Customer service matters. Does it matter to you?

“Customer service is reactive — it’s what happens when something goes wrong. Customer experience is proactive — it’s every interaction, every touchpoint, every moment between a brand and a customer that shapes their perception and their loyalty.”

Everyone complains about customer service – but entrepreneurs and CEOs rarely focus on it. As Jeannie Walters, author of Experience Is Everything: Making Every Moment Count in the Age of Customer Expectations, points out in a recent article, “many leaders think customer experience is someone else’s job.”

In “The leadership blind spot that’s quietly killing revenue,” Walters notes that companies prioritizing proactive customer experience achieve 41% faster revenue growth and 51% better customer retention. “Those aren’t customer service metrics,” she writes. “They’re business outcomes, directly tied to leadership decisions at the top.”

Walters says business leaders who consistently drive strong customer experiences share three behaviours:

1. They define what success looks like for the customer, not just the organization. “When both sets of goals are visible, decisions vastly improve.”
2. They make the customer’s voice a leadership-level input. Customer feedback rarely reaches the leadership table. “Leaders who build direct lines to customer insight make faster, more informed decisions.”
3. They treat consistency as a competitive advantage. “Customers form their perceptions from patterns, not individual moments. Leaders who establish clear standards for every touchpoint create the conditions for trust to accumulate over time.”

Read more at “The leadership blind spot that’s quietly killing revenue.”

Read more about Jeannie Walters’ work.