Sure, many businesses tout “We Provide A Great Customer Experience”, and sometimes they even deliver – however, a Customer-Centric Culture is the key to gaining and retaining those ever-important loyal customers! It’s the new Customer Experience!
Businesses are spending lots of cash implementing Customer Experience Training Workshops to ensure their front-line people are fully trained and knowledgeable in providing exceptional service. Often, the front-line Managers are trained as well in how to coach and develop and the metrics to monitor in delivering a great Customer Experience.
However, businesses should also strive to delight and excite the Customer – create a Customer-Centric Culture – as a way of doing business – it’s a game-changer!
What Is This Culture and How It Is Created? What Are the Advantages?
In the Handbook of Human Resource Management Practice, author Michael Armstrong defines company culture as a “pattern of values, norms, beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions that may not have been articulated, but shape the ways in which people in organizations behave.”
A “Customer-Centric Culture” is a way of doing business – it focuses on the Customer Experience and shapes the way in which the business behaves. It is consistent and repeatable, and becomes the base of the business’s’ culture’.
Make the Customer Experience core to what you do. Place customer satisfaction at the top and bottom. It should be in conversations surrounding changes to product and processes – always asking “how will this affect the Customer?” The question should be a component of both internal and external communication.
In other words, it’s not just an objective of your Customer Service Team! It’s a requirement of the entire business. From Accounting to Project Management, the Customer’s satisfaction must be a major element of how you function.
All business units should be aware of how they influence the level of service being delivered. Measure your Customer’s Satisfaction and deliver those messages to the entire organization – let each know of their individual impact. Hold them accountable to build and implement objectives, goals, deliverables, and targets to this end.
So does this sound like a lot of extra work for you? For some businesses, maybe. However, doing so could help retain earnings, improve your Customer Satisfaction and Net Promoter Scores, increase loyalty and bring more leads and sales. Everyone likes to work with a business where they are treated as though they matter, where their satisfaction is most important!
Not Interested? Consider This
- Customers have stopped using a product or service 4 times on average as a result of poor customer service
- Research by New Voice Media revealed an estimated $41 billion is lost by US companies each year due to bad customer experiences
- Of the consumers surveyed, 96% say Customer Service is a very important factor in their choice of loyalty to a brand.
- More than half of Americans have moved back from a planned purchase because of bad Customer Service
- On average, consumers tell 15 people about a poor service experience – that’s a lot of negative advertising for any business, large or small
A great Customer Experience has many advantages, including increased revenue, reducing customer churn, and even improving employee satisfaction. According to a recent article in Forbes:
“Temkin Group built a model to show the impact of small improvements on a typical $1 billion business. Using this model, they estimated an average revenue increase of $775 million over three years just by making small adjustments. Those could include reducing wait times or simplifying transactions for customers.”
So Are You Ready? Here Are Some Tips to Get You Started
As mentioned above, make it everybody’s business – all business units. The Customer Experience will suffer if it belongs to only one group or department. Collaboration, education, and full ownership are all critical for businesses to improve in this area.
Hire for the culture you want to build. Right out the gate, regardless of the position, job requisitions, interview questions, and discussions should surround and reveal the candidates’ customer orientation. Doing so will send the message to HR, business units, the candidate, and everyone in between, that you support a ‘customer-centric culture’.
Ask customers what they think. Create an Advisory Board. These Boards can help develop the corporate strategy toward your new culture. Customers would have a lot of valuable input.
Facilitate direct interaction with your customers – get to know them, and let them know you! This will get you on the inside and you’ll learn what makes them tick, what they like, what they need to remain loyal.
Finally, hiring a Customer Experience Consultant, passionate and fluent, can help you facilitate those changes. Working with a Consultant will help free your Team to perform their normal duties so that the change will have minimal impact on your production. A Customer Experience Consultant would not be partial to any unit or department, so their votes would be completely unbiased.
It’s time to get to work! Your competitors are already engaged in creating such a culture because they know the Customer Experience is clearly a differentiator!
