How to create a customer centric culture?
The three elements of customer experience.
I currently work for a client with customer experience (CX) delivered to external clients via a robust framework. It consists of three elements:
- Marketing: They created the customer journey lifecycle, used personas and segmented their audiences.
- Clients’ input: They use the voice of the customer to stay relevant and listen to feedback on the always-changing client expectations.
- Skilled employees bu training and development: they make sure people who are talking to clients get feedback, training and development opportunities and management monitors in a good way the performance of the teams within the client contact centre.
However, this robust framework is ignored if we look at the delivery of services to internal clients, and this surprised me when I researched this for them.
We see this represented in company policies, the wording within the internal department’s intranet (lots of jargon or subject slang), and the advisors’ delivery. Why not use the framework to provide your clients with the best possible service and create the Wow factor?
How to create a customer-centric culture?
To create a customer-centric culture, you need to enhance your CX strategy (Soule, et all, 2016). How to do this?
- Listen to the users of your service/department and combine this voice of the customer with existing data (Sacolick, 2017) to understand the level of customer satisfaction.
- Invest in skills: make sure your team lives and breathes clients and that they know that one size does NOT fit all.
- Keep your focus and attention on your client. Wishes and demands change over time; you must stay on top of their needs. One way to do this is to use your staff to talk to clients in person (not via email or phone) and have an actual conversation. When you take time for them, they will open up and share their needs which will prepare you and your team/company for the future.
Resources:
Sacolick, I. (2017). Driving Digital. The leaders guide to business transformation through technology. American Management Association, New York.
Soule, D., L. and Puram, A., Westerman, G., & Bonnet, D., (2016). Becoming a Digital Organization: The Journey to Digital Dexterity (January 5, 2016). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2697688.
