Preparing For The Worst In Customer Experience | Micro & Macro Moments

Unexpected events can undercut everything you've done to improve your customer experience. But just because they're unexpected doesn't mean you can't prepare at all.

And, with good enough anticipation and scenario planning, you can even caplitalize on disruptive opportunities. In this week's episode of the #CX Patterns podcast, I reflect on what we should do to prepare for unforeseen events.

Will you be caught off guard by disruption, or ready to take advantage?

Unexpected Experiences Make Memories - But Usually For The Wrong Reasons

So many memorable experiences in our lives start with something unexpected happening. A chance encounter with an old friend, or the right new person that turns into something. Bad weather changing plans, last-minute sickness changing plans.

The thing is, if you don't prepare for the reality that unanticipated things will occur, you will be caught off guard by them.

The first line of defense is to make sure your organization is prepared for bad weather, system outages, staffing shortages, or price wars from competitors. Things that will happen, but that you don't know exactly when they will happen.

The second line of defense is to prepare for new unexpected events, things that no one can forecast becuase they haven't happened before. Seems like those are happening more and more today, no?

You can't prepare directly, but you can create contingency plans for cusotmer experience, of how you will communicate to customers, how you will make things right with customers.

First, avoid being memorable for unexpectedly bad experiences

Plan to Capitalize On Unexpected Change

Unanticipated events can disrupt your plans. They can also give you opportunities to create a new, better plans.

What we want as companies is to be prepared to capitalize on the unexpected – on a big scale when there is a change in the world, when there is a change in customer expectations, when there is a new technology that means new possibilities but also new competitors, what we want in each of those scenarios is to greet the news with enthusiasm.

Not misplaced optimism, but the optimism born from preparation. We want to be ready to act, to react, to take advantage of the change. Also, we want to be prepared on a small scale – when there is an issue for an individual customer, or a location of our business, or one product or service. We want to be prepared to be flexible and adaptable to fix what needs fixing or to take advantage of a small opportunity to make a customer’s day.

Being prepared turns unforeseen events from crises to opportunities.

Human Responses Matter More In Times Of Crisis

Helping your employees prepare to serve customers in a crisis, with empowerment, the right tools, the emotional space to respond and make moments memorable for customers is vital, and creates the possibility to quickly and gracefully save bad experiences.

You also want employees to feel that they are capable of handling the unforeseen, and the unpredictable at a broader scale. GenAI comes along upending interaction models, and expectations for customers? Great! Our employees are feeling confident to experiment with the different Large Language Models, and feel empowered by them, not scared or threatened for their jobs.

Because the biggest opportunities, the biggest moments come when we aren’t expecting them, or come from directions we aren’t expecting. You can’t anticipate them, that’s what makes them so impactful. The only way to be prepared, to meet them in the way we’d like to meet them is to be ready for the unexpected.

The future will surprise you. You can still prepare to respond to the unexpected.