If you want to be relevant and ensure your business model can adapt to market needs, the single most important source of information is your customers.
This requires continual, real-time pulse checks of customer emotion, at a transactional level. That way, you can start to build a picture of what your customers are really saying and create an agile organisation that is sensitive to what they actually want and need.
But how can you put this into practice? What are the steps you can take to think strategically, but still do the best by your customers? Here is our checklist of how you can think like a CEO, but act like a customer.
There's no substitute for reading customer comments. It's so powerful to go through pieces of unstructured text – the genuine comments that people have made. Spend time digesting this information. Uncover what customers have to say and get a sense of customer emotion through the actual feedback, not just the aggregated response report or summary.
Typically, when customer information is internalised, all the emotion is stripped out of it and we tend to rationalise it. We put it in reports; we've probably got graphs and charts. But this doesn't tell you how your customers are feeling, which is the most important part of why they decide to stay or ultimately leave.
So, step outside of the organisation. Spend time with a range of your customers. Ask them what they really think and get an outside perspective.
It’s often a real struggle for organisations to find a way to operationalise a customer-centric approach across the business. How do you prevent it from being another initiative, another action, another KPI or another incentive program? If it is a program, it will eventually die.
It has to be a cultural thing. Create a movement within the organisation, sharing those little nuggets and stories that have surfaced from the frontline. Share them through a bulletin or a newsletter throughout the organisation. Only then will your customers start to live as real people, rather than just numbers and revenue.
Work closely with those areas of the business that have quite a lot of customer interaction (people that are in the field or in the Contact Centre). Look to engage them in gathering feedback from customers. Oftenyou’ll find yourcustomers have more positive things to share than you fearedbut may also highlight niggles and frustrations that you were previously unaware of.
Rather than relying on team leaders to share positive and negative feedback, by giving frontline staff access to customer comments they can see their performance in real-time and know exactly what they need to do to improve, or where their efforts are being appreciated.
Recognition can be more important than monetary rewards. Often, what frontline staff really want is praise from senior management – acknowledgement that what they do is important and that it has a significant effect on the organisation.
Have a mechanism in place, like a town hall, so good customer stories can be highlighted and shared. There’s nothing better than highlighting positive customer feedback. It helps to bring the customer and their view of their experience into the heart of the organisation.
Take your customer experience to such a level that your customers are actually making suggestions and sharing ideas about product development. Instead of just collecting feedback from your customers, open up a genuine dialogue with them – a two-way conversation.
This gives you clear ideas about what you need to do better and what your products or services might need to look like, based on their suggestions. By doing so, your customers will feel as though what they have said has influenced the direction of the company. They feel they're in control. In this case, rather than the shareholders determining the strategy of the company, let your customers take the reins.
If you're ready to take your customer experience to the next level, check out our Infographic:
