The red carpet
Let's go back in time. I think it was sometime in 1999. I worked at AMEV as a Life Inspector and I refinanced my mortgage. Because as an employee, I received a nice discount on the mortgage interest rate and I was happy to take that advantage. A few years later I started renovating and I was able to go to AMEV for that too.
Within AMEV there was a special office for employees, where everything was taken care of when taking out the mortgage. There was coffee ready, you could always walk in if you had any questions and also the communication about papers and the notary was well taken care of. There was no red carpet rolled out yet, but it felt that way. As employees, we were well pampered.
As a Life Inspector, I was responsible for a large area, east of Utrecht to the German border and helped intermediaries choose AMEV in the field of mortgages and pensions. I'm sure there are some time zones mixed up now, but I do remember that my clients – the intermediaries – didn't find our mortgage handling too flourishing. Communication was unclear. Their customers didn't understand our letters. It took a long time for official quotes to come. Things went wrong when sending the notary documents.
I didn't understand much of that. After all, we had arranged it so well, hadn't we? I really didn't know any better than that we as AMEV gave the red-carpet feeling to customers. Because that was my own experience. In Customer Experience, we call this the 'n=1 situation'. My own experience, would also be that of our customers and their customers. In addition, I didn't realize at the time that I had an inside-out view and was heavily contaminated with the 'curse of knowledge'. The what?! I had much more knowledge of mortgages, legislation, and processes than the customer who took out a mortgage. This is called the 'curse of knowledge'. As a result, I couldn't put myself in the shoes of the person without that knowledge. I missed the outside-in view.
I went with an intermediary to one of his customers and immediately saw where things went wrong with us. That the red-carpet feeling only applied to employees. But I also immediately saw the potential for improvement.
That's exactly why I'm calling on everyone to visit customers themselves. Step out of your own processes, systems and ideas and look at the world through the eyes of the customer. Where the customer is. At the company or just at home. See where customers' needs lie, what keeps them awake at night and where the real potential for improvement lies. Who knows, you might also see where your organization can give that red-carpet feeling to customers.
This blog was written for CustomerFirst and published on July 4, 2023
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