I love people (and chocolate) and that is why I created The Melting Pot – a business running chocolate workshops for adults, children and teams. Creating the best possible experience for customers is a true passion; and a workshop environment provides a golden opportunity to really cherish every guest and ensure they leave happy.
The experience itself is just one part of a journey for my customers – one that starts long before I’m aware of their presence. They will be experiencing my ‘business personality’ via my website and social media platforms. I must encourage their interaction (whether they decide to take part in a workshop or not) and keep in touch with them over a long period of time, strengthening our connection until they are ready to buy (and buy again).
I work hard at creating the right business personality for The Melting Pot; involving daily disciplines on social media, quick response times, newsletters and my workshops. I’m fascinated in learning more so I can always review, hone and improve my offering to customers.
One business owner once said to me “I want what you’ve got in your business – I can’t quite put my finger of what it is, but I want it in mine.”
Never one to pass up a challenge, I set to identifying all the elements that go into creating a great customer experience. I created a six week programme called ‘the WOW workout’. The overall aim is on building better relationships with clients (and creating a ‘WOW moment’ now and again to really make us stand out from the crowd), but the main focus is on getting all the basics right. The programme also helps identify the best people in a team to be customer experience ambassadors, the natural ‘people people’ who find positive interaction with customers second nature.
In my opinion, it’s not about theory, spouting statistics on customer retention and yet more examples of bad customer service stories (yawn, we’ve heard them all before) – it’s about getting in the right mindset, sweating the small stuff, and giving examples of what we CAN DO to create some WOW moments for customers.
I deliver my WOW workout programme to clients via workshops, questionnaires, telephone support and one-to-one sessions; always modelling the way and making it totally tailored and relevant to their business.
There are a series of ‘exercises’ we undertake as a team including mindset, standards of operation, customer interaction and expectations. We also look at how to answer the phone, events, face-to-face meetings and the written word. We get the basics working properly first. Then we look at how they could create some WOW for their customers, as well as look at examples of where other companies are doing great things and work out how we can make it relevant for them.
The buy-in to focus on creating great customer experience must come from the very top. Without that any team will fail.
Staff must be empowered to take responsibility and have the authority to make decisions. If necessary, a monetary limit could be set on what they are authorised to do for customers.
The biggest revelation reported back to me by delegates is when I simply encourage them to be themselves!
“Having time out from everyday work to really focus on what we do and why we do it was amazing! The session has reinvigorated my desire to help and wow customers and to make a difference to someone’s day. Dawn is excellent at making you think about things in a different way – lots of light bulb moments for me!” Sarah Henson, delegate, Solihull
I’ve created a free download – ‘100 Ways to WOW’ – you are very welcome to swipe and deploy in your business! I know you won’t be doing that before you ensure that all the less exciting but very necessary bits are done properly first! http://www.dawnfry.co.uk
Dawn Fry
Owner, The Melting Pot
http://www.makechocolates.co.uk
Customer Experience Services
http://www.dawnfry.co.uk
Dawn Fry – Biography
Dawn started The Melting Pot from the summerhouse at the end of her garden in Hitchin in 2009. Despite the family name there is no family history of working with chocolate – Dawn just loved chocolate and people and decided to put the two together!
Dawn is in the process of franchising her chocolate business, and is looking forward to working with franchisees on creating more great experiences around the country.
She is currently writing her first book – ‘12 Steps to Getting Sticky Customers’ The experience theme runs in the family as Dawn is married to blacksmith Jo Fry and has three children.