It should be easy to be your customer and do business with you in a brutally competitive environment. Be ETDBW and have customers for life. Research shows that acquiring a new customer costs 6-7 times more than retaining an existing customer.

If your business could have a higher ETBW score than your competitors, you lower your customer acquisition cost and your customer loyalty will increase. This will have a direct, measurable impact on your bottom-line. A Harvard Business Review report asserts that a 12-point increase in NPS scores leads to a doubling of a company’s growth rate on average. (NPS: measures customer satisfaction based on whether your consumers are likely to recommend your brand to a friend)

Every contact with the customer is an opportunity to make your current customer more loyal and win new business. In today's world where products and services are becoming more and more standardized and similar to each other, one of the most effective ways of "differentiation" is "to give the customer an experience" and the most effective way is being ETDBW. Not in a single transaction but in all customer transactions in consistent, repeatable terms. Every customer basically wants:

• No surprises: Offers / orders are clear including specs, service levels, policies, exceptions. Promises are kept against the customer orders and policies.
• Convenience: Being able to reach easily from any channel and run your business effortlessly.
• Clarity: Acknowledgement of their requests; clarity on requests feasibility; provision of regular, honest and open information; error-free, fair and honest billing
• Speed ​​and Reaction: Immediate response, fast solution at first contact, effective business follow-up
• Courtesy: Your way of communicating makes the customers feel valued. When mistakes happen, you gently accept, apologize and take action.

The foundation of ETBW is to implement a best-in-class “Customer Experience Management” system. Creating and maintaining a complete customer profile, personalizing all customer interactions, transforming business processes into a fast, digital, ETDBW mode.

Do the following anti-ETDBW examples seem familiar to you?

• Frustrating a calling customer with complex automated voice response system menus making it almost impossible to reach and communicate with a live person.
• Asking again and again the information customer has supplied before.
• Have long forms filled with unreadable font size.
• Don't have a user friendly mobile app and online communication channels.
• Transfer the customer request from person to person and customer will have to tell the story from the very beginning to each handler.
• Take customer request, say you'll be back in a certain time, and never come back.

I thought these may sound familiar because I frequently experience similar ones.

After all, sustainable success in business comes with sustainable customer excellence. Those who constantly improve their ETDBW processes the ones who succeed.