A few days ago I shared a great story from Sharpen CX on my LinkedIn page. It was a focus on the consumer shipping companies and the “Shipageddon” they have faced in 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic caused a dramatic increase in e-commerce - and therefore more packages!
FedEx is a great example. Despite hiring over 70,000 seasonal employees, just to cope with the demand, they still delivered over 94% of packages on time. This itself would be impressive, but FedEx keeps breaking records for positivity and great customer service. They scored the highest customer ratings in the industry on the ACSI Customer Satisfaction Index.
Sharpen CX listed five important attributes that help FedEx to keep outperforming these industry benchmarks:
- Use data to personalize the customer experience (CX)
- Hire friendly and helpful representatives
- Offer proactive customer service notifications
- Stock digital channels with self-help resources
- Prioritize customer’s security
It’s not valuable for me to repeat every point Sharpen CX made - you can click the link above to go and check out the full story - but I’d like to add a few thoughts about some of these five key attributes.
Hiring the right people is essential in CX. We have found exactly the same inside Teleperformance. You can’t hire people based on their resume matching what you need. It’s essential to find people who actually like helping others if you are going to place them into situations where they need to directly help customers. When they are in that situation they represent the entire brand, so you need people who love helping out.
When I read some of the feedback stories and online reviews of FedEx it is clear that this is an important part of their hiring process. So many reviews comment on the way that a delivery person has gone far above what might be expected of someone in their role. The effect is very simple, but important. Every time those delivery people get recognized for going beyond what a customer would normally expect, they are elevating the FedEx brand and making people feel more comfortable about using that company again.
The comment on self-help is also really important. So many customers today are asking Alexa, Siri, or Google for help before ever checking with the company or calling a helpline. Put yourself in the shoes of the customer and make sure that all those searches and questions return really helpful results and prompts to useful information.
These five points look and sound simple, but this process starts before hiring and encapsulates the entire customer journey and experience with the FedEx brand. It’s about hiring the right people, letting them do what they need to help the customer, and ensuring that the right systems and processes are also in place.
Let me know what you think about the FedEx 2020 experience? Did you have a great interaction with a shipping company or a nightmare? Leave a comment here or get in touch via my LinkedIn.