Will your customers stay? Take a moment to pause, reflect and honestly answer that question. Your response to this simple question is important to reflect upon.

• If you are confident that your organization is serving your customers well, ask yourself “What builds this confidence?”. What investments are you and your team making to ensure that you know your customer? How are delivering a strong value to them? How can you learn from your successes (and shortcomings) improve on the value you deliver?
• After reflection, have you determined that your organization is underserving your customers? Well nothing is more important than diagnosing why and solving the problem. In a competitive environment, your business won’t survive without loyal customers.

Now, what if you aren’t confident answering the above question? What if your answer is “I don’t know how well I am serving my customers.” Unfortunately, this is an all-too-common reality that organizations face. Clients have asked this exact question many times. If you are not confident in answering the question above, you are not alone.

So what do you do?

It’s important to establish a stronger feedback mechanism within your organization. This will help you learn from your customers, solve current challenges, and invest in winning solutions.

Regardless of how you answered the question above, all organizations have an opportunity to consider thier customer experience (CX) strategy. It will position you for long term sustainability and growth.

Customer Experience is not Simply Customer Service

Customer experience is sometimes misunderstood as customer service. Customer experience is the full experience your customer has from browsing to buying to unboxing to usng your product. Customer service is part of your organization’s broader customer experience, but it’s often the last step not the first step.

A customer typically contacts customer service if there has been a breakdown in your customer experience. As orgnaizations become more customer centric, customer service teams can shift to how they serve customers. They can focus on delighting a customer vs fixing an issue.

Customer experience is a holistic way to view your company’s relationship with customers. Whether directly, or indirectly, every team contributes to the customer experience. Leaders must not only cast a vision that puts the customer first, but they must live this ethos, and invest behind it. This means enabling all teams to refocus around the customer. A few examples include:

• Research and development can be testing and evaluating their innovations with customers. They can seek to understand what’s working, what’s not, and integrating their learnings to improve future designs. This requires time and investment. But the added feedback can drive product success to entirely new levels.
• Marketers need to have an acute understanding of the customer. They know their pain-points, what product benefits matter to them, what messaging resonates. The marketing team is responsible for engaging with customers in high-impact ways. They also equip the rest of the organization with what matters most to the customers. To do this they need the ability to connect with customers. They need to build feedback loops with other teams to share this information.
• The Sales team engages customers at one of the most critical parts of a customer journey — the point of sale. But this also means engaging them in longer term discussions about what they may need or want in the future.
• Customer Service teams engage with customers throughout their journey with your brand. This team is responsible for serving customer sin critical moments. They can also help create a feedback loop, by sharing customer feedbcak. This will position your organization to constantly learn from your customers.
• Operations and Supply Chain ensures customers have a great post-purchase experience. They ensure on-time delivery of products, and meet the standards your customers expect. This is a key place that our shared values with our customers come into play. How a product is made, stored, and shipped is becoming ever more important. You do not need to share proprietary information, but customers care about the stewardship of brands. Working with other teams, operations and supply chain can help bring this to life for the customer.
• Finally, dont forget about the proverbial back-office functions like Finance, Accounting, Legal, HR. Each team plays a role that contributes to an positive customer experience. Each are critical enablers of a well-functioning business.

Customer experience is not the responsibility of one department. It is the responsibility of the entire organization.

Why Customer Experience Matters

“Our companies are all based around our customers, right? We all got into business to be able to fill a need or deliver value to our customer basis. We don’t exist without our customers, so it’s really important to make sure that we understand who they are, and what the value that we are going to be able to deliver to them is.” — Tracy Eames | Building Teams Podcast Episode 3

How to Deliver an Excellent Customer Experience

So, how can you improve the customer experience in your organization?

Identify Your Core Customer: Define who loves your brand.

Constantly Learn from Your Customers: Tools like surveys, interviews, and focus groups are invaluable. Ensure that you’re consistently gaining new feedback from your customers. How to Create a Great Customer Experience.

Make it Easy To Engage with You: Remove the barriers required for customers to gain the information that they need. Implement tools like an FAQ page provide easy access to frequently asked questions. Make it simple for customers to talk to a live person to handle their questions.

Empower your Team: Give your team the authority and support that they need to take care of your customers.

Measurement: Put metrics in place to gauge how well your team is doing at serving your customers. Hold yourself and your team accountable for consistently improving the customer experience.

Do you have more questions? Book a Consult.

 

TEAMES & CO is rooted in the idea that effective teams deliver memorable customer experiences and exceptional business results. Our solutions are customized to ensure your path to growth outpaces your competitors and keeps your customers front and center. We can help you identify ways you can improve customer experience, develop a plan, and implement that strategy. Contact TEAMES & CO for more information about how you can grow by improving your customer experience.