Are you a Chief Customer Officer, a CEO, or a CMO who has been given the responsibility of Customer Experience Management?
Do you have an interest in the latest developments in customer-centricity, customer experience and customer satisfaction?
Then this article is for you.
It describes a common, but flawed, approach that many organizations inadvertently take when first embarking on their CX journey. Then it outlines the rationale of a better way, and it describes what to do next.
When CEOs ask: “How do we best go about becoming more customer-centric?” I always tell them about one trap that a lot of organizations fall into. You see, many senior leaders then go on to ask: “We want to be more customer-focused as an organization, but how do we go about it? What do other organizations do?”
And often the answer is: “Ah, they do Net Promoter Scoring. Let’s do that as well.” And the result is that at great expense and effort they then go and get their NPS score, but they don’t know what to do with it, other than to say: “Let’s do better next year.”
But they don’t know how.
If you want to embark on a customer-centricity journey for your organization, you’re better off making sure first that your organization is actually ready to be customer-centric.
Did you know that there are tools available to help organizations to measure their internal READINESS for customer-centricity?
Using these tools you can determine:
– where your organizational weak points are
– where your strengths are
– where your “low hanging fruit” is
– and it will help you to benchmark your organization on how ready you actually are to be customer-centric
And then, once you have benchmarked your business, then you should ask: “Where should we roll our CX implementation program out first?” It makes a lot of sense to do so in two of the most customer-facing and most revenue-generating parts of your organization, namely your sales and your marketing teams.
Then, only once you have established customer-centricity within your organization, then it makes sense to go and get the Net Promoter Score or Customer Satisfaction Index, because then the feedback that you are receiving from your customers can actually be acted upon. And you’ll be in a much better position to act on it. And your customers will see that there is immediate response to their feedback and they will feel that their feedback was valued.
“Don’t just go and do the NPS just because everybody else does it.” Start within your organization, get your own house in order first, get yourself ready to be customer-focused, and then take it from there.
Your customers will reward you for it with their loyalty.
