If you value your customers and the long-term survival of your brand and business then I have an idea for you: mystery shop your own customer experience and make an honest, unbiased assessment of how well you’re doing.

Chances are you’ll discover a gap between the experience you aspire to deliver, and your customers’ reality.

For example, if your organisation has a call centre, try calling it.

You’ll be greeted with something like this:

Welcome to XYZ. We are experiencing unusually high caller demand right now. Please hold for the next available customer service representative.

Cue, awful music.

Thank you for continuing to hold. Your business is important to us. You have progressed in the queue and your call will now be answered in approximately … [117*] minutes.

Cue, more awful music.

If you’re patient, you’ll wait for the call to be picked up.  Or you’ll hang up, frustrated, with no resolution to the issue you were calling about in the first place.

Your customer’s experience doesn’t just start when he or she resorts to contacting your call centre, though. It begins way before, deep inside your organisation, at the leadership table where strategy and processes are defined, and culture is shaped. These are what produce the overall experience.

I was reminded of this recently when a well-known credit card company harassed my parents for $5.41, an ‘outstanding balance’ of accrued interest that had arisen from the company’s own error.

Frustrated that the customer service rep wouldn’t listen and was unwilling to verify details of previous interactions, my mother gave up and called me in a fairly distressed state.

I contacted the company’s head office in New Zealand. They couldn’t help. I was transferred to a call centre in Australia, bounced two more times (each time having to repeat the reason for my call), and finally spoke to someone who agreed to help resolve the matter.

Fairly wound up myself by now, I wondered out loud why the service rep didn’t simply take the customer at their word and waive the sum in dispute. Surely that was the right decision to make under the circumstances? After all, the account had been closed a month earlier. Instead, they chose to argue with a customer to the point of tears. Over $5.41.

This represented what Swedish businessman and former CEO of Scandinavia Airline Systems (SAS) Jan Carlzon called a ‘moment of truth’. Credited with turning the airline around at a time when it was losing money and had a poor service reputation, Carlzon said that every time a customer interacts with any aspect of a business, no matter how remote, they have an opportunity to form an impression. Good or bad.

It’s the collective response to these micro-encounters, some as brief as 15 seconds, that creates your customers’ overall experience, and that can ultimately lead a business to succeed or fail.

That’s a powerful idea. How many potential moments of truth are there in your organisation in a typical day? Is your website up to scratch? Can people find what they’re looking for? How are calls answered? What are the wait times? Are the facilities in your premises clean? Do your employees get back to people when they say they will? Are your external communications free of typos? Do your invoices make sense?

In marketing parlance, these are all examples of brand touch points. Places where your customers experience your brand in action. Whether human, digital or static in nature, they are what help create the impressions that are formed in moments of truth.

It isn’t just about individual touch points, though. An employee could provide exemplary service in one interaction, but the overall experience could still disappoint for one reason or another.

As McKinsey point out in The CEO Guide to Customer Experience, companies wishing to improve customer experience need to shift their thinking to end-to-end experiences. They recommend quantifying what matters most to customers (‘the critical customer journeys’) and focusing on improving the steps that make up those journeys.

Get most of these right most of the time, and you’ll likely see corresponding improvements in customer satisfaction, loyalty and sales.

Which brings me back to the idea I opened with – mystery shop your own customer experience, or better still, put a cross-functional team together and empower them to.

I guarantee that when you step into the shoes of your customers you’ll experience a few moments of truth of your own. And only then will you know what it’s going to take to improve your customers’ overall experience.

*True story!!