All in JESSICA NOBLE
Business is personal. Developing deep relationships with top tier customers is critical in today's fast moving, highly-competitive business environment. Frequent, deliberate discussions with key customer executives helps build the type of relationships that deliver clear benefits:
It’s important to have mechanisms in place to listen for customer wants, needs, and expectations. They are ever-changing at different times and paces for each customer type and segment. Many companies have found a comfortable cadence listening to customers with surveys at 1-2 interaction points in a customer’s overall experience (example: post-purchase & post-customer service). There are more opportunities and other vehicles.
Things will not always go as planned. Even companies consistently providing the best experiences, have process breakdowns leaving customers feeling like it's too hard to do business with them or that they don't care. And, technology can exacerbate tough situations when it doesn't provide answers to questions customers need answered. And, employee training or lack of can lead to friction in the customer experience you provide. Things will go wrong. Guaranteed.
You have many opportunities to create relationships and stickiness with your customer base, but providing a consistent experience can be tricky. You need to use data to understand pain-points and develop a process to monitor progress, adjusting as necessary. Design an experience that meets the wants, needs and expectations for your ideal customer segment. It’s all about data, prioritization and focus.
If your organization is struggling to understand how to deliver an optimal customer experience, it is vital to start thinking about the entire journey from beginning to end. If any aspect of your organization (team or channel) is delivering an inconsistent experience, you risk undermining the great experience provided elsewhere and losing valuable customers.
Priority setting during Annual strategic planning should consider your customer’s goals and reflect your brand promise to ensure your people, processes, and technology are aligned and trained and equipped to deliver a consistent experience.
Organizations use varying criteria for prioritizing annual initiatives around technology, training, business process improvement, and analytics. Sometimes the approach for ranking possible initiatives is as straightforward as perceived relative value of a project (or improvement) and the level of difficulty as compared to other initiatives. If there is a project that is low difficulty and high value, it soars to the top of the list.
Here are four (4) customer experience imperatives to prevent losing your customers’ loyalty. If you offer multiple channels, it's imperative you support those channels. Don't let your back office issues cost the customer, or it will cost you a customer. Don't take Customer Effort for granted. Speak the customer's language, highlighting benefits
If you don't see the relevance of capturing your customer's voice in some of your change initiatives, the ripple effect of change could disrupt your customer experience as well as your ability to deliver on your brand promise. Listen to your customer to understand what they want, need, expect and value.
When customers invest time to provide feedback about their customer experiences in a thorough and thoughtful manner, they have expectations. Not just an expectation to be listened to. My perception is they did nothing constructive with the feedback, and perception is everything.
