Every business in its quest to succeed will strive relentlessly to acquire and maintain profitable customers while attracting new ones. The edict is this, when you have worked so hard to bring them on board and aligned with your service delivery, what next can you do to ensure that you keep them satisfied and engaged? How do you sustain a happy and satisfied customer base while keeping your business on track competitively?
Every business is determined to have customers say nice things about them and even promote their goods and services to other potential customers. This trend is shown clearly on the broad journey map where businesses strive to create awareness of their products and services, ensuring that they are visible and easy to find (‘Findability’), maintaining a great reputation in the customers’ eyes, and keeping them engaged until the purchase is made, following which the customer leaves to return later and even becomes an advocate championing your brand to others.
This sounds like the perfect journey. The big question is, how you can keep this story going for as long as you can sustain it and even improve while you are at it? I bet most organisations know the answers to these questions, but fall short of the harder path of mobilising the organisation to deliver great experiences consistently. Here are a few pointers that can change the narrative for you and help boost your experience agenda sustainably.
First, you must be clear about who your customers are, and what their dislikes and preferences are as you work to address their needs proactively. Second, know very audibly what a good customer experience looks like, now and in the future. Third, develop your touchpoints for turbulent flights and happy landings. Fourth, develop and sustain a customer-centric organisation. Fifth, know how to become customer-centric. Sixth, deploy tools to consistently measure your service delivery, and work on feedback to improve consistently.
There is a strong case for making sure that you go to this length. Forbes has reported that 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience; Research by McKinsey & Co has also found that brands that improve their customer experience see revenues increase as much as 10 to 15 percent, while lowering the cost to serve by 15 to 20 percent. Therefore, more businesses need to become aware that customer experience and profitability come hand in hand.
Your customer
The traditional definition of the customer an individual or business that purchases another company’s goods or services. Customers are important because they drive revenues; without them, businesses cannot continue to exist. All businesses compete with other companies to attract customers, either by aggressively advertising their products, lowering prices to expand their customer bases, or developing unique products and experiences that customers love.
Think of the likes of Apple, Tesla or Uber. Apple can afford to remove features from their devices and continue to sell absurdly high volumes. Fact is not just sales, their customers would never trade the Apple ecosystem for an alternative – not without putting up a fight at the very least. I can personally attest to this as a colleague of mine in the UK has said that he wouldn’t trade his Apple for anything else. Apple has successfully leveraged word of mouth marketing by showcasing their customers as part of their advertising campaign. Brand advocates they are.
Tesla has managed to go beyond capturing the interest of the traditional car buyer and made their vehicles a part of pop culture. Even those who have little knowledge about cars would be looking at getting a Tesla, simply because somebody has raved about it, in person or on social media. Uber’s customer advocacy programme works for both traditional cab users as well as riders. It has made it extremely accessible for people to get a cab service up and running by using referral schemes.
We must not forget that there is a broader definition of the customer – the internal and external customer. As much as we dwell on the external (traditional) customer, we must not forget those whose duty it is to keep the customer happy and engaged – the employee. Ricardo Semler introduced ‘corporate democracy’ in his business – Semco – years ago, with amazing results; a clear indication of how impactful an internal customer-friendly environment can be in influencing the customer-focused orientation of a business.
Good Customer Experience
It is of prime importance that as a business, you pursue a path of ensuring that you inspire your charges on delivering a compelling vision with everyone aligned. Friedrich Nietzsche, the great German philosopher once said, ‘When one has finished building one’s house, one suddenly realises that in the process one has learned something that one needed to know in the worst way – before it began’.
How we develop and sustain great experiences is through learning, more than anything else. From the boardroom and everything in between the learning, orientation is necessary to help your business understand intuitively the needs of the customer and strive to keep pace with them as they journey through your touchpoints. This means you must be listening frequently and be prepared to respond to the needs as they emerge from customer engagements.
By providing your customers with unforgettable experiences that match their preferences you can make decision-making easier for them. In the UK, I learned something profound about customer loyalty by observing a clothing retail chain. They saw customers come out from shopping for clothes at their stores and go into other retailers to buy groceries so they decided to include groceries in their product lines, locating them by their stores so that customers bought clothes and went in there to buy groceries. It worked!
Turbulent flights, happy landings
I have shared this story before but still worthwhile sharing again. Years ago in faraway Singapore, I met a former boss of mine who had relocated there. He was excited to see me so naturally, we went out one evening for a meal. I recall the sugary kebab we tasted as he reminded me of the Ghana (spicy) version. Well, we ended up in this restaurant where we were served our meal.
While eating he noticed that the lobster he ordered had a funny taste so he called the waiter’s attention. The poor waiter was overly defensive and would not accept that something was wrong but his manager spotted the argument between my boss and the waiter, so he quickly came over and asked the waiter to serve another table while he went on to apologise to my boss and even went further to offer a replacement. Although my boss declined the offer, his countenance changed as a result of the manager’s intervention.
My personal experience of taking home groceries for free due to a machine malfunction is still firmly etched in my memory. In reality, negative customer experiences usually arise in one of two ways: product problems (such as bugs and malfunctions) and unsatisfactory support. What is critical here is how you recover from these pitfalls. By recovering a poor customer experience, you’ll demonstrate your ability to solve problems, increase clients’ loyalty and show genuine concern.
From your choice of words to managing your emotions, and providing appropriate responses, your efforts at recovering from a bad customer experience will be duly rewarded as the customer warms to your genuine depiction of remorse. All a customer craves is a successful outcome to every engagement – A happy landing.
Customer-centricity
A good question to ask oneself is, who is the customer? Is it just your existing customer? Other stakeholders? We must bear in mind the fact that our customer is not necessarily interested in how we are organised. She/he wants to be seen as a person and wants to find what she/he needs fast. She/he wants it easy. Years ago, when I was in my IT lead role, we paid a visit to a prospective network provider whom I must admit was very organised and was even keen to demonstrate to us his power backup capabilities to prove that he could deliver ‘always on’ network services (99.9%). This was a network provider so backup was important.
We paid two visits to their site and in both instances, he took us around and even showed us his generator capacity and all. On our return back to the office, our boss, who was with us on the first visit, asked if he could showed us around including the generator and office organisation details, he was being sarcastic of course. In the end, we did not select his company in the bidding. Our interest was more in the service delivery than their excellent set up and technology. Being customer-centric means prioritising your customers’ needs and responding promptly and aptly to them.
Measuring success
If you have an effective means of assessing how the customer feels about your brand, then you are in a good place. A satisfied customer will not hesitate to recommend your products or services to a colleague, friend, neighbour, and so on. As the customer experience discipline has matured, more work has been done to create measures that help connect the experience to business results.
One of the widely adopted methods is the Net Promoter Score (NPS), developed by Fred Reichheld, a partner at Bain & Company, USA. In 2003, he created a new way of measuring how well an organisation treats the people whose lives it affects — how well it generates relationships worthy of loyalty. NPS relies on a single question, the answer to which correlates to improvements in business performance.
The measure asks customers to say ‘how likely they are to recommend your company to a friend or colleague’ using a scale of 0 – 10, where scores 0 – 6 are labeled as detractors, 7 – 8 as neutral, and 9 – 10 as promoters. By taking the percentage of scores between detractors and subtracting it from the percentage of promoters, you derive the Net Promoter Score or NPS. The greater the conversion from non-transacting to transacting customers, the likelihood it is that a positive experience has been delivered.
There are other measures, such as Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) surveys and others. What is important is how it serves your purpose in terms of how your responsiveness to customers aligns with your mission as a business.
Here are some tips and ideas you can use to improve CX: Engage with leaders in your industry, invite your VIP customers to events, send them a ‘Thank You’ postcard and call your customers to thank them.
Delivering a poor customer experience can cause tremendous financial loss. Customer expectations are increasing as they become more empowered. Having the right strategy in place and executing the best customer experience practices helps you improve conversion, and drives retention and loyalty, irrespective of the size of your business.
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The Writer is a Management Consultant (Change and Customer Experience). He can be reached on 059 175 7205, [email protected], https://www.linkedin.com/Kodwo Manuel |
