Partner Article

Going from Lip Service to Real Service:  Listening and Acting on Customer Concerns

Now more than ever, customers have a wide array of channels through which they can share their thoughts after an interaction with a company. A single customer has the power to significantly damage a businesses reputation, as their review or opinion can appear online, be spread by word of mouth or even be brought to the attention of an investigative reporter. A customer’s experience, whether good or bad, can greatly influence an organization’s image and bottom line sales.

Too often, organizations are unable to answer the simple question of: “Did my customer have a good experience today?” Few have adopted a holistic approach to collecting customer experience data, thereby leaving many companies with a lack of information to support their decisions, often leaving a skewed view of customer feedback. Given the wrong information, companies could be associated with overlooking their customer’s concerns, or providing “lip service,” where a disingenuous expression of support is not followed by action.

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Companies are beginning to take notice to the importance of answering customer needs. The demand is there, and businesses have the ability and technology to proactively ask for feedback immediately after an interaction.

The first step in tackling this oversight is to implement a comprehensive approach to Customer Experience Management (CEM) that ensures an organization is providing the experience customers expect, real service. However, the key to a successful CEM program requires substantial organizational commitment, investment in a CEM platform and overcoming several challenging barriers.

CEM: The Benefits Package

Establishing a customer centric model will equip organizations with the ability to listen and act to customer concerns in real time, thereby boosting customer satisfaction and the overall business reputation. In addition, by refining its services in areas where customers are dissatisfied, an organization can reduce churn, increase customer retention and improve revenue.

For example, a US financial institution used a CEM program to reduce their operational costs related to employee training during the heart of the financial crisis. With a CEM program in place, they were able to drastically reduce their training costs, as employees only received training that was relevant to their individual scores. This visibility encouraged employees to improve their behaviors and knowledge, which resulted in increased motivation, decreased employee churn and overall improved customer satisfaction.

Who Gets What?

A customer’s concern needs to be heard across an entire organization. However, information that is relevant to the executive team won’t necessarily be the same as what’s appropriate to front line employees.

Distributing the Data

Getting pertinent information to the correct person is a key hurdle organizations continue to try and overcome. The relevance and delivery of this information is imperative to target operational areas for customer experience improvements immediately. However, the format may vary based on the employee’s role.

By implementing a CEM platform that can automate the distribution of data and enable the configuration of alerts, the appropriate people can gain access to customer insights as needed. Negative survey responses can be flagged for immediate attention, notifying the appropriate manager immediately. Higher-level executives will receive dashboards identifying business areas that are showing improvement or need additional support.

Utilizing the Data

Once a CEM program has been implemented to collect, measure and report on customer’s experiences, what are the next steps? Next is deciding what to do with this information and how to turn it into actionable intelligence.

1. Evaluate Satisfaction Levels

There is always room for improvement; in what areas are your customers dissatisfied? Observe the customer experience and satisfaction scores across various solutions, such as Purchase Experience, Contact Center Experience or Online Channel Experience, and delve deeper into those various experiences to get an idea of which metrics are most important for your organization to improve on.

2. Identify Key Metrics Impacting Customers

Once you’ve identified which metrics to target for improvement, it is essential determine what impact these will have on key drivers. Do this by conducting correlation analysis to see which metrics have an impact on customers. From that point, it should become clear where to focus your efforts.

3. Ensure Consistency of Delivery

In order to ensure consistent delivery of your CEM solution, it is important to identify any significant outliers within your CEM reporting. These areas can be efficiently targeted through micro training specific employees to improve areas of low scoring.

Summary

To adopt a comprehensive CEM solution, companies need to clear four key barriers:

• First, the benefits of a CEM program must be understood in order to garner full commitment from an organization in delivering top service and quality to its customers (real service, not lip service).
• Next, information must be appropriately tailored for all levels of an organization, providing executives to frontline employees with the information they need to better their service and their customer’s experiences.
• Third, customer experience information must be distributed in a timely and relevant fashion, utilizing a platform that can provide automation and preconfigured alerts.
• Finally, an understanding of how to leverage customer experience information must be acquired and acted upon.

Implementing a customer experience program may seem daunting. However, it is important to understand the key barriers described above and how to overcome them to deliver the best possible customer experience.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Syed Hasan .