Simple 1 Minute Wisdom:
“Hire for the attitude, coach on the skills. Embed the company culture of valuing customer service at the core of each persons IDENTITY and each TRIBES Mission & Values. Recognise & Reward exemplary results.” Constant and NEVER ending optimisation and improvement of the Customer Experience is an ongoing, life-long, process. LEaderships / management’s day-to-day activities must focus on indicating that customer experience is a competitive differentiator. The problem: low employee morale (49%) and disengagement are the greatest obstacles to the success of your customer experience management improvment process. Customer service training will NEVER FIX this! Anothe rproblem…Lack of a clear strategy for Customer Experience Management (CEM) (36%)
Steps to transforming your organisations Customer centric focus and actions
- Clear strategic coordination among managers of CEM methods.
- CEM as a determinant of corporate strategy and CULTURE.
- Presentation of CEM status and ongloing survey results to all employees.
- Calculation and Sharing of customer lifetime value (CLV).
- Action on survey results by owners of customer experience key drivers.
- Strong Funding of cross-organizational collaboration.
Brand Champ or Chump?
People buy from people. People who bring true empathy, authenticity, connection and sincerity to the service battlefield win more often. Research shows that 70%) of customers left a service touchpoint because of a lack of attention from front-line employees. The #1 trait for Service effectiveness is knowledgable empowered empathy. The core “people skills” for service warriors are resilience, respect, patience, listening, care, clear communications, and passion. This is vital as your front-line employees are your brand champions or brand CHUMPS!
The Battle for Customer’s Hearts
Research indicates that “71% of business leaders believe that customer experience is the next corporate battleground.” So… Hope is not your ideal strategy for increasing customer satisfaction, engagement and loyalty. All people want to be recognized, appreciated and valued. SHOW them your appreciation. Start each day, session, or shift with “Why are we here?” and then share current challenges and ask for solutions.. Involve everyone in delivering WOW service.
Denial is Deceptive
This means that the entire organization must align with the excellent customer experience vision (destiny), strategy and standards. Companies need to empower, energise and align all employees to ensure they deliver memorable customer experiences.
Reality Check…“80% of CEOs believe their brand delivers a superior consumer experience yet only 8% of consumers agree.” How then do we create a customer-centric organization that your customers agree is superior?
Satisfaction or Loyalty?
Satisfying customers needs are not enough to keep them forever! To drive ongoing growth and profitability you must generate customer loyalty.. on a sustainable basis, which means you need to orient your entire organization around that Customer Centric mission.
Real customer loyalty is not a short-term proposition; rather, it is a long-term commitment to your products or services, company or brand.
In order to create and build Loyal Customer Ambassadors and improve customer retention, your Tribes must be truly customer-centric. Full enlightened and proactive Customer-centric organizations attain higher profits and greater growth than non customer-centric organisations. The key difference is how you focus your Tribes.
Steps to building your tribes around the core elements that characterise and inform the customer-centric culture of your organization:
- Shared customer-centric vision, Destiny
- On-going focus on customers’ needs
- Accountable, empowered and energised staff
- Readiness, Willingness, and Ability to shift/change
- Happy@Work (Engaged) employees
- A Tribal Culture level 4 or level 5 …. Beyond “ME”
- Equal Internal & External customer orientation
- REAL Inspirational leadership & management (“Kill” the GREEDERS)
Organizations must map the customer experience in order to build a culture around servicing it. They then need to provide all customer-facing staff with immediate access to the knowledge and information they need to intelligently handle customer issues. Companies need to have a deep interest and curiosity about customers needs and wants and make customer centricity the core fabric of the tribal and company culture. The new customer centric approach and culture design must encompass the entire customer journey including pre- and post-purchase.
The Softs skills are the HARDS Skills today
Regular and ongoing “soft skills” (which are the hard skills in Customer centricity), training is vital when designing and sustaining a successful “client-centric” culture. Smart companies will deputize “customer advocates” within each department so there is always someone looking out and communicating inwards from, and for, the customer’s perspective.
A customer-centric culture starts by hiring the right people. the key is changing individual, Team, Tribe and organisational company behavior to match what customers needs/wants.
Show how and where the customer journey crosses silos and provide joint solution with joint rewards to cross silo relationships and results. All in all, creating a customer-centric culture demands that “brand promise match brand experience.”
Here are the Top 10 ways to build a stronger customer-centric organization and increase profits:
1. Focus on Generating Customer Loyalty. According to the latest research from the Customer Contact Council, customer loyalty is the best indicator of future customer economic behavior and profitability. Returning customers and those to whom they refer to your business keep the cash register ringing.
Have a loyalty mindset. Know the lifetime value of your customer. The Harvard Business School has put together a Lifetime Customer Value Tool that estimates the cost of acquiring a customer and the net present value of that customer’s business during his or her economic lifetime. You can check it out here.
In most cases, a customer generates a profit for your business only if he comes back after his first experience, since the cost of acquiring any given customer far outweighs the gross profit produced by one transaction with that customer.
2. Go Undercover. Be your own undercover boss. If you are a small business, have someone who will be brutally honest with you shop your store, call on your business and try to do business with you. This will allow you to find out what your customers experience in doing business with you. The feedback you receive will be invaluable. This exercise is almost always a profit-building experience because it helps identify leaks and missed opportunities.
3. Be Easy to do Business With. The most effective way to create customer loyalty is to provide a low-effort customer experience. The easier it is for customers to take advantage of your product or service, the more business you will generate. When you limit the amount of effort customers have to expend during their customer experience, they will want to come back.
Take another look at your policies and procedures – which ones were designed and implemented with the customer as first priority? If your answer is “none” you are not alone. Most companies design policies and procedures to support company functions or protect the company in some way. That’s okay, but the trick is to find a way to accomplish this in a way that does not jeopardize your efforts to build customer loyalty. Great companies find the right balance!
4. Learn to Sell on Value, Not on Price. Poor-performing salespeople sell on price because they do not know how to effectively create value for the customer. Unless you’re Wal-Mart, or unless you’re the proverbial Wal-Mart of your particular industry, competing on price is growing increasingly difficult in the current business environment. Most companies have to build a value proposition for the customer based on other customer needs that rise above price.
5. Seek Referrals. Learn to ask for what you want. Proactively ask those existing loyal customers to actively refer their family and friends. Ask them to share the value of your business with other consumers.
6. Treat Your Employees the Same Way You Want Your Customers to be Treated. Employees, like children, will behave in ways that are consistent with the manner in which they are treated. So, if you want your employees to provide great customer service, treat your employees well.
Reassess your employment culture. Are your people positive and upbeat, or are they micro-managed and not trusted? The behavior of your employees will be transferred into the employee-customer dynamic. Employees create loyalty with customers because their interactions make your customers feel something. You want that something to cause your customers to come back again and again and to promote your company, products/services and brand.
Loyalty is an emotional reaction to your business, not a practical reaction to your products or services.
7. Be Proactive. Don’t wait for business to walk through your door or for your phone to ring. You have to have a sound method of being proactive in telling your story and engaging customers and prospects. I have participated in several BNI (a business and professional networking organization) groups and have encountered a number of lazy business people trying to build a business. They seem to believe that if they just join the group, the business will come. Nothing could be further from the truth! In business, it takes a great deal of effort to get the ball rolling and keep it rolling. In addition to working hard, you need to work smart.
8. Set Performance Standards and Expectations.
Your success in creating and sustaining customer loyalty and driving profitability is directly related to the commitment and productivity of the people who work in your business. To that end, it is critical that management sets effective performance standards and expectations, and then creates the positive accountability to make them meaningful. When this is done the right way, employees become energized and empowered to take ownership of their positions; management becomes inspired, everyone knows what is expected of them, and productivity increases. The process also tends to open up new channels of healthy communication inside the organization.
9. Create a Culture of Accountability. I refer to accountability in #8 above, but accountability deserves its own discussion for this reason:
Everything that matters inside your organization revolves around the discipline of accountability.
Accountability means taking full responsibility for your behavior and your results in the execution and accomplishment of your role. There are three kinds of accountability: organizational, managerial and personal.
• Organizational Accountability is all of the employee handbook-type stuff. It is how the overall organization holds people accountable. The attendance policy is a good example of organizational accountability.
• Managerial Accountability is how your managers and supervisors hold their direct reports accountable. Some employees only do what their boss tells them to do; in absence of being told what to do, they tend not to do very much. If employees are held accountable only from an organizational or managerial standpoint, it takes a great deal of effort and energy to just to reach and maintain mediocrity.
• Personal Accountability is how an individual holds himself accountable to the high business standards set inside the organization, as described in #8 above. It is each person’s individual commitment to living up to his purpose with passion and professionalism. A company’s success in generating customer loyalty and profitability is dependent on a high level of personal accountability among a critical mass inside company.
10. Train and Coach. As much as you might like them to be, the skills and behaviors necessary to create customer loyalty and profitability do not come naturally for most people. When it comes to execution and performance on the front line, do not take anything for granted or leave performance to chance.
Hire the attitude, then train and coach the skills and behaviors that will create loyalty and profitability.
Too many businesses view training primarily as a cost. However, the right kinds of training and coaching will give you one of the highest rates of return of any business investment you can make. Do not ignore the coaching side of the equation – if the objective is changing and improving behaviors to drive performance, providing training without coaching makes as much sense as buying a car but never fueling the gas tank. Remember the ABCs of performance improvement – Always Be Coaching!
These are the Top 10 business-driving components we use every day with companies to help make them more customer-centric and profitable