Tennis and the art of effective customer experience

I play club tennis badly and watch it closely, and I have started to suspect the two habits teach me more about customer experience fundamentals than most conference talks.

Club tennis is honest in a way that business rarely is. Nobody on the court is impressed by your strategy deck. The ball either comes back or it does not, and the person on the other side of the net has an opinion about everything you do, which they express by hitting the ball somewhere you are not.

Here is what the court keeps telling me.

Footwork before winners

Every beginner wants to hit the winner: the crosscourt forehand that clips the line. Every coach says the same boring thing: get your feet in position first. The winner is a consequence of being in the right place. Attempted from the wrong place, it goes into the net, and it goes into the net with confidence.

Companies attempt winners from the wrong place all the time. The surprise gift in the parcel, from a company whose parcel arrived three days late. The handwritten thank-you note, in an account that took four calls to set up. Delight is a winner, and it only works once the basics are in position: the order arrives, the invoice is right, the person who answers the phone can see what happened last time.

Consistency beats brilliance

Watch a club match and count how the points end. A few are won with a great shot. Most are lost with an ordinary one that goes long, or wide, or into the tape. The player who wins is rarely the one with the best strokes. It is the one who makes the fewest unforced errors.

Customers are lost the same way, and most of them leave without saying why. Rarely because a competitor did something brilliant. Usually because you did something ordinary badly: the password reset that loops, the return label that never arrived, the fourth time they had to explain the problem. Nobody churns for lack of wow. They churn from friction, one small error at a time, and the scoreboard does not distinguish between your error and their winner.

Watch the other side of the net

The worst habit in club tennis is admiring your own shot. You hit a good one, you watch it go, and while you are watching, the ball comes back. Better players hit and look up. They are already reading the opponent: which way are they leaning, where is the racket going, what comes next.

Listening to customers is this kind of watching. The survey that asks “how did we do?” is mostly admiring the shot you just hit. Reading where the customer is going before they get there is different: what they searched for last, what they started and did not finish, what they asked about twice. Most feedback programs do far more of the first, and the people most worth reading this way are your best customers, who rarely fill in the form.

Practice the boring stroke

Nobody wants to practice the second serve. It is a defensive, unglamorous stroke whose only job is to not lose the point. Yet matches turn on second serves far more than on aces, because you hit far more of them, under far more pressure.

The renewal email is a second serve. So is the returns policy, the out-of-office reply, the confirmation page, the script for the call nobody wants to make. They are hit thousands of times by people who did not design them. Where a company is losing customers, it is nearly always on a boring stroke nobody has practiced since it was written. Plain food, well cooked and served on time, beats a clever dish that arrives cold, a thought I have chewed on before in serving up a nourishing meal.

The scoreboard resets every game

What I like most about tennis scoring is how unforgiving it is about the past. You can win a game to love and the next one starts at zero. A great first set buys you nothing in the second except a little confidence.

Last quarter’s satisfaction score does not play this quarter’s point. The customer who rated you highly in March is not carrying that rating around. They are on the baseline waiting for the next serve, and what matters is whether this one goes in. That is why companies that standardize themselves into trouble are so often surprised by decline: the process that won last year’s points is still running, and the opponent has moved.

The practical advice from the court is not glamorous. Find your second serve, the stroke your customers see most and your designers see least, and go and watch someone hit it this week. Then get your feet set for the next point, because it has already started.