A lot of people think that senior management are the most important internal stakeholders. But that’s probably a misconception.
Typically, there is a general understanding at senior management level that customer experience is important. The real struggle is how do you operationalise it? How do you prevent it from being just another initiative, another action or another incentive programme? How do you turn it into part of the company culture?
By engaging with the frontline, you can start to create a small movement within the organisation, sharing those little nuggets and stories that have surfaced from the frontline team and distribute them through an internal bulletin or newsletter. Then your customers will start to live as real people rather than just numbers and revenue.
Now if you're going to ask for feedback, you really have to be prepared to act on it. If you put yourself out there and say "We're listening" and then don't deliver, you’ve set an expectation and you've got the potential to disappoint customers even more. If you make the decision to say, "As a company, we're going to be all about customer experience", then you really have to be. Because if customers don't feel that they're being listened to, it's very easy for them to switch and go to somewhere that they know they'll be heard.
If you can get it right, then this is where your customer loyalty is going to grow. People will know they can come back to you and you’ll actually listen. But even if you get it wrong, even if the brand makes early mistakes, then it can still help. As long as you're proactive about making it right and explain to the customer that that's what you're doing, then often, that breeds the most loyal customers. They've just had a really negative experience, but you have managed to turn it around and make it positive.
So instead of thinking of your more senior, board-level colleagues as the main stakeholders in Customer Experience, it’s time to start thinking of your frontline staff as the main stakeholders in your customer experience, as these are the people who can make all the difference.
To find out how thinking differently about your Customer Engagement can benefit your brand in our Webinar: Customer Engagement for Rebels
