Customer experience is about so much more than call-center scripts or proper protocol around customer complaints. The best companies, the ones we know as customer experience leaders, adopt a customer focused view to everything. They instill the values that matter, not just the process.
Large organizations however are big beasts. Silos make understanding the customer journey that much harder. Here are five ways to encourage your organization to become more focused on what matters – the customer.
1. Share the best stuff!
Too often, the worst case scenarios are all we hear about when it comes to showcasing customer experience. Companies like Rackspace, however, have learned to highlight when something wonderful happens. Their fanatical recognition of customer service reps who go above and beyond is a crazy example of getting it right. What if your company spread the news about great experiences just as much as bad ones? Everyone throughout the organization can learn from those positive moments.
2. Get to the root cause.
Customercentric culture is all about being proactive. If customers are complaining about the same issue over and over again, it’s time to figure out what’s really going on. Sprint made a point of doing this and ended up saving billions – that’s with a B! – by proactively addressing the issues causing complaints. Don’t let complacency win. Don’t allow “that’s how it’s done” to be an acceptable answer. It’s simply not.
3. Deputize your ambassadors.
With meetings and department responsibilities and urgent deadlines, it’s not terribly surprising when organizations go days or even weeks without really considering their customer’s experience. I’ve witnessed how taking one person from each department and asking them to serve as true ambassadors for the customer can make a big difference. Holding monthly lunch and learns for these special ambassadors can keep them fresh and dedicated. Rotating the responsibility can help you get many people involved. Asking your best people to serve in this way can have a huge impact on the rest of the organization.
4. Communicate in shareable ways.
Creating a customer-centric organization from the inside out requires serious word-of-mouth messaging. Help your people who don’t interact with customers understand what that is like. AT&T created an internal tribe of employees who were asked to share information only when they felt it was appropriate for their personal networks. This led to more sharing beyond what the brand alone could do. Creating bite size pieces of content about your customer experience helps everyone – inside and outside of your organization – understand what experience you’d like to create.
5. Lead by listening.
Leaders of any organization should be interacting with their customer experience on some level every day. The CEO and executives should listen to the call center, walk through a digital experience or roam the floor of a store to really experience what customers do everyday. If leaders do this, they are much more likely to understand the issues and correct them quickly. It’s one thing to hear customers are complaining about something, it’s another to stand there and hear the complaint directly.
How can you get your organization to deliver an exceptional customer experience?
Happy Customer Experience Day!
This post is part of the Customer Experience Professionals Association’s 2014 Blog Carnival. It is part of a broader celebration of Customer Experience Day.
Image credits: WikiThreads, Global X via Creative Commons license
