How We Want Our Customers to Feel

We recently gathered our whole team for a brainstorming bonanza, armed with a deck of cards designed to spark conversations about how we want our customers to feel. We wanted to figure out how to make our customers go, "Wow, that was awesome!" every time they interact with us.

The cards ignited lengthy conversations about who our customers are. In our business, the ‘customer’ may be the key stakeholders – the individual, or individuals with oversight and responsibility for a program. They can also be the beneficiaries of the program – the participants who take part in training or coaching sessions or complete an online course. Our customers can also be consultants who purchase tools from us, or distributors of our own materials. We asked ourselves: is there a difference in what we want each type of client to feel and, if there is, how different are those feelings? We found that we needed to create some clarity around this first to make sure we were all on the same page.

When we started to talk about the specific feelings that we each wanted our customers to feel, there were pockets of immediate agreement, but others that saw things very differently. This prompted some robust conversations about the purpose of our business and an unpacking of the customer lifecycle. In our different roles within the business, we interact with clients for different reasons and those clients will have different priorities, as will we. Sharing these priorities and goals helped us to understand the customer lifecycle as a whole, each other’s perspectives and ultimately helped us to realise that we all had the same aim – to give our clients the best possible experience.

After a lot of laughs and some serious thinking, we landed on six feelings we want our customers to experience. We want our customers to feel inspired, curious, understood, courageous, challenged, and supported. These are our magic words now. They’re guiding everything from the design of our new website to our approach to facilitated training sessions.

The bottom line? Taking the time to get together and express our passion for our customers and our business has been a game-changer. It's not about selling stuff; it's about building real connections. And that's something every business can benefit from.

Want to learn more about how to put your customers' feelings first? Let's chat!