A culture that supports the delivery of a better customer experience is one where all business decisions are taken in the best interests of the target customers.
Embarking on any cultural change initiative requires commitment, vision, perseverance, courage and effective communication. Achieving a desired shift in the culture should not be viewed as a project with a commencement and end date but rather as a journey with ongoing recognition of incremental changes in line with the desired outcomes.
Demonstrating courage in the vision of delivering a better customer experience is necessary particularly in the early days when the return on investment is not reflected in increased revenues. The courage to persevere should normally result in a more sustainable customer focused firm.
In order to achieve positive change in the customer experience, a firm should focus on the following key steps:
Vision
Clarity of the desired future and why becoming more customer focused is important for a firm (particularly for long term profitability) is critical to create a shared understanding, inspire collective responsibility, coherence of efforts and foster necessary momentum to ensure successful execution.
Customer Understanding
Building a deep understanding of customers is an ongoing process and each interaction with a customer in the service delivery process offers a firm the opportunity to capture additional customer information, which enhances its collective knowledge of its customers.
Customer Journey
The firms that tend to excel in the delivery of an excellent customer experience usually view their service delivery processes through the customer’s lens. They attempt to walk through their processes in the customer’s shoes.
Collective Responsibility
The delivery of excellent customer service is the collective responsibility of everyone in a firm.
Leadership Commitment
The commitment of leadership to effective execution of the customer service vision is a critical success factor. That commitment is usually manifested in a number of ways and it sets the tone in the firm with regard to customer service.
Customer experience plan
Executing a clear vision of the desired customer experience for the target customers requires firms to intentional plan the design process. A helpful starting point is a gap analysis between the current position and desired future.
Values
Creating the right set of values that supports the delivery of the brand promises that a firm makes to its target customers can be an enabler of better performance.
Recruitment
The overall objective of an effective recruitment strategy is to recruit employees with the right attitudes and capabilities because such employees are more likely to deliver wonderful customer service underpinned by effective training and education.
Education and Training
The education and training of employees should be ongoing as appropriate and should help them to understand how their contribution impacts on the customer experience.
Communication
Communication should be consistent and a key message that should be continuously reinforced is that customer service is everybody’s responsibility.
Employee Engagement
Treating employees fairly precedes the fair treatment of customers and ensures that they receive a positive experience. The correlation between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction should not be underestimated.
Transparency
Providing customers with relevant and transparent information that enables customers to easily understand how a firm’s services and service delivery approach are most suited to meet their needs helps to foster a positive customer experience particularly at the customer acquisition stage.
Continuous improvement
A commitment to continuous improvement is a trait that is shared by firms that consistently deliver great customer experience. Such commitment is evident by the willingness to identify, embrace and learn quickly from failures in the service delivery process.
Reward and Recognition
Firms need to ensure that their reward and recognition approaches reinforce the desired behaviours, celebrate success, encourage experimentation and foster learning from both failures and successes.
Measure what Matters
In order to make informed decisions to improve the customer experience, a firm should develop an effective system to measure what matters most to its customers.
Handle complaints fairly
A corporate mindset focused on improving the customer experience helps firms to see complaints as an opportunity to enhance the customer’s perception of the firm.