Improve Customer Experience

Monitoring voice of the customer is one thing, but can all your employees name the customers’ top ten wish list? Employee engagement is a key to making significant improvements in customer experience, and the UK-based online banking group at Barclays engages employees in understanding customer priorities by summarizing customer feedback on notice boards along with process improvement updates, on internal email signatures, and in the executive director’s weekly internal updates. Personal performance reviews include a strategic satisfaction index, which includes read more »

Start with your customer in mind whenever you use a management technique. Strategies that start with the customer set the stage for daily behaviors that are customer-centric.

The customer is left out of most templates you find in consultants’ toolboxes or business classes. This causes self-centered or competitor-centered, or Wall Street-centered thinking, rather than customer-centered thinking. If customers are paying your way, why would you dare center your thinking on anyone else?

SWOT (Strengths-Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats) is an often misunderstood tool. The goal of SWOT is to align your strengths with market opportunities within the context of what matters to your target customers.

1) First, know your customers’ priorities and read more »

Customer Care … Customer Relationship Management … Customer Experience — what’s the difference? All of these terms are components of customer experience management (CEM), which is the broadest and deepest way of viewing customers and their role in the success of any organization (for-profit, non-profit, or government). The purpose of any organization is to serve a customer need. The results of serving that need are typically financial (revenue, profit, funding, paychecks). In essence, customer experience is what makes the world go around!

Customer experience management is sometimes confused with the following concepts. Indeed, CEM encompasses all of these practices, and more. They can be categorized by Customer Profitability, Customer Knowledge, and Customer Well-Being.

Customer Profitability (efforts to increase revenue and profit from customers)

• Customer relationship management (CRM) — use of a database of customer transactions and facts that enable customized communications (1-to-1 marketing), upselling, cross-selling, and data-mining
• Experiential marketing — events and read more »

Do you have a customer-focus creed? How visibile is it to your employees? In the conference room of a company I visited recently a poster served as a clear reminder for customer centric decision-making. Think about the highest priorities indicated by your most recent customer feedback, and how you could insert those priorities into a poster like this one:

Our goal is to increase customer retention through product and service value creation. Achieving this goal requires the commitment of all employees on a daily basis to:

Ensure all decisions support increasing value for key customers.
Ask when assessing the merits of a product, service or policy:

• How does this strengthen our relationship with our customers?
• How does this make doing business with us easier for customers?
• How does this exceed the needs and expectations of customers?

Can we do this successfully, and will our customers notice?

Reminder badge cards or posters such as this are great for building a customer centric culture. They’re the next best thing to having the customer physically in your meeting rooms to monitor your dedication to superior read more »

When customer experience requirements guide the hiring process, a company is practicing outside-in thinking. In fact, most companies that are consistently listed as top customer service providers have very deliberate methods for choosing the right people who will properly represent the company’s brand promise.

At Southwest Airlines, a culture committee was established to make sure their vision and values are not compromised as the company grows and as it adjusts to economic forces. Vice president of marketing and sales, David Ridley explained: “We are a customer service business that just happens to fly airplanes. Our leaders have a genuine love for people,” he said. “We don’t want you in leadership if you don’t. If it’s all about you we don’t want you — there are no BS [Big Shot] leaders at Southwest. We tell our leaders that of all the decisions they will make, the most important ones will be hiring decisions. We tell them to make it tough to become part of the team,” because the traits Southwest looks for are inherent in personalities and cannot be achieved through training.” He characterizes ideal employees as warrior spirits with a servant’s heart and a fun-loving attitude: “People who are other-oriented, not self-important, who put others first — these are the people who will deliver service like Southwest Airlines. We take our customers read more »

The absolute most important aspect of customer retention is culture. Culture is the way things are thought about, talked about, and done. If TRUST is the basis for any long-term relationship, then a culture of trust is essential to customer retention. Two great examples are Kimpton – a boutique hotel chain, and Cisco Systems.

Kimpton has been named the number one place to work in 9 of the 17 cities where it operates. Market Metrix Hospitality Index or MMHI, has awarded top scores to Kimpton over the past few years – their scored have exceeded not only their direct competitors – but also brands such as Ritz Carlton, St Regis, and Four Seasons. Kimpton has achieved this because of their strong customer-centric culture of really knowing their customers, anticipating customers’ needs with great precision, and empowering employees to meet customer expectations.

Another good example of customer-centric culture is Cisco Systems. They are proactive about solutions for every stage of the customer’s lifecycle, and on their basic product web pages you can readily find contact information for customer service and tech support … whereas many companies require customers to go through many clicks to get their contact information. Cisco has made a concerted effort to maximize their customer self-service features, so that their agents can focus on more high-value assistance, from the customers’ read more »

Over-focus on customer acquisition teaches customers to switch brands. For example, the brand switching rate, called customer churn, is 40% for the mobile phone industry, compared to a 7% customer churn rate for the insurance and financial services industries. Some good advice is to quit training your customers to switch – get off the churn bandwagon.

Let’s take a look at a mobile phone company that has pursued a customer retention strategy whereas its peers in the industry were focused primarily on customer acquisition. The mobile phone company Orange is owned by France Telecom, and it’s a great example of departing from industry norms with a unique experiment on customer service as a brand differentiator – somewhat similar to the Saturn brand of General Motors.

Orange has pursued a strategy of customer-centricity by investing heavily in their agents’ knowledge, customer communication and responsiveness. Customer service agents take a 1-month course before interacting with customers, and for their first several weeks interfacing with customers, the work environment has a high ratio of supervisors.

This is accompanied by ongoing formal quality assurance with an emphasis on precision monitoring through speech analytics. The speech analytics tool has enabled Orange to identify at-risk customers, and these customers are reached out to within 24 hours, to turn around their sentiment about the brand, and migrate them from at-risk status toward satisfied status.

80% of the customers identified as at-risk through the speech analytics were not picked up as at-risk through the agents nor other methods. The results are 20% improvement in 1st call resolution, 15% reduction in repeat calls, and 20% increase in satisfaction with customer service.

The lesson here is that customer retention may be best supported by operational integrity. After all, when you think about your personal relationships as well as your business relationships, you tend to stick with the folks that are really good at showing they sincerely care about you, and doing what they say they’re going to do.

It boils down to trust. When you dig down to the reasons why people leave a brand for a competitor’s solution, it’s not so much about the competitors’ offers and brand affinity …. But the reasons people switch brands is much more about product, service and value disappointments. Companies make huge investments in communicating their value proposition. Logic says read more »

Here are some interesting examples of involving customers for improved customer retention … to get started, see what’s being said about your brand name and keywords associated with your solution — Google BlogSearch and Twitter have great search engines to help you follow the conversations underway. Take a look as well at YouTube and other social media – SearchMerge.com is very useful. Two-way conversation on Twitter is best illustrated by Comcast – Frank Eliason’s is director of digital care at Comcast and his profile includes his personal website and blog – as he sees customer frustrations expressed, he reaches out to them to find solutions, and in the process, many disillusioned customers have migrated to fans not only of Comcast, but to a friendship with Frank.

Customer success stories at Microsoft come not only from the formal customer reference program, but also from every salesperson, as they carry inexpensive video cameras wherever they go, and when a customer has something they want to share, it gets captured on the spot.

Informal customer stories sometimes add more credibility than formal stories, as shown by Blackbaud, where customers tell their own stories in their own words.

And 3Par has found a way to involve ALL their customers – whether large or small, in weighing in on marketing claims of the 3Par value proposition.

For details on these examples, see the Customer Reference Knowledge Sharing Network channel on BlogTalkRadio.com/CRKSN.

Wikis are another great way to involve customers in 2-way conversations. Many leading companies, such as Hewlett-Packard, Intuit and Apple, allow customers to post text or video stories, ideas on how to do something, and articles … and some companies are creating more enthusiasm by tying-in contests to wikis.

Social network sites are gaining popularity for business use … For example, on Facebook, Fox News has 160,000 fans. Articles typically get one to two thousand thumbs-up votes, sometimes generating a thousand reader comments. Dell is making good use of its Facebook page; according to a study Dell commissioned from measurement firm Visible Technologies, negative sentiment toward the Dell brand has dropped from 48% in 2006 to 23% in 2008.

Dell’s IdeaStorm community read more »

Open your mind to new ideas for improving customer experience. It’s a fast-paced highly competitive world, so continual improvement — and occasional breakthroughs — are imperatives for consistently delivering superior customer experience.

Every person has creative capability. “There’s this common perception among managers that some people are creative, and most aren’t. That’s just not true,” says Teresa Amabile, head of Entrepreneurial Management at Harvard Business School. “As a leader, you don’t want to ghettoize creativity; you want everyone in your organization producing novel and useful ideas, including your financial people. The fact is, almost all of the research in this field shows that anyone with normal intelligence is capable of doing some degree of creative work.”

Fool around with the vast array of mental exercises described in the Big Book of Creativity Games. Its author, Dr. Robert Epstein, organizes these exercises by four core skills helpful to creative solutions:
1) Capturing new ideas as they occur: increase creative output by 10X.
2) Challenging old behaviors: allow failure to spur creativity.
3) Broadening your knowledge base: expose yourself to new areas, environments, groups, styles, etc.
4) Surrounding yourself with multiple or unusual stimuli: mix it up in your physical and social environments to keep creative juices flowing.

Some ways to apply the creativity core skills listed above for customer experience creativity include: read more »

‘Too much information’ (TMI) can hurt customer experiences. It can be tempting to brag or complain about things as the customer waits for something. It can be easy to get long-winded telling a story to a customer. Be careful! Not only is TMI inappropriate and unprofessional, but it turns customers off. It can negate an otherwise stellar customer experience.

Customers Expect Dialogue
Two-way communication, in short statements, is more the norm now. Think about Twitter, Facebook, and sites that allow customers to post ratings about their experiences. Customers now expect to be heard as much as they expect to hear. Adjust your communication style to accommodate these expectations. Make sure you’re really good at customer listening!

Customers Expect Professionalism
Courtesy, efficient service, and helpful knowledge are essential to good customer experiences. Stick to the customer’s interests. Avoid tangents. I recently found myself waiting for a repair, and one of the idle salespersons proudly admitted to me several of his unethical and illegal practices. He explained to me that the movie and music studios ‘earn enough’ through concert and cinema attendance and related promotional items, and he has every right to download digital products without paying for them, and in fact, has at least a gigabyte of so-called free files. This was said to me in a lengthy monologue, without noticing me squirming uneasily as I heard this bragging. It seemed to the salesperson as a friendly chat, but to me it nearly ruined my customer experience with that company.

Customers Expect Proactive Communication
Actually, there may be no such thing as read more »