Every customer must leave happy

“Every customer must leave happy.”

This isn’t meant to be a tagline. It’s meant to be a non-negotiable standard for any business that’s serious about being customer-centric.

Imagine a business scenario, where, at the end of every interaction, each customer is asked, “Did we make you feel happy today?” and the answer, accompanied by wide smiles, thumbs-up signs and glowing compliments, is a resounding, “Yes, you did!!”

If this scenario isn’t commonplace in your business, then customer centricity is still a distant dream.

In Trinidad and Tobago, we’re playing far too small in the vast experience economy.

We’re stuck in the struggle of trying to reach the exalted space of customer centricity, barely and rarely taking the bold, systemic actions required to get there.

It’s time to stop admiring the idea and start engineering the reality.

When a business is truly committed to customer happiness, it doesn’t just talk about being committed, it acts on the talk.

Happiness becomes a measurable business outcome.

Systems, processes, and practices are built for measurable delivery and decisions are made with the end experience in mind.

In a marketplace flooded with rhetoric, the businesses that break free of the “talk-only syndrome,” become both evangelical in belief and experiential in delivery.

They begin to outshine their competitors.

Customer happiness must be built into the very architecture of the business, by virtue of it being a design principle.

In this ecosystem, happiness is the standard.

Every touchpoint is intentional and the right people deliver the right experience.

That last point is critical. To build a happiness-powered ecosystem, you need the right people.

That means confronting a hard truth that some businesses are overpopulated with wrong-fit employees, whose poor performance is tolerated at the expense of superior culture and customer experience.

It’s time for businesses to break free of the love affair with low performers.

A good start can be to carve a path to the exit door for perpetual transgressors, at every level, who show no interest in meeting performance expectations.

Performance management systems and improvement plans can be used as the collective pipeline for change.

This action will demonstrate that the business values high performers and is committed to protecting its culture.

No transformation is complete without measurement.

In a happiness-powered ecosystem, happy exits and experience audits become value metrics.

One powerful metric is “The Guaranteed Happy Exit,” where every customer’s emotional state is audited at the end of his or her journey.

Yes, I know that it’s work, but it’s work that can be automated, using digital labour and artificial intelligence, to scale emotional intelligence across the business.

Alongside human and digital labour, scalable systems become the backbone of the experiential ecosystem.

Routine transactions are transformed into memorable moments, characterised by speed, responsiveness, personalisation, convenience and ease of doing business.

All of this, against the backdrop of a culture engineered around customer happiness.

Customer happiness isn’t a soft metric. It’s the heartbeat of brand vitality, loyalty, and legacy.

If a business isn’t delivering happiness at scale, it’s not customer-centric, it’s just customer-adjacent.

Can you imagine if “The Guaranteed Happy Exit” becomes an engineered outcome for a business that is intent on being distinctive in the customer experience marketplace?

We will witness a revolution in the internal infrastructure of that business and the re-engineering of moving parts to achieve the gift of happy experiences that culminate in happy exits on the part of its customers.

I believe that it’s time to stop playing small with customer experience and customer happiness in Trinidad and Tobago.

It’s time to remove all of the barriers to building ecosystems that guarantee customer delight, one customer at a time.

It’s time as well, to make “every customer must leave happy” not just a goal, but a daily reality.