in and ask how things were going.

Seriously. Stop right now and write it down.

We will refer to this experience later in the chapter.

WHAT IS A CUSTOMER?

Before we define the Ultimate Customer Experience, let’s first expand our vision of what a customer is.

You likely think of customers and consider only those outside your organization who purchase the products and services you offer. Or you may be thinking, What value does this book offer me if I don’t deal directly with customers?

The definition of a customer according to Dictionary.com

is a person who purchases goods or services from another; buyer; patron; a person one has to deal with.¹

Since people you have to deal with include the colleagues with whom you work, let’s think of them as internal customers. The people who do not work for your organization and spend money for the products and services of your company are external customers. Both desire an ultimate experience!

The idea of an internal customer is an important concept. Popularized in the 1950s by Romanian-born management consultant Dr. Joseph Juran, it still has great application today. The Elsmar Cove Forum describes an internal customer as anyone within an organization who at any time is dependent on anyone else within the organization.²

This is important. It means if your boss fails to get you the information or training you need to do your job, then she has failed you—the internal customer! Internal customers consist of everyone up and down within the organization who are impacted if you fail to do your job.

So who are your internal customers and to whom are you an internal customer? To find out, do the following: First, develop categories by listing all the internal customers you serve and their individual requirements and needs. Next, list those departments and individuals within your organization who serve you—the places where you are the internal customer. Just as with external customers, internal customers seek, desire, and deserve an Ultimate Customer Experience!

In this book, when you see the term customer, remember that the principles we are discussing can be applied to either or both the internal and external people you may have to consider.

YOUR ULTIMATE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Let’s examine the Ultimate Customer Experience that you wrote down at the beginning of this chapter. I’d like to make two critical points based on your experience.

1) THE EXPERIENCE WAS OBVIOUSLY POWERFUL.

I would wager that you’ve been a customer in literally thousands of situations at a wide variety of businesses. From the store where you buy groceries to the shop where you get your car serviced, from the hotel where you stayed on vacation to the restaurant where you had dinner last weekend, your experience as a customer is both deep (going repeatedly to the same places) and wide (doing business at a large number of establishments). In other words, when it comes to being a customer, you are an expert!

Notice as well, that out of the literally thousands of occurrences you have had as a customer, the ones that first came to mind and the one you selected to write down were experiences that were obviously more powerful and compelling than the rest. It’s why you thought of them as potential answers to the question!

It is logical to assume that since you are an expert as a customer, you can determine what an Ultimate Customer Experience is for you! And since you can determine this, you might even know what it takes to create Ultimate Customer Experiences for others.

Ultimate Customer Experiences create a powerful impact upon their recipients! That’s why we will leverage the expertise that you have as a customer to assist you in creating the Ultimate Customer Experience for your customers—both internal and external!

2) EVERY CUSTOMER SHOULD RECEIVE THAT SAME LEVEL OF EXPERIENCE.

Why would any customer choose to receive less than you did in your Ultimate Customer Experience? In every situation, wouldn’t you like to be treated in the same superior manner you’ve just recalled? Of course! We all would! So if you would like to have this same ultimate experience when you are the customer, why wouldn’t you want to create the very same amazing connection with your own customers?

Here’s something I’ve learned from over two decades of studying the importance of the customer experience: We fail to create the very experiences we desire because, when we go to work, we think like an employee, not like a customer! We now have virtual meetings about everything under the sun when it comes to being more productive or finding ways to perform our tasks more efficiently. Prior to the pandemic, there were abundant conferences that encouraged professionals to market more intensely and sell more powerfully. However, even after all we’ve been through, we still aren’t spending nearly enough time talking about how we can serve our colleagues in a more compelling manner or expand a learning program to educate our team on how to attain a higher level of customer retention. Then we wonder why customers aren’t more loyal and more engaged with us!

Both my research and my professional experience have taught me that individuals and organizations willing to focus on creating Ultimate Customer Experiences will discover that external customers come back to spend more, more often—even when the marketplace is in a volatile period. And just as important, you and your colleagues will find your work more enjoyable and productive!

THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK… AND YOUR CHOICE TO READ IT

The reason I chose to write this book is because I wanted to share the five fundamental aspects of creating Ultimate Customer Experiences for the clients and prospects you deal with every single day. During this volatile period, as we come to grips with—and try to learn—how business has been changed forever, the level at which we connect with customers has never been more important.

If your company gave you this book, it means they are committed to improving the experiences you create for customers and colleagues. No organization would invest in an activity—or ask their employees to invest in an activity—in which they had little interest! Just as you wouldn’t buy season