Top 5 Inhibitors to Customer Experience Success and How to Remove Them
By Juned Ahmed, Founder, IndianAppDevelopersGrabbing customer attention is the first and most important aspect of your business. Thereafter comes retaining taking their interest further to convert it into business and then you need to retain your customers and make them replicate into more business volume. That is the clear path of business.By simply knowing your customers need and what do they want you can just garner support in favor of your business. But what are the inhibitors from doing these things right and making customer experience better? To answer these questions we have come here with 7 great inhibitors to customer experience success and tips for removing them. To ensure that the customer experience of your company gets better you have to address these inhibitors by perfecting your business process in several areas.Inhibitor No.1: Taking ‘focus on customer experience’ as a wise catch word Many companies start with the wise statement that their commitment lies in making customer experience better. Accordingly with the corporate statement some customer focused planning is done, scoreboards are made and some active measures are taken. But the approach being a preconceived one without having any basis on the ground experience soon just proves to have no substance except false words and actions without specific goals. This happens because the principle of customer focus did not come from some valid real life customer experience that can further push development for customer centric business plans.Solution: Make your commitment statement to focus on customer experience invariably accompanied by a specific plan of three month, six month and twelve month duration. Secondly, make the specific roles and responsibilities of personnel clear in carrying out this plan. Thirdly, just like a guiding road map provide update to all the team members regarding the position of the team in carrying out the plan. Give everyone a clean understanding of the goals reached and what is left to do. Inhibitor 2: Not prioritizing and segmenting the work into milestones As mountaineers in their pursuit in crossing a summit just crosses milestones one after another before reaching the top height, there are several success points in carrying out a mission. Even when you are actually far away from the ultimate goal you can just count the already covered path behind the progress made so far. This is why the entire task needs to be broken into several milestones and they should be laid out in the plan one after another as per their priority. Furthermore, determining separate scores for each piece of work is a clear way to objectivise the work process.Solution: To know the value of a piece of work in making customer experience better you need to know the exact business value or potential value of the individual or a group of customers addressed by that action. Making a solid accessible framework that provides customer data is important for this. Secondly, making calls to high value customers directly by the customer leaders can be a great measure. Lastly, your business organization must create a good training apparatus to make employees learn in improving customer experience across business dealings. Lastly, business leaders by sensitizing employees on their accountability for customer benefits and issues would help garnering customer experience success.Inhibitor No. 3: Taking outcome metrics like survey report more seriously rather than organizational metricsOutcome metrics live survey scores often represent various factors rather than just organizational aspects and so taking them seriously you are likely to have a false notion concerning customer experience. Outcome metrics cannot be taken as the performance score for the organization as these metrics other than the input of the company carries other influences as well.Solution: Know the operational metrics where customer impact and experience is impacted more. Organizational and operational metrics such as Key Performance Indicator (KPI), Mean Time to Readiness (MTR), Time to Response, etc. can be more effective in assessing the customer satisfaction. Inhibitor No. 4: Absence of engagement from top executives Executives in many companies are seen to make only the vocal job as far as their commitment to customer satisfaction is concerned. They just rely on the subordinates or personnel responsible for that area. This results in a very loose approach towards addressing customers.Solution: The business must engage the executives and leaders in the customer centric business process invariably. Especially when it comes to focusing on a priority area the experience and managerial skills of the executives are too important. Moreover, it is their involvement that can make the team moral high in serving and addressing customers. To engage executives create a metric that clearly shows the relation between experience and ROI. Make it explicit how non-involvement of senior executives results in loss of customer base. Secondly, you can always call the customers you have lost and then just place the issues raised by them over a customer life cycle map. Thirdly, show the executives how great incremental growth has been achieved by avoiding loss of customers. Lastly, make it obligatory for every executive to call 5 to 10 lost customers in every month.Inhibitor No. 5: Taking actions purely based on people’s opinion rather than real customer need A great array of companies including many giants in various business niches just take actions and measures depending on so called gross opinion they gather from various sources rather than going deeper into what actually their customers need. Moreover, when they research on customer needs they just try to validate their preconceived plan by gathering bits and pieces of opinions and few facts.Solution: To address this you need to listen to customers rather than the opinions that are in the air or being advocated internally. You can listen to your customer and track their needs by tracking the information shared by your customer to your call center executives or to your retail store manager or to your social page or over other interactive platforms. Make it a point to train your executives and personnel to listen to customers attentively whenever they happen to interact with them and formulate the feedback in a precise way for further use.
About the Author: Juned Ahmed is the founder and marketing director of IndianAppDevelopers, an app development company that empowers web and mobile applications for small to big brand business houses.
