Improve Customer Experience

Make Good Customer Experiences Easy!

clearaction — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 15:43:55 +0000

Upgrading to a new model of any kind of product can be an exciting customer experience … but not if you as a supplier don’t set it up for success. All too often, upgrades cause too many surprises, wasted time and money, and frustration. It just doesn’t make any sense to spoil what could be a perfect opportunity to strengthen your fan base into brand evangelists. After all, buying an upgrade means customers are giving you a new revenue stream and market share. Show your appreciation for that with these keys to making it easy for the customer to have a great experience: anticipation, policies, and communication. Anticipation Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. What are their current habits with the old model: - What do they love about their current experience? - Which habits would they find difficult to modify? - What is combined with their current model? (other habits / solutions) - How long ago did they upgrade to their current model? - What do they wish would be solved regarding their experience? Also, gain a clear picture of customers’ understanding of the technologies associated with the current and the new models. Policies As you design your upgrade, honor what you discovered in the “anticipation” exercise above. Design the product and its surrounding business processes and policies to honor the customer experience. Give customers more choices and more control, not less. Even if you would like to migrate customers to a new revenue stream by replacing something they’ve taken for granted (was free or combined with former model), find a way to give customers choices that they will like. Communication Make it easy for customers to find information that will help them adapt to the new model. Again, referring to what you discovered in the “anticipation” exercise, provide real-time information from the customers’ perspective. As they go through the upgrade process, is needed information at-hand? For example, include with the product a list of URLS that address all of the expectations and challenges the customer may face. Even better, include this information on the product packaging and along with the specs list on the “buy-now” web page. Do not require them to peruse your blog and forum for such basic information. When customers make inquiries or comments about something that surprised them, step again into the customers’ shoes to formulate a solution that they will like. Do not give the customer an answer that just reflects the company’s perspective. The customer has already invested in your brand, and now they’re expanding that investment — honor that! Customer Experience Management Customer experience management is a way of life for everyone in a company. It’s not confined to the call center or sales force or website navigation or personalized marketing. To manage customer experiences, it is essential to anticipate and communicate much more than what has been done traditionally. Customer value (for both parties) is cultivated by preventing all things unpleasant. Always setup yourself and your customers for success!

Loyalty Is Not Just For Customers

clearaction — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 05:45:06 +0000

Customer loyalty is important to business success. Profitability of customer retention is pretty much common knowledge. So companies do a lot to encourage customer behavior that favors their brand, to increase: - Purchase frequency and volume - Involvement and structural ties - Recommendations of the brand. Yet, like most things in life, loyalty is a two-way street. Who are you loyal to? “Loyalty by its very nature demands that we commit ourselves to a person, group, or cause,” explain Timothy Keiningham and Lerzan Aksoy in their book Why Loyalty Matters. “We suppress our short-term self-interests to maintain our bond. In its most noble form, we serve a cause greater than ourselves, designed to unite with another.” What and who do you consider to be greater than yourself? The answer to this question reveals the shallowness or depth of loyalty in your environment. Customer Loyalty Are you personally loyal to your customers? Is your whole department loyal to customers — both internal and external, with an emphasis on the external ones who ultimately make your payroll possible?¹ If not, we may be subconsciously expecting customers to “serve a cause greater” than themselves – us! If we really think about it, the company exists because of customers, not the other way around, so this line of thinking makes the customer “a cause greater than ourselves”. Reciprocal customer loyalty is not limited to customer-facing employees. A company is a team. Everyone’s attitude, decisions, and behaviors have a ripple effect on customers. How do you (individually and collectively) demonstrate your loyalty to customers? What happens when you’re stuck between a rock and a hard spot, so to speak? Do you “suppress short-term self-interests” to maintain your bond with customers? Companies’ reports to stockholders and industry analysts frequently tout satisfaction and net promoter rankings. In some cases, stellar customer-centric performance is indeed a hallmark for the business. In other cases, the benchmark may be the prevailing mentality among competitors, which may not at all reflect what customers actually perceive as being focused on their best interests. It’s worthwhile to conduct occasional reality checks! Personal Loyalty “Our loyalties demonstrate what we value, what we believe, and what we want our world to be”, explain Keiningham & Aksoy². “Loyalty requires deliberate effort, constant practice, and conscious employment. … Being loyal is the manifestation of the choices we make in life. … And for the world at large, it is the small yet numerous acts of loyalty or disloyalty that help determine the kind of communities in which we live.” Laws of congruence imply that it may not be possible for reciprocal loyalty on a professional level without actively practicing loyalty on a personal level. Consider loyalty among your friends, family, community, faith, and fellow citizens. In this age of instant gratification, it’s easy to become self-centered and discount the value of relationships and time-proven principles. It’s worthwhile to conduct occasional reality checks with all your relationships, and strive to continually improve relationship skills. You may enjoy richer ties in all facets of life, with spill-over benefits of customer retention in your business. Boomerang Effect Huge budgets and efforts are dedicated to enticing customers to be loyal to businesses. And according to the two-way street theorem, reciprocal loyalty by companies to their customers is key to sustainable return on investment. Contact the author to find out how to customize these tips to your situation. Request complimentary Customer-Centricity Worksheet and/or customer-centricity audit. ¹Note: a careful analysis of this is essential, as it’s not just about who deposits money in accounts, but rather, those who are at the end of the line as recipients in the chain of your services and products — even for non-profit and government entities. ²The book includes a code for complimentary access to the LoyaltyAdvisor online assessment, which provides an evaluation of how you view your loyalties, and how your friends and family view them, to help improve your bonds with others.

Double-Check Assumptions & Motives to Improve Customer Experience

clearaction — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:49:41 +0000

When a customer asks you a question, do you double-check your assumptions about their intended outcome? So often we take customer inquiries at face value, or simply assume we know what is meant. No matter what your job, you have customers, and clarifying your customers’ intended outcome is smart business. Examining Customer’s Intended Outcomes An intended outcome may be quite different from the words a person chooses to make a request or to give you feedback. Different personality types shape our phrasing as well as our hearing. Have you ever played Boggle? It’s a letter-scramble game that challenges players to identify as many words as possible, and typically, it’s quite surprising to see that another player has a completely different point of view and hence, a unique list of words. Similarly, every interaction we have with a customer poses the possibility of mis-matched speaking and hearing. Furthermore, the big picture may be unclear initially. It’s like the story of the blind men who touch an elephant and describe it … one touches the tail and says the elephant is a rope, another touches the trunk and says it is a snake, another touches the ear and calls the elephant a fan. By asking a few questions about the customer’s statement, you can discover the context of the customer’s perspective. This allows you to respond more accurately and satisfactorily from all parties’ perspectives. Effective customer listening boils down to sincere curiosity about the customer’s viewpoint. Examining Your Own Intended Outcomes On the other hand, when you interact with customers, are your own intended outcomes clear in your mind? Do you have the customers’ best interests at the forefront of your intended outcomes? If not, your true priorities will become apparent, and the customer’s trust in you will erode. With all our emphasis on customer relationship management, surely we want to carefully hone trust-building. A conscious effort is typically necessary to assure our own customer-focused intended outcomes are not overshadowed by our other needs. What about the intended outcomes of your promotions and customer programs? For long-lasting customer profitability, make sure your initiatives and campaigns put the customers’ interests first, and the company’s interests second. This applies to customer surveys, customer care financial incentives, loyalty perks, experiential marketing events, CRM, touch-point management, and basic marketing and business policies. Customers are savvy, not naive. Customers are informed, not ignorant. Or at least, they can quickly become savvy and informed. And customers are vocal. Make sure your customer care approach contributes to the long-term value of your brand and your customer relationships. Customer Experience Equation Satisfaction with the customer experience can be summarized as a simple equation: reality must be better than or equal to expectations, from the customer’s viewpoint. Communication plays a massive role in customer experience satisfaction, as it helps define both expectations and reality. To improve customer experience, make sure you accurately understand customers’ intended outcomes (expectations), and ensure that you accurately deliver intended outcomes (reality), as judged by your customer in every interaction. Contact the author to find out how to customize these tips to your situation.

The Art of Listening, for Customer Experience Improvement

clearaction — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:59:53 +0000

Curiosity is the key to great listening skills that improve customer experience. When you’re truly curious about your customer’s opinions, expectations and requests, you’ll find the customer to be more pleasant, interesting and fulfilling to you as well. Get Over Me-Focused Listening! It’s easy to tell yourself you’re listening when in reality you’re focused on yourself. Whenever you worry about and think about what to say next, you’re not focused on the customer. Whenever you feel bored or compelled to end the discussion, you’re probably focused on your own agenda. If you feel a sense of urgency to fix the situation or person or circumstances, you’re probably more interested in serving yourself rather than the customer. Practice Customer-Focused Listening Skills It’s really pretty simple to be customer-focused. Be curious! 1) Allow yourself to wonder what the customer’s world is like. 2) Focus on the customer’s body language as much as his/her words. At least 80% of communication is non-verbal. 3) Clear the clutter in your own mind, and do not let yourself be distracted while your customer is communicating with you. 4) Try to understand the reason why the customer is saying what he/she is saying. Did you know that 95% of thought, emotion and learning occur in the subconscious mind? If you’re having trouble comprehending the customer’s message, ask for a metaphor — this is the quickest way to tap into the subconscious and ‘get on the same page’. 5) Verify your interpretation with the customer before jumping to conclusions. Check to see that your interpretation of the customer’s message is correct, and after you explain something to your customer, check to see that their interpretation of your message is correct. The Personal Touch Goes a Long Way We’re in the information age, where abbreviations, slang, and short-messaging are the norm in our communications. Yet, in business, a return to more formal communication really pays off. Don’t risk mis-understanding others, or being mis-understood by cutting corners in your listening habits. A little patience can give you the ability to re-assure your customer that you truly understand him/her. In these times, this ability may be very important in differentiating your customer service to keep the customer coming back, to purchase more from your company rather than others. Think about your own favorite experiences as a customer: upon reflection, you’ll find that there’s nothing more powerful than feeling heard, and getting the response you need in a timely and pleasant way. By improving your curiosity level with customers, you’ll find that you enjoy your work more, and customers enjoy their experience with your organization. In the meantime your improved knowledge of your customers will enable you to develop a sixth sense, to anticipate customer needs and to consistently delight your customers. Contact the author to find out how to customize these tips to your business.

To Improve Customer Experience, Help Me Help You!

clearaction — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 04:39:38 +0000

You’ve heard of garbage-in, garbage out, right? It’s amazing how often work teams put up with substandard inputs “thrown over the fence” from groups they rely on for information or materials to do their work. Faulty inputs lead to imperfect outputs and inconsistent customer experience. Everything that external customers receive is the result of business processes. Any business process is typically deployed by several departments. Otherwise, it’s likely a sub-process of a bigger process that delivers value to external customers. In other words, a business process involves a value chain of internal suppliers and internal customers. Help your internal suppliers help you deliver better customer experiences — analyze your business processes and proactively communicate with your internal suppliers. Timeliness and quality of handoffs throughout this internal value chain snowball exponentially toward revenue-generating customers — for better or worse. The key is to work backwards from the customers’ viewpoint, like peeling an onion with successive layers of handoffs deeper and deeper into your organization. Here are 7 steps for improving your process: 1. For your business process, determine its inputs and outputs. 2. Identify its internal and/or external customers. 3. Collect data from customers regarding their expectations and challenges. 4. Modify the business process to enable it to deliver what its customers want. 5. Identify its internal and/or external suppliers of inputs. 6. Specify requirements of inputs, evaluate current inputs, and communicate requirements and performance to the suppliers. 7. Establish an ongoing schedule for repeating the preceding six steps, as many forces over time cause change in customer expectations and challenges. Prevent customer hassles by managing more effective handoffs — upstream and downstream from your point in the organization. You’ll find yourself enjoying your job, being more productive, dealing with less waste, and improving profits! Contact the author to find out how to customize these tips to your business.

Inventing Great Customer Experiences

clearaction — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 01:01:25 +0000

Every person in an organization is needed for customer experience innovation. That’s because customer expectations and competitive offerings are always on the rise. Your processes, policies, skills, and motivations have a lot to do with keeping customers coming back — and even more to do with customers deciding not to come back. Think of your own situation as a customer — whenever you’ve decided not to go back to a certain product or service or place, it was usually because you were turned off by a process, policy, skill, or motivation, right? For example, at Procter & Gamble — the company that makes Tide, Duracell, Cover Girl, Pampers, Pringles, and much more — every one of their 100,000-plus employees is expected to continually innovate customer experience. Those employees work in a manufacturing company, not stores. So how do they innovate great customer experiences? They do it by developing new product ideas, cutting cycle time and costs, improving skills, creating new ways for customers to access value, and making processes and policies more customer-friendly. How do you invent great customer experiences? 1) Find out what outcomes customers expect. This is different from product or service features. Those are just means-to-an-end. The outcome is what the customer really buys. 2) Find out how customers make value judgments of each outcome. This is different from satisfaction levels. They want outcome A to be minimized, or outcome B to be increased — get the customers’ wording for this, and maintain that wording to measure your performance. 3) Find out #1 and #2 for the whole customer experience — from the point when the customer becomes aware of a need through the point when the customer no longer perceives that need. 4) Think about your role in helping the company succeed on #1 and #2 and #3 above. You do play a role in customer experience. Discuss it with your peers. Make good things happen. 5) Track the customer’s value quotient: the ratio of desired outcomes to undesired outcomes. This gives you an idea of how much value versus hassle the customer sees. Customer behavior follows this automatic benefit-cost analysis. 6) Monitor your motives. If your primary reason for any decision or behavior truly has the customer’s best interest (see #1 and #2 above) at heart, then you’re on-track. On the other hand, if your own gain is the primary reason, with customer’s gain as a secondary reason, then you’re on the wrong track. 7) Borrow ideas from others. Not just competitors, or you’ll only be a me-too company. Be curious and open-minded about how other industries and cultures do things. Learn from them, adapt and experiment, and use what works. 8 Be creative. “There’s this common perception that some people are creative and most aren’t. That’s just not true. As a leader, you want everyone in your organization producing novel and useful ideas. The fact is, all the research in this field shows that anyone with normal intelligence is capable of doing some degree of creative work.”¹ 9) Love complaints. When a customer take the time to share suggestions or vent frustrations, you can bet they’re representative of a larger number of customers that share that sentiment — or soon will, unless an improvement occurs. Better for you to hear it and make the change before your competitors take that revenue stream. 10) Make quarterly — or more frequent — assessments of your policies, processes, skills, motivations, products and services. Assess them from the customer’s viewpoint. Always keep on the lookout for ways to invent great customer experiences. ¹Teresa Amabile, head of Entrepreneurial Management at Harvard Business School. These tips come from the new e-handbook, Innovating Superior Customer Experience. See the webcast and sample book pages at clearaction.biz/innovation. Your 20% discount code is “ology”. For tips on how to customize these tips for your situation, contact the author.

Building a Customer-Centric Culture

clearaction — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:23:07 +0000

CLICK HERE FOR INTERNET RADIO VERSION What Does it Mean to be Customer-centric? To have the customer’s best interests as the focus of your attention — not to be pre-occupied in your own interests at the customer’s expense. To do this, you need to: (1) Really know the customer in order to anticipate their best interests. (2) Differentiate between primary and secondary motives.

Customer-Centric Primary Motives: Making it easier and nicer for the customer to get and use solutions. Self-Centric Secondary Motives: Building revenue and profit through new product development, word-of-mouth, etc.

There’s a myth that talking often to your customers (sales, service, surveys, etc.) means you’re customer-focused. However, customer-focus goes beyond lip-service to the primary motives that drive your behaviors. Gap in Desired Versus Actual Customer-Centricity Half of companies say they’re extremely customer-centric, but when customers of those companies were asked, only a tenth of them said those companies were extremely customer-centric.¹ Why is there such a huge gap? When you think about who makes business processes and policies within a company, it’s usually the workforce that doesn’t interact directly with customers. Three-fourths of companies say that customer experience is not well defined and communicated within their company.² Half of companies say they have fair or little knowledge of customer demographics, behaviors, psychographics, and transactional histories. Less than a tenth of companies say they have excellent knowledge of customers.² Three-fourths of companies say their employees aren’t well versed in how to delight customers.² Ways to Really Know the Customer This represents an opportunity for those who work directly with customers to share valuable stories and facts with the rest of the company, to help the entire workforce live up to their brand promises. We usually think of marketing, sales, and customer service as outward-facing, with only outbound deliverables. Yet, if a company is customer-centric, then concentric circles around the customer mean that marketing, service and sales are the natural conduit for helping the rest of the company — engineering, finance, human resources, production, operations, technology, safety, accounting, etc. — understand their impact on customer experience and customer profitability. Three-fourths of marketing groups say they don’t influence the customer service function⁵ … so you can imagine how much influence marketing has on the rest of the company! Customer-facing professionals can sensitize the whole company toward the customer’s plight and priorities: (1) Make sure customer stories reflect the customer experience spectrum. (2) Use creative ways to share customer stories: - Intranet - Internal newsletters - Bulletin boards & posters - Lobbies, break rooms, war rooms, conference rooms, cafeteria - Staff meetings (3) Involve organization in learning and adapting their mindsets — this is the organization-wide journey guiding everyone on managing their personal impact on customer experience, called internal branding Return on Investment Your company makes huge efforts and investments in communicating your value proposition, which is the brand promise that shapes customer expectations. Customer satisfaction occurs when the customer’s experience meets or exceeds their expectations. Trust — being true to the brand promise — is biggest the biggest factor in building a customer-centric culture that maximizes customer profitability. Notes: ¹CMO Council: Customer Affinity study. ²Peppers & Rogers: Customer Retention presentation. Contact the author to find out how to customize these tips to your business.

Do The Whole Job for Customer Experience Success

clearaction — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:31:12 +0000

CLICK HERE FOR PODCAST VERSION (3:40) Whether you’ve got external or internal customers, they expect you to ‘do the whole job’! Show that you care about your customer … after all, if your customer decides he or she no longer needs you, you may be out of a job. Customer Care Beyond Lip-Service It’s easy enough to talk about commitment to customers, but what does it really mean? Whether you make an offer to a customer, or the customer makes a request to you, your sincerity is obvious to the degree that you do the whole job. That means standing behind your word, demonstrating your word of honor. In previous centuries, words really meant something — to the point that duels were fought, contracts were not as necessary, and people felt a compelling need to make their words true, or deal with the consequences. In the information age, we may take our words for granted. Yet customers continue to expect follow-through, and they vote with their wallet for those who best meet their expectations. Anticipate Customer Expectations One of the best habits you can build is anticipation of customer expectations. This skill pays off in every aspect of your life. To do this, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. To do that, learn everything you can about your customer’s world. And it means you need to examine your motives in your business decisions and activities. Are you putting the customer’s interests first? Really? Be honest with yourself, be more generous to customers, get to know their world very well, and anticipate what they expect. This puts you in the driver’s seat for managing the customer relationship. And you are more likely to earn admiration, loyalty and the financial benefits you seek from your customers. Carry the Ball Instead of referring the customer to someone else or someplace else, take them there yourself, or do the legwork yourself and get back to the customer with your findings. Instead of leaving the next steps to the customer’s initiative, carry the ball in finding a full solution to your customer’s need. Consider your competitors’ delight in taking over to solve the customer’s needs. Drive the ball past the goal line. That’s the essence of doing the whole job! Double-Check the Customer’s Perspective Just because you want to move on to other things, does not mean the customer feels you’ve done the whole job. Ask them — not just at the end, when fatigue may cause the customer to prefer moving on with some other solution provider. Ask your customer, at each juncture in your solution delivery, whether there is anything else they expect. More than 80% of communication is non-verbal, and 95% of thought occurs in the unconscious mind. You may get a more honest answer if you ask for customer opinions in terms of metaphors describing their level of satisfaction with the situation. Do the whole job and you’ll enjoy more secure customer relationships. You’ll benefit not only in the short-run, but also in the long-run as you build customer equity, lifetime value and reliable profit streams. Contact the author to find out how to customize these tips to your business.

What IS Customer Experience?!

clearaction — Fri, 01 May 2009 21:27:36 +0000

by Lynn Hunsaker, head of ClearAction (www.clearaction.biz) CLICK HERE FOR PODCAST VERSION (4:50) You probably hear lots of “customer …” phrases that seem interchangeable. In reality, there are big differences in these terms, although they are related.

Customer Experience: customer’s journey from realization of a need until the need no longer exists.

Customer Satisfaction: customer’s perception of reality compared to their expectations. Experiential Marketing: providing an extraordinary experience as part of a marketing campaign. User Experience: intuitive and functional aspects of interfaces between a customer and technology. Customer Retention: duration of a customer’s relationship with a brand. Customer Relationship: breadth and depth of interactions between a customer and a brand. Customer Churn: customer’s defection from a brand; customer switches to an alternative solution. Customer Relationship Management (CRM): effort to optimize customer relationship, usually with the help of a database that contains data about customers and interactions. Relationship Marketing: effort to optimize customer relationship through personalized and long-term oriented marketing activities. Customer Loyalty: customer’s preference for, or insistence on, a specific brand. Loyalty Marketing: effort to optimize customer loyalty, usually with the help of purchase frequency incentives, experiential marketing, relationship marketing. Customer Touch Point: any interaction between a brand and a customer; it is always an opportunity for a customer to adjust opinion of a brand. Customer Advocacy: effort to represent the customer’s best interests. Customer Affinity: how attractive a brand is to a customer. Customer Value: customer’s perceived total benefits less total costs. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): sum of profit from a customer over a lifetime of purchases. Customer Equity: sum of all customers’ lifetime values for a brand. Customer-Centric: customer’s best interests are top priority.

Customer Experience Management (CEM): organization-wide customer-centricity aimed at optimizing customer experience, customer value, and customer equity. All of the terms listed above are subsets of CEM. CEM defines the way everyone in an organization does all they do, and their motivation for doing it.

Complimentary Worksheet From ClearAction

CEM: An Economical Strategy Most marketers focus on attracting and converting new customers, which is a much-needed role. However, although this focus is obviously tied to revenue, it doesn’t guarantee higher profit or sustained market share. One of the great things CEM does — thanks to organization-wide customer-centricity — is remove wasteful and non-customer-friendly policies and practices. This results in lower waste inside a company, and hence lower costs and higher profitability – and greater ability to pass along savings to both new and existing customers. CEM is customer-centric, systematic, holistic, and preventive of negatives: * Encourages outside-in thinking and processes * Demands a much broader view of what the customer experience is * Views the customer’s experience strictly from the customer’s viewpoint * Values existing customers as much as new customers * Keeps customers returning by managing expectations — not by removing choice * Increases brand equity by strengthening the brand promise * Differentiates the brand in ways that are hard to copy * Helps to avoid competing on price * Enables great strides in customer value to be made on a shoestring budget * Is a lucrative opportunity for marketers to drive brand value and company growth. Customer experience management improves both bottom-line and top-line results by organically keeping customers happily giving you great referrals, share-of-wallet and market leadership. For a limited time, ClearAction is offering a free worksheet: How Customer-Centric is Your Company? Contact the author to find out how to customize these tips to your business. Here’s one of my favorite explanations of CEM.

Everybody Has a Customer

clearaction — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 02:27:54 +0000

CLICK HERE FOR PODCAST VERSION (5:07) Is there any job that doesn’t have a customer? If you work directly with paying customers, you obviously impact customer experience. If you don’t:
1. Eventually, the job you do ripples to those employees who do work directly with customers — don’t drop the baton!
2. Inside your company, the job you do has internal customers — figure out how to make their experience excellent! What everyone in a company does can be reduced to one of two functions: to serve the customer or serve someone who does.¹ Think of the purpose of your job — why is it worthwhile for the company to fund your position? To answer this, big-picture thinking is needed. Ultimately, what you do in your job must be important in some way to the needs of paying customers. Your answer is the beginning of customer-centric thinking. Customer-centric employees always keep in mind their purpose from the perspective of paying customers. First and foremost, what do you do that is in their best interest? What could you do that might better serve paying customers’ best interests? Companies with higher than average customer satisfaction and retention also have higher profit.² Of course that’s important for job security, budgets and promotions. Secondly, what might you do better to make smooth hand-offs to your internal customers? And thirdly, what’s in the best interest of your work group and yourself? This order of priorities is extremely important. Most employees think they are customer-centric, while their customers strongly disagree.³ It’s easy to be ethnocentric about customer-centricity! Enthnocentrism is the tendency to look at the world primarily from the perspective of one’s own culture. When priorities get out of order, your work becomes self-serving. And that does not pay-off in the long-run. There’s no escaping the reality — you do personally have customers! Beyond the impact to your boss and co-workers, your job has far-reaching effects on paying customers. What goes around comes around, and you’ll reap higher-than-average business results by doing all you can to be customer-centric with the right priorities. ¹Dr. W. Edwards Deming. ²Aberdeen Group,Customer Experience Management, August 2008. ³CMO Council, Customer Affinity, July 2007. For more tips on Employee Engagement, see the ehandbook Customer Experience Improvement Momentum 20% discount code = “Ology” Sign-up for ClearAction Newsletter.