When You Absolutely, Positively Want Loyalty
FedEx is known for absolutely, positively getting packages to their appointed destination overnight. But its more recent focus is to absolutely, positively continue to raise the bar on its customer experience, according to Om Chokriwala, managing director of strategic marketing. During his presentation at the recent Customer Feedback Week, Chokriwala revealed how the company is doing so.
FedEx handles about 6 million shipments a day; that’s 6 million opportunities to increase or decrease customer satisfaction. According to Chokriwala, customer satisfaction is at an all-time high, as evidenced by the company’s 10 percent growth to $35 billion in revenue. So why change? The company tends to grow at about the same rate as the U.S. GDP; if the GDP slows, FedEx doesn’t want its growth to slow with it. And competition is increasing.
One way FedEx plans to maintain that double-digit growth is to increase its focus on the customer, Chokriwala said. The company created a loyalty vision to help guide its customer strategy. The four element of that vision are:
1. Create and retain loyal customers
2. Create a loyalty index that the company can use to measure performance
3. Understand customers’ loyalty drivers
4. Make decisions based on those drivers
One major objective, Chokriwala said, is to improve loyalty by linking feedback, operational performance, and actual customer behavior. “We weren’t measuring the whole customer experience from their perspective,” he said. So FedEx created what he called the Customer Experience Corridor, which comprises nine areas and defined 42 attributes within those areas that qualitative and quantitative research findings said were important.
“Brand, experience, price all drive loyalty,” Chokriwala said.
FedEx uses three main tiers of customer feedback. The company conducts major customer satisfaction research once a year at the enterprise level, hosts customer experience panels twice a year, and conducts moment-of-truth research within 24 hours of a specific customer experience, which gives the company actionable insight it can quickly follow up on. The queries include questions on overall satisfaction, plans to repurchase, and likelihood to recommend.
The company aligns its external customer research with its internal performance measures. “This ensures that we’re aligning customer experience and company priorities,” he said. It’s a strategy that for FedEx really delivers.
