This year I am talking a lot about the customer journey, which starts the moment a couple finds your business, and how the journey you have them take not only affects whether a couple books you but how, if done right, the journey improves the couple’s entire experience with you and thus improves their overall impression of your business. So, looking at the importance of a couple’s journey and the high level of personal service expected of wedding industry businesses, is a couple always right?
Well, I can say without hesitation, and I am sure you would probably agree, the customer is not always right. However, in the wedding industry, when it comes to customer service and the couple’s journey, we have to make sure that the expectations of our ideal couples are going to be met, or exceeded, and our customer service goes above and beyond. The nice thing is that if we do our job right by identifying our ideal couples, tailor our marketing to attract them, and then create a customer journey that is designed with our ideal customer in mind, our instances of the customer thinking they are right vs. them actually NOT being right should be very low.
For example, my ideal couples place a high importance on a fun, meaningful, and personal wedding ceremony. My marketing is targeted to attract those couples, and the customer journey they take with me is designed to get me what I need to give them the ceremony they say they want. As part of their customer journey, all my couples are given
homework, which includes a questionnaire that they each answer separately that helps me understand their relationship, how it formed, how they see it, and how they feel about each other. Every couple I meet with is told, during the initial meeting, about the homework and explained how I will use it in the creation of the ceremony. The couples that come to me, my ideal couples, should be up for it. And, if they are not, they are probably not going to hire me (and I likely wouldn’t want to work with them either). So, by knowing my ideal couples, tailoring my messaging to attract them, and creating a customer journey that meets or exceeds their expectations, I should have very few to no couples that hire me yet don’t want to do the homework. And in the scenario where I have a couple who hires me but doesn’t do the homework – no matter how many times I explain the importance of it – I don’t consider them “right,” I just consider it not worth telling them they’re wrong, and I remind myself of how rarely that happens and just move on…
