A customer experience expert recently provided some great advice in a best practice sharing session. Our expert was helping a counterpart from another company who is just starting the journey to improve customer interactions with his support organization
Background: Customer feedback identified some challenges the support team has meeting customer expectations. The head of the support team intends to make changes and become more customer-centric.The suggestion was made to hire an external training organization to help get them on track, but first he wanted to find out what other customer intelligent companies are doing in similar situations.
The Advice: The customer experience expert didn’t jump on the bandwagon to hire an external trainer. Instead, he suggested, “Some of the fundamental aspects of building a program include: vision, expectations, definitions, and accountability. If you do those things, everything else will fall in line.”
- First, you need to define success. If you don’t know what success looks like, then the effort to improve the customer experience can be ineffective since your team doesn’t have a vision of what they are striving for.
- Once you know what success looks like, you need to set clear expectations around
delivery and performance. - Help your team understand exactly what they need to do. (This is where the training comes in…not before.) Make sure they understand the behaviors and actions needed to achieve the vision and meet customer expectations.
- Finally, be sure to provide ongoing feedback and coaching so they continue to move towards the vision. Hold them accountable.
Doesn’t the advice make more sense than just hiring a training organization? How would you know what your training needs are if you have not defined the end goal? I love how the advice aligns with the message in this edition of Walker Weekly to start your VOC program off on the right foot.
Sometimes in our desire to take action, we skip a few steps along the way and end up going in circles. Instead, the key to success is simply to start with the fundamentals.
Kitty Radcliff
Vice President, Consulting Services
Image courtesy dreamstime.com
