People sometimes ask me ‘what does it mean to be Customer-Centric’?
The answer, in a nutshell, is that the Customer Experience outcomes are factored into all decisions in the organisation which will affect the Customer Experience. On the surface, this seems fairly easy to achieve – the management of customer channels should take into account Customer Experience outcomes – but in reality this goes right to the heart of the way the organisation operates.
Perhaps some examples will illustrate this:
- A company implemented a new method of managing the high street outlets for its products. Unfortunately, this created confusion around stocking, and customers were not able to access all the products consistently from one high street to another. Since the Customer Experience was not being connected to the organisational cause, it took quite some time for this to be uncovered and solved.
- A company implemented a new call handling process for the call centre which forced agents to handle calls in a standardised process. This met the goals of the software implementation project, but failed to take into account the needs of the customers, and the agents, and call handling times went up, as well as satisfaction going down.
- A company has various Customer Experience initiatives, but still uses sales conversions as the primary measure of success. Whenever there is a tradeoff between going for the short term sell or an improved Customer Experience, the short term sell always wins. Over the long term, the Customer Experience suffers.
- Each customer-facing channel is managed separately within the company, and operates in a silo, and this is reflected in the channels themselves – print, web, mobile, TV, Social Media and phone all have completely different Customer Experiences, are unconnected, and seldom cross-promote.
In each example, the way the company is organised has a major impact on the Customer Experience. The systems, processes, structures and rewards which the company has chosen to use have resulted in particular Customer Experience problems.
This is strange, because, as we see from the multichannel report, companies see the Customer Experience as a major problem, and all of the companies in the examples are strategically focussed on solving this. The only explanation can be that the connections between cause and effect are not being made.
Here are some more questions to ask about the way the company organises itself around Customer Experience outcomes:
- When the IT department purchases a new software system, even internal-facing ones such as KM systems, are the Customer Experience outcomes accounted for?
- If they are, are the measures of Customer Experience accurate? (or does it just measure a component or Customer Experience, such as satisfaction)
- Companies are naturally organised into silos, but do these silos help or hinder the customer experience? Where they hinder it, are there mechanisms in place to counter this?
So what can companies do to become more Customer-Centric?
Here are the three steps to success.
- Identify which Operational and strategic decisions are affecting the Customer Experience by carrying out an Operational and Strategic Customer Experience audit.
- Make improvements to these Operational and Strategic factors
- Measure the improvements.
If you have any questions about becoming more Customer-Centric, please feel free to get in touch.
