Improving Customer Experience

It’s popular to tout customer-centricity, yet it’s very difficult to consistently demonstrate. The word centric means having a specific thing as the focus of attention and efforts. Customer-centric means that concerns other than the customer’s well-being are in the background while the customer stays in the foreground. That may seem simple enough, yet reality proves the elusiveness of customer-centricity. From the blog Customer Experience Optimization: (5:00).

Social media introduces excellent tools and customer feedback data streams for companies to monitor perceptions and trends. Best practices in customer experience management: a) Use social media listening first to determine how best to interact with customers; b) Recognize the importance of making emotional connections with customers via social media; c) Blend social media with other voice of the customer sources to create a holistic view of customer priorities; and d) Leverage customer stories from social media to energize employees enterprise-wide in continual improvement of customer experience. From the blog Customer Experience Optimization: (6:14).

What Does it Mean to be Customer-centric? To have the customer’s best interests as the focus of your attention — not to be pre-occupied in your own interests at the customer’s expense. To do this, you need to: 1) Really know the customer in order to anticipate their best interests. 2) Differentiate between primary and secondary motives. How Marketing and Customer Reference Managers can help build customer-centricity enterprise-wide. From the blog Customer Experience Optimization: at http://customer.ology.com (3:48).

You probably want to feel great more often! How can that happen? It’s up to you as a supplier to create excellent customer experiences that result in enthusiastic positive word-of-mouth and great business results. It’s up to you in all the decisions you make. Featuring the book I Love You MORE THAN My Dog: 5 Decisions That Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times & Bad, by Jeanne Bliss. From the blog Customer Experience Optimization: at http://customer.ology.com (4:38).

'Too much information’ (TMI) can hurt customer experiences. It can be tempting to brag or complain about things as the customer waits for something. It can be easy to get long-winded telling a story to a customer. Be careful! Not only is TMI inappropriate and unprofessional, but it turns customers off. It can negate an otherwise stellar customer experience. From the blog Customer Experience Optimization: at http://customer.ology.com (3:10).

Social media contains a wealth of information about the customer experience, and savvy managers are paying attention. the social Web is full of customer comments, and engaging customers in conversations enables opportunities for building brand reputation, customer service, competitor analysis, sales leads, employee engagement, and new product development. From this perspective customer experience is 'the new marketing'. From the blog Customer Experience Optimization: at http://clearaction.biz/blog (6:44).

You’ve probably heard of the blind men who touched part of an elephant and were adamant about their interpretations. Businesses are in the same predicament without customer data integration for a panoramic viewpoint. Examples from Hewlett-Packard. From the blog Customer Experience Optimization: at http://clearaction.biz/blog (7:17).

For holistic customer experience management, the challenge is horizontal alignment to deliver intentional customer experiences. Keys to horizontal alignment, and what it takes to energize your customer experience strategy as a long-term journey enterprise-wide. Examples from Symantec. From the blog Customer Experience Optimization: at http://clearaction.biz/blog (8:04).

Traditionally, Marketing takes the organization’s message to the customer base, but now equally important is Marketing’s potential to take the customer base’s message back to the organization.

Marketing sets up the value proposition that the brand represents, but ultimately customers define what brand truly means to them. The way we actually deliver the value proposition is more relevant than what we tell customers. Examples from Aon Corporation. From the blog Customer Experience Optimization: (4:00).

A new understanding of innovation success factors is making traditional logic obsolete. Successful innovation has less to do with the best investment, technology, research and designers, according to Booz Allen Hamilton: “Unless their R&D efforts are driven by a thorough understanding of what their customers want, their performance may well fall short — at least compared to that of their more customer-driven competitors.” From the blog Customer Experience Optimization: at http://clearaction.biz/blog (4:12).