Let's go back in time for a moment. I think it was sometime in 1999. I was working at AMEV as a Life inspector and I closed my mortgage. Because as an employee I got a nice discount on the mortgage interest and I was happy to take advantage of that. A few years later I started to renovate and again, AMEV was a great help.
Within AMEV, there was a special office for employees, where really everything was taken care of when taking out the mortgage. There was coffee ready for you, you could always walk in if you had questions, and communication about papers and the notary was also well taken care of. There was no red carpet just yet, but that's how it felt. As employees, we were well pampered.
As a Life Inspector, I was responsible for a large area, from the east of Utrecht to the German border, helping intermediaries choose AMEV for mortgages and pensions. There are probably some time zones mixed up now, but I do remember that my customers - the intermediaries - did not find our handling of mortgages too florid. Communication was unclear. Their customers didn't understand anything about our letters. It took a long time for official offers to arrive. Things went wrong when sending notary documents.
I understood little of that. After all, we had it so well taken care of, hadn't we? I really didn't know any better than that as AMEV, we gave the red-carpet feeling to customers. Because that was my own experience. In Customer Experience, we call that the "n=1 situation". My own experience, would also be the experience of our customers and their customers. Besides, I didn't realize then either, that I had an inside-out view and was quite infected with the 'curse of knowledge'. The what?! I had far more knowledge of mortgages, legislation, and processes than the client who was taking out a mortgage. That's called the "curse of knowledge". As a result, I couldn't empathize with the person without that knowledge. I missed the outside-in view.
With an intermediary I visited one of his clients and immediately saw where we were going wrong. That the red-carpet feeling only applied to employees. But immediately, I also saw the potential for improvement.
This is exactly why I urge everyone to go on customer visits themselves. Step out of your own processes, systems and mindsets and look at the world through the eyes of the customer. There where the customer is. At the company or just at home. See what customers' needs are, what keeps them awake at night and where the real improvement potential 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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