I recently introduced myself at our internal customer experience workshop for new CAPS-ers as employee number 0 – and I liked the sound of it. Zero, because setting up a business usually starts as an abstract idea before anything else. It is zero, a starting point that might add up to a lot later… or stay at zero. Before hiring first team members and setting up CAPS, today CAPS Group, I was getting my first experiences in the retail industry as a middleman. A fixtures supplier for American and British retailers sourcing their equipment in Central & Eastern Europe, with Poland as the main market. And that’s how I met Paul, my business partner of many years, together through ups and downs. Luckily for both of us, we had a clear vision of what kind of business we wanted to run. And we have been building on that zero since then.
Maximising customer experience as a way of doing business
Did you know that when you google “Customer Experience” you usually get over 1 600 000 000 results. There are more than 1,6 billion sources on the topic! Quite intimidating. Yet we didn’t budge and set our goals high.
Our recipe for delivering outstanding customer experiences comes down to 4 things: honesty, engaged (committed team) people, going the extra mile and flexibility. This is how it has always been for us. Not complicated, but not easy to deliver.
While three of them are pretty self-evident, going the extra mile is the one that spices things up. Often not glamorous and rather bringing extra cost instead of a lot of money, it’s what matters in the long run – the basis of a true partnership.
Customer perception can change very quickly and is affected by each and every interaction with the business. It is down to everybody in a company to manage and maintain positive customer contacts. But, we can’t expect everybody to know how to do it. We need to explain, train and constantly remind ourselves how to provide desirable customer experiences until it is deeply engrained in our minds. One way we do this is our internal WOW Box initiative. Every month we collect the best examples of blowing a customer’s mind and we share the winner’s example with the whole team. Sharing best practices is a great way of learning to think customer experience in everything we do, every day.
And, at the same time, we need to work on the engaged internal customer concept. Sophisticated as it sounds, it is simply about also providing a great customer service to each other in the company. Treat others the same way we would like to be treated. I deeply believe in the power of this teamwork.
New chapter
And now, 265 employees in 14 countries later, here we are. Our mix of various nationalities makes our team unique and strong, yet still flexible. I feel we are not really big, we are just not afraid to work across borders. Together we speak 16 languages to be able to communicate with our customers in their local tongue. This is all about that extra comfort and peace of mind while we check all the other boxes to provide a one-stop-shop service.
With our new campaign, Everything taken care of, we want to emphasize our “going the extra mile” attitude and further support our CAPS Maximising Customer Experience motto. It takes a lot of work each and every day to keep delivering such a promise. But, Maximising Customer Experience is at the core of how we do business. We wanted our current and potential customers to be able to quickly understand this by the very simple line “Everything taken care of”. Because that’s what we do.
I am very proud that our staff were interested and eager to take part in the photo and video session that was used in our new campaign material. The photos are all over our website, presentations and other materials. All polished up, we had a lot of fun and made jokes while becoming celebrity actors for a day.
Spotlights off, here we are, back to business. There are always problems, or challenges as some prefer to say, but being a part of a true team keeps you positive. We take care of each other, we take care of our customers. Everything taken care of.
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