Who Owns the Customer Experience in your Organization?
Answer: Everyone Should.
Who drives the Customer Experience strategy?
Answer: The Leader who is responsible for providing customer service.
The executive team should be 100% supportive and enabling of the necessary collaboration to establish a Customer Experience that is the best in Delivering Service Value.
The foundation for delivering outstanding service requires your touch teams to:
- Know your Customer.
- Understand how they use your products or services.
- Ensure this information is shared with all of your customer touch teams.
Don’t have a CRM tool? No worries, the Sales team gathers this information during the sales process. Good ol’ fashioned text documents or customer profile forms will work just fine. Don’t let the lack of fancy tools prevent you from this most critical step of understanding your customers.
Create a Customer Experience Map.
Build your strategy by understanding what is happening today. Start by mapping out all customer touch-points and by whom. Be sure to delineate between the type of outreach: email, phone, and face-to-face. Depending on the size of your organization, this is likely to be a collaborative effort with your sales, marketing, service and fulfillment teams. Don’t think you can effect real change without the participation of these other teams.
After you have your map of touch points by whom and by type, fill in the expected timeline. For example, if you send a Welcome letter then be sure you have designated the timeline of when this letter is sent. Is it with the first order? Is it as soon as the opportunity has been converted to a customer with a signed contract?
Example: Welcome Letter -Email – Marketing- Upon Signing of Contract
If implementation and/or training are a part of your customer rollout, then be sure to include general touch-points and timelines.
This map is the start of your Customer Experience strategy. Once you map what you have, then add what should be included. From there, drill down into each touch-point to specify what, whom, how and when. Final Step: communicate, communicate, and communicate.
Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages. …Henry Ford
The ultimate goal for your business is to figure out how to create the exceptional experience and establish it as the standard.
Coming next…Customer Onboarding. What is your current process? What makes it exceptional?
Carter McNamara of Authenticity Consulting, LLC, provides organizational development, consultant training and Action Learning services, and is developer of the Free Management Library.