Customer experience as a discipline and an art continues to gather momentum with businesses and is becoming more important to customers.
More and more we’re seeing the power of customers and the success that comes to organizations who truly focus on developing an exceptional customer experience and are leaders in providing great customer service. 2012 should be a year in which we’ll continue to see an increase in customer focus and improvements in the overall customer experience for many industries.
Looking ahead to the rest of this year, what are our ‘top 10’ resolutions for achieving exceptional customer experience success this year? Chris Severn, co-founder and Director of The Customer Experience Company, listed his resolutions for last year, which still apply today.
1. Customer experience begins by getting customer feedback & do it right.
Get customer feedback measures and actions right. Customer feedback should be collected frequently or real-time, be attributable to specific customers, attributable to the specific staff that served them (or pages/service offered) and plugged into an effective continuous improvement process. Old-style market research surveys just provide data without action.
2. Make customer experience a factor in every business decision.
Make ‘outside-in’ thinking a way of life for your business. Whether you’re working on service/product design, operational processes, projects or organizational models, it’s the customer where things start and end, with your front-line staff running a close second.
3. Use customer data to make changes to improve customer experience.
Make use of good data – clean your customer data, fix causes of errors, then use it better. Most business make almost no use of all the data they have on customers. Intelligent use of even a fraction of that data will improve services, sales and efficiency.
4. Make metrics & processes encourage a great customer experience.
Fix operating models that prevent a great customer experience from taking place. The structure, process flows and performance management of teams facing customers are still often at odds with company vision statement like ‘customer first’. Dive deeply into these operating models and remove the barriers to excellence.
5. Make the customer experience central to your brand value (Mission Statement).
Match the values of the brand with the values customers experience in practice. Conflict between these two causes dissatisfaction and churn. But if your brand, culture, and mission is centered on the customer, you eliminate customer-unfriendly actions.
6. Be unique in action and in service.
Differentiation! Create relevant, timely and intended positive customer experience for customers of different needs, different situations, or in different segments.
7. Love your employees.
Employee advocacy – we’ve known for some years that staff engagement directly correlates with customer engagement. Your employees are the face of the organization, if you want great service, your employees need to feel great. Great begets great.
8. Focus on simple, timely, effective actions for a positive customer experience.
Run projects better. The best customer program and aligned executives can still fail to change an outcome when delivery switches too far into to ‘time, cost, scope’ thinking. We get stuck too often on the big & grand, waste too much time in the back rooms planning & organizing, meanwhile your customers continue missing out on the small things they want and need. The small things often make the biggest difference in the customer experience because they show customers we care.
9. Existing customers are VIP customers.
Treat existing customers as well or better than prospects. Don’t be a company that institutionalises customer churn by focussing more and more on acquisition but ignoring existing customers. Think of advertising as a cost of failure and seek to minimise it. Part of a great customer experience is making each customer feel valued, feel special, feel like they matter.
10. Be personal. Be social.
Bring ‘social’ interactions into mainstream. Perhaps you have someone in the online team monitoring Twitter and Facebook. Customers are on there, are you? Train your staff to interact with them there, do it well, and effectively represent your brand.
That’s a lot for one year, but like all resolutions, the ones you never start take the longest to finish! These simple resolutions are effective and simple solutions to developing exceptional great customer experience and get your organization off on the right foot in providing great customer service.
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