Summit Conversations: The Key to Designing Exceptional Customer Experiences

Patricia Cameron 
InfoStream Guest Author 

The quality of experience your customers have with your business has a huge impact on whether it thrives, scrapes by, or fails. If a person has a confusing, frustrating, or really bad experience when frequenting your business, there is a very good chance they will never come back.  In today’s connected world, there is also a good chance they will share their negative experience not only with the 11 people they traditionally shared complaints with, but with hundreds, thousands, or even millions of other people.  Ask United Airlines. 

So whether your business is an animal shelter, a veterinary office, a pet supply store, a pet insurance provider, or animal boarding facility, or a groomer, you can start today to design a customer experience that is clear and understandable, convenient, helpful, honest, high quality, and even fun.   The key to successfully designed customer experiences is a rare and precious resource — the resource of empathy. 

Often confused with sympathy or compassion, empathy is defined in a variety of ways, but basically, empathy is “understanding of another’s situation, feelings, and motives.”  Developing and growing organizational empathy is key to delighting customers, and delighting customers is key to a successful business. 

Every day, lack of corporate empathy creates huge numbers of dissatisfied customers. Below are a few examples of experiences designed WITHOUT empathy — that is without “understanding [your customer’s] situation, feelings, and motives.”

1.  Talking AT people (about yourself).  Many corporate brochures and websites start something like this:  “Founded in 1986, RuffnReady Pets has sold more than 2.5 million pet beds. Our factory is gleaming and modern, and our designers are educated in the latest computer-assisted design processes.”  RuffnReady (fictional) focuses on itself — its history, its sales, its  factory, its designers.  Customers are focused on their own needs (like getting a great bed for their pet) and you should be too. 

2.  Processes that put up barriers to satisfying a customer’s needs and desires.  Many people come to animal shelters hoping to adopt, and excited to help both homeless animals and the organization.  After more than an hour of paper work and what feels to them like interrogation, many go away with hearts and minds filled with confusion, hurt, and anger, rather than arms filled with a new furry friend.  Empathy would help shelters avoid this unfortunate ending.  For example, people are generally eager if not impatient to directly connect with animals, so let them.  Finding out hands-on they have no control of a dog will be more persuasive than engaging them in an argument about whether they have the experience and skill to work with a rambunctious pup. After such a lesson, being directed to animals more suited to their homes will be experienced as helpful rather than interfering or controlling.  

3.  Communication that isn’t. You get a new purchase home hoping to put it to good use, only to be frustrated by the “instructions.”  Since so many products are now made overseas, the use of diagrams rather than text has become commonplace.  Often these diagrams are rudimentary and unhelpful because they were designed on the cheap with little or no concern for the customer’s needs.  If your company sells a product with such horrible instructions, they have a bad experience not with the manufacturer but with YOU. Check for these sorts of problems and provide customers with support — “Hey, the instructions are not great.  Here is an example we assembled.”  Or, “The first few times you use this product can be tricky. Here is our card; give us a call if you have any difficulty.”  

4.  Lying.   There are many examples of companies lying.  Lying really annoys some people who then go on social media and tell everyone about it.   Ask Kashi. Here’s a personal example.   As a consumer interested in personal and environmental health, I choose not to support Genetically Modified (GMO) foods and unless specifically labelled organic, canola is all GMO.  I was looking for a canola-free, Non-GMO mayonnaise at my local grocery store. After much searching, I was excited to see Hellman’s had a mayonnaise boldly labelled “With Olive Oil.” As Yogi Berra memorably said, “You can see a lot just by looking.”  With that in mind, I looked at the label.  The first ingredient was canola oil; olive oil was way down the list.  Now the people at Hellman’s are no dummies — they know the label “With Olive Oil” will be a beacon to consumers seeking Non-GMO mayonnaise — they just lack empathy. If they had empathy, they would know that being lied to results in bad feelings and motivates people to never buy their products again. 

Having empathy, that is truly understanding the people you hope to attract and retain as customers, is a simple path to designing amazing, satisfying, high-trust, loyalty-building customer experiences.  Simple, but not easy.  You will have to talk WITH customers not TO them.  You will need to stop focusing on your needs, your interests, and your agenda.  You will have to let their agenda dictate how, when, where, and what services and products you deliver.  You will have to take the time to really look and to observe how people interact with your organization and its products.    And finally, you will have to be honest and authentic.  

The ninth annual Summit for Urban Animal Strategies is days away. Throughout the year, leaders in the industry have identified dilemmas and developed conversations to recast dilemmas into opportunities. 

The 2014 Urban Animal Forum™ on Friday, October 24th, develops industry conversations into strategies and tactics. InfoStream articles by recognized industry experts, are presented to prepare delegates for this activity.

Get the facts, have YourSAY, move the industry.

Summit Conversations: Influences of pets in creating community

Ann M. Toohey, PhD Candidate in Population and Public Health, Department of Community Health Sciences, Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary
InfoStream Guest Author 

Understanding the influences of pets in creating community in urban settings is a timely topic to study, given that over a third of North American households include a pet. In fact, the many ways that our society accommodates the pets with whom we share our homes and neighbourhoods inevitably has an impact on the lives of pet-owners and non-owners alike.  

So, enticing urban planners and policymakers to consider ways that pets and people co-exist in neighbourhoods is an important step towards achieving the best possible sense of community in our urban neighbourhoods.

If we think for a moment about the presence of pets in our own neighbourhoods, for some, it might be the small annoyances, or even dreaded conflicts, that are top-of-mind: the neighbours who let their dog loose to “go” wherever he pleases, or the roaming cat who intimidates birds at the neighbours’ feeders. Indeed, we cannot ignore the fact that many people, nearly a quarter of those surveyed in one Norwegian study, may identify cats and dogs in their neighbourhoods as causing problems. 

In matters of sharing public space, for instance, we regularly hear about “pro” dog versus “anti” dog factions, pitted against each other in heated political debates. Sometimes, dogs themselves are unwanted (for instance, when viewed as invading safe havens for urban wildlife). Other times, dog-owners are accused of failing to respect the experiences of others (including other dog owners!) who are also trying to enjoy the same public spaces. 

Cats also get a bad rap for causing problems between neighbours, although a UK study of retired women living in subsidized housing found that the non-cat-owners in the complex were far more accepting of their neighbors’ cats than expected. The finding was so pronounced that a no-cats complex reversed their policy as a result. 

Overall, these different examples illustrate how points of both conflict and cohesion are critical for urban planners and policymakers to identify and understand, in considering pets in communities.

While we often hear about pet-related conflict as deterring sense of community, there are also many ways that pets can help to make people feel good about their neighbourhoods. Dog-walking has received a good deal of attention from researchers of late, alongside concerns over increasingly sedentary lifestyles. Many studies have linked dog-walking, a popular neighbourhood-based activity, with being more physically active. Several other studies have highlighted the increased – and at times enduring – social contact that takes place with dog-walkers. 

In fact, dogs can influence physical activity for both dog-owners and non-dog owners. Ideally, the influence will be a positive one, encouraging people to be out and about in their neighbourhoods. For example, some research has suggested that by seeing people out walking their dogs, we feel safer, we have a stronger sense of community, and we may be more inclined to go out walking ourselves. 

My own research has confirmed that older adults who are frequent neighbourhood dog-walkers also have more positive feelings about their neighbourhoods. In response to these findings, urban environments merit consideration for adopting designs and amenities that encourage dog-walking for people of all ages and abilities. Proactively planning for dog-ownership in new urban developments, as is beginning to happen in the UK, is an approach that merits consideration.

We also know that neighbours often get to know one-another through their pets. As a personal example, I once had an elderly neighbour who would walk up and down the sidewalk each evening, calling in her cat for the night. Not only was the elderly woman out walking and interacting with any neighbour she encountered (Have you seen Kitty?): simultaneously, her neighbours were informally keeping an eye on her, which was important since she lived alone, aside from her beloved cat. 

Studies of neighbourhoods have found that these informal roles we play, in terms of caring about our neighbours’ well-being and being willing to assist them in times of need, are fundamental to building strong communities. And often, these roles may be facilitated by the pets in our midst, especially if supported by things like pet-friendly features (including pet-friendly housing), social spaces, and careful policy that outlines the pet-owners’ rights alongside their responsibilities, both towards their pets and towards others.

The overall message, when it comes to considering the influence of pets in creating community, is to ensure that urban planning and related policy development is thinking through the ways that pet-friendly environments can benefit pet-owners and non-owners alike. The presence of pets in our neighbourhoods and public spaces affects how people relate to each other and to their environments. A forward-thinking approach can go a long way towards enabling the positive benefits of pets in urban environments, which can also help to create community.

The ninth annual Summit for Urban Animal Strategies is days away. Throughout the year, leaders in the industry have identified dilemmas and developed conversations to recast dilemmas into opportunities. 

The 2014 Urban Animal Forum™ on Friday, October 24th, develops industry conversations into strategies and tactics. InfoStream articles by recognized industry experts, are presented to prepare delegates for this activity.

Get the facts, have YourSAY, move the industry.

Should Veterinarians Rethink the Pet Owner Service Model?

DVM360.com, an Ezine for veterinarians, published an interesting article earlier this year. Dr. Brian Toivola, a retired veterinarian, asks important questions about the veterinary service model and provides some of his own ideas about why pet owner visits may be falling.

Veterinary services are an important element of the pet owner experience. This conversation was of particular interest at Summit 2013. In the near future, InfoStream will use the YourSAY(tm) system to poll both pet owners and veterinarians about this topic. Perhaps defining and understanding the gaps between what vets currently provide and what their clients desire will be better defined from this activity.

In the meantime, the DVM360, article provides another lens from which to gain perspective.

VIEW THE ARTICLE