Podcast

CX Education 04: How to provide a personalized and seamless customer experience with Daniel Lafrenière

Join Daniel Lafrenière and Heather Garand as they chat about the importance of personalization in customer experience. 

How to provide a personalized and seamless customer experience with Daniel Lafrenière
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About this episode

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.

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Guest Speaker

Daniel Lafrenière, Omnichannel Customer Experience Strategist

Daniel is a speaker, author, and consultant in the field of CX and UX.

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Host

Heather Garand, Sales Director E&M | Sinch

Heather Garand, is a marketing storyteller with over 15 years’ experience helping lead omni-channel growth for a number of Canada’s largest brands today. Currently Heather is the Sales Director Canada for Sinch. Sinch is a leading player in the Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) space and one of the fastest growing cloud players. Heather helps companies understand and integrate the power of CPaaS solutions for companies to have the best-in-class Customer Experience.

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Key insights

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.”

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.”

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.”

Episode highlights

The holy trinity of customer experience

“It’s a combination of social skills, emotional behavior, knowledge, know-how, and how much you know your products and services in order to provide good advice or help customers choose the proper products or services. And then the quality of the product. So it’s fairly simple — customer experience is what I feel when I interact with a brand.”

Don’t take advantage of customer surveys

“We see that in car dealerships and elsewhere. It’s horrible. The main reason we do customer surveys is to improve the customer experience. So if we ask the customer to give us a 10 out of 10, this is not a measure — it is totally wrong. So how can you improve if everybody tells you that you are perfect?”

Use chatbots to provide a more seamless customer experience

“For me, those simple chatbots, when they are well-designed and programmed, allow the customer to be autonomous and get quick answers to simple questions instead of overloading the call centers. And I don’t want to wait 45 minutes to get simple answers to my questions. So the chatbot is very interesting.”
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