Customer Experience Management Checklist
It's easy for executives to say that they want to use customer experience as a competitive differentiator, but putting action behind those words isn't always so easy. Customer experience management (CEM) comprises service, branding, employee engagement, and the like. In fact, I recently attended Strativity Group's two-day customer experience management (CEM) certification course, and came away with pages and pages of notes on those areas and more.
I poured over those pages and compiled a list of the questions, observations, and advice that to me were most notable. I've presented it here, by area of interest:
Customer value:
+ Executives think, "How can I close the quarter with the most sales?" Customers, on the other hand, want a relationship--especially when a company claims that partnering with customers is what sets it apart from competitors.
+ How many unprofitable customers are you doing business with in the name of market share? Proceed with caution if those customers don't have growth potential. Why? There are myriad obvious reasons, but here are two that are often overlooked: 1. Profitable customers don't want to "sponsor" unprofitable customers. And, 2) you simply cannot delight customers who are not the right customers.
+ One size fits all is the enemy of any customer-centricity program.
+ For many companies it's the prospect, not the customer, who's king. The height of customer commitment often is the same time customers are most taken for granted. This is called the relationship paradox.
Loyalty:
+ Nearly 85 percent of "satisfied" customers will listen to competitive offers. Earning customer loyalty means asking customers to bypass price considerations and to continue doing business with you.
+ When you ask customers for their loyalty, expect them to ask, "Can you reciprocate?"
+ How do we reward customers for doing what we want?
Think "customer":
+ You need to define excellence in the customers' terms, not in your terms. Storytelling will help you communicate what excellence is for your organization.
+ Before you rush to say, "That's not our core competence," think customer centric versus product centric. When Apple introduced the iPod, for example, it also launched iTunes--in other words, a complete customer experience: a device, software, legal downloads, and more. So, when considering what more your organization can do, ask yourself, "Are there mature and tired markets, or just tired executives?"
+ Every touchpoint is an opportunity to excel or fail.
Voice of the customer:
+ Companies that work in a vacuum create their own commoditization. Listen to customers to create an experience that's about them. That's when their purchase drivers move from price to value. It's not about how companies create a product; it's about how customers consume them.
+ Always assume that a complaint represents a broken process, not an individual experience. When attempting to fix the process, define it from the customers' perspective, not yours.
+ Contact centers can provide executives with leading indicators of customer trends.
+ Companies design surveys with a thank-you in mind; customers respond to surveys with action in mind. So when you launch a survey, you need to have a cross-functional team ready to respond to customers' feedback.
Branding:
+ Branding sets customer expectations. Don't promise something the company can't deliver.
+ Customers have more impact on brand than ever because of the Web. Social media, online communities, and the like increase the power of the consumer at the expense of the power of the company.
+ As negative word of mouth increases, so does the cost of acquiring new customers.
Employees:
+ Everyone in the organization needs to understand that they're in the customer business. Remind them: If you don't think you're part of the customer experience you could be subject to "outsourcing."
+ Employees need to understand how their job impacts not just the customer experience, but also the bottom line. Help them understand customer value, segmentation, cost per call, and the like. This will enable them to justify the decisions they're empowered to make.
+ Employees will trust management only if managers add value to their staff. Make employees feel like the missing piece of the puzzle, not one paper clip in a pile of a thousand.
+ Most training today is designed for repeatability, not exceptions. But mastering the exceptions is where employees can surprise and delight customers most.
What advice do you have?
Related Entries
- Guest Blogger Toni Hendrix: Managers' Role in the Customer Experience
- Customer Experience Management Checklist
- There’s More Than One Way to Customer Experience Success (In Fact, Here’s 7)
We are Telecom company based in Saudi Arabia and we are doing a Customer Experience research. Any comments are welcome.
Regards,
Waseem
Aashish,
You are raising a fair question. In fact, our experience is with deploying CEM programs in very large organziations, such as the $12 billion Honeywell Aerospace that was featured as a winner of the 1 to 1 Awards last year.
Yes, the different verticals are a challange to start with, but when you unify everyone around the customer and demonstrate how the current engagement model does not work, people wake up to the reality. There are multiple ways to demonstrate it, including the creation of customer journey, mapping the touch points and scoring quality per touch point.
Another way is to calculate the economics of customer experience. When you demonstrate to the organization what they lose by continuing to be product centric, it is a major wake up call. Check up the Economics of Customer Experience white paper on our site www.Strativity.com it will provide you with great ideas and formulas.
Good Luck On The Journey
Colin,
Regarding the question do customers want a relationship, the answer is, it depends. It depends on their level of commitment to the product or service, as well as their level of trust in the provider. From a vendor prespective, if cutomers do not want relationship, the result is commodity business with high price sensitivity.
There are definitely areas where you will not look for a relationship, others where if the opportunity is right and the vendor is authentic, you will.
Regarding the example with Apple, you are right. Advocacy does not mean blind advocacy. It is still your "reputation" that comes with every suggestion and you would recommend it to the right person vs. being indifferent. Your willingness to share your enthusiasm with certain products as you have done with Apple here is priceless.
Aashish,
Taking action on customer experience initiatives can be complex because many of them involve culture change. Take, for example, something seemingly as simple as getting customer-facing employees to say "My pleasure" instead of "You're welcome" after a customer says "Thank you." The CEO of fast-food chain Chick-fil-a, Truett Cathy, asked employees to make this change, and it took quite a while to catch on, according to Michael McCathren, Chick-fil-A's senior consultant of interactive digital marketing(http://www.1to1media.com/view.aspx?DocID=31274).
In a large organization the culture change necessary to significantly improve the customer experience requires a commitment from the C-level of the organization, as is the case with Chick-fil-a.
It also requires a champion who can help to sell the benefits throughout the organization and who is responsible for getting different departments to work together. But that person can't be a talking head; he or she needs to be someone with real authority to make change happen.
And finally, management needs to match compensation to their customer experience goals. Often compensation is misaligned. The adage "you get what you pay for" is especially applicable in business. If you want employees to deliver outstanding service, compensate and recognize them for doing so. If you say you want outstanding service, but pay employees to keep customer interactions as brief as possible, you're going to get polite yet brief interactions that are most likely less than outstanding.
Colin,
Interesting question about relationships. I'm going to pose your question to Strativity Group.
For me, I think it depends on the type of business, the people involved, and their expectations. I think that much of B2B sales and B2C professional services have an expectation of some sort of "relationship" in which there is a value exchange; and some B2C does, as well, especially where there is repeat business. It might be as simple as "I buy my coffee from you because you care enough about me as a customer to remember my sugar/milk preferences." In B2B the relationship might be about trust: "I'm going to buy from you because you've shown an interest in what my business needs to succeed; someone only focused on the quick sale may disappear when I need them for follow up."
There are many ways to define "relationship," so that itself can be an issue in setting or meeting customer expectations.
Regarding your other point on advocacy, as you point out, advocacy is hugely valuable. Bose is a great example. Customers who love Bose are so enthusiastic in their recommendations that they have helped to build up its reputation to the point where people who have never listened to anything through Bose speakers will recommend them.
Absolutely a fantastic check list...lot of thoughts to ponder upon as to How to Do it after understanding What to do..
Large companies with different verticles have a far greater challange in getting the outcomes of the areas mentioned in the check list... Any further thoughts on this for large companies...
Aashish from Mumbai, India
Great summary. A few comments for your consideration. Re: your first point on Customer value. Why would you say that customers really want relationships? Do you, or any of us working in the customer management field want relationships with your service providers or retailers, or would you prefer to get all the perks one would expect from relationships without having to put out the effort? I would argue the latter. Most of us have enough investments (and fatigue) from human relationships, and not enough return. I would venture to guess that most people want the inverse from the business world - all perks (high value, low cost, quality products, great service) without having to return the effort. I believe customer's want to have their cake, and to eat it too. I do.
As for Loyalty, let's not forget advocacy, unless you've covered it elsewhere. You're right, in that loyalty trumps satisfaction. However, I'm loyal to Apple, but I keep telling my freelancer wife to get a PC laptop for when she's visiting a client site (for a variety of reasons). I'm loyal to Apple, but I wouldn't recommend a Mac to everyone. If Apple conducted voice of the customer research, and measured advocacy, they could find out why people love them but often won't use their products for various business applications. Similarly, some makers of PC products might like to know what they keep doing right, despite low loyalty scores.
All interesting stuff - thanks for generating dialogue.
Lynn,
Thanks! And thank you for the link to your blog post on turning complaints (lemons) into opportunities to improve the customer experience (lemonade).
Lior,
It seems that 'wow' is happening in more and more suprising places (to me, anyway). I went to Staples yesterday, and when a passing associate heard me wonder aloud about a product choice, he politely gave me some information to facilitate my decision. I left happy, product in hand.
Great checklist! It's amazing how ethnocentric we become as companies, where seeing the customer's point of view is a surprising revelation. Huge potential for CEM -- and all its promised benefits -- is represented in your Voice of the Customer section: seeing complaints and survey results as business process opportunities.
Ginger,
You really captured the heart of the certification session. I would add that companies must recognize that the custoemr experience is their core value proposition across all touch points. It is the way to combat commoditization.
Everyone is the customer experience business directly or indirectly.
The last thing, our research show that meeting customer expecttaions is no longer sufficient. We are in the business of wow or nothing.