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Keep the Lines of CX Communication Open

Keep the Lines of CX Communication Open

What’s in it for me? That’s the question key stakeholders will ask as you build your customer experience management (CEM) roadmap.

What they’re really asking is:

  • How will they or their team benefit?
  • What will they be expected to do differently—and at what cost in terms of time and effort?
  • And, how does their role link to customer experience, satisfaction, and loyalty?

With the groundwork of your CEM program defined, it’s time for formal communications with your key stakeholders to answer those questions, and to gain their support as you implement your plans.

Who are those stakeholders? They’re the internal and external groups you’ve been surveying and analyzing all along; getting their input to ensure that your CEM efforts will be supported internally, and are as relevant to employees as they will be to customers. Of course, your stakeholders naturally are curious about what it all means to them, their team, and their workload.

Your CEM program sets expectations for process improvements in your customer- and employee-facing operations. You now must communicate those expectations broadly and repeatedly. This will help to ensure understanding, buy-in, and participation.

You also must communicate transparently the results of your CEM strategy. If you don’t share this information, you’ll lose credibility with your stakeholders. Not only will they be less likely to embrace the needed changes to meet the expectations set in your CEM program, but, without follow-up communication, they’ll be left to assume by your silence that the results of the company’s CEM efforts are negative.

Initially, not every component of your CEM strategy will meet its stated objectives. That’s OK. Those elements will likely improve over time with changes and adjustment. In fact, it’s important to communicate the planned changes so stakeholders can stay apprised of progress and improvements, and understand how these adjustments may impact their roles and responsibilities.

But, of course, there will be wins. So, you’ll have a compelling story to tell about those specific improvements in customer satisfaction and loyalty.

You can use tools such as benchmarking and satisfaction studies to showcase your initial and ongoing successes to key internal and external audiences. You can also use these communications tools to further brand your CEM strategy and keep its momentum moving forward.

Remember: Transparency and frequent communication are essential to the short- and long-term success of your CEM efforts. Without those critical elements, your stakeholders will consider CEM as just another “program of the week” and revert to their easier and less customer-centric ways of operating.

 Communications to stakeholders is part of the CEMDNA Assess phase—along with win-back strategy and ROI—and one of the 12 of the components that comprise the CEMDNA Playbook Strategy.

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Using Telephone Surveys to Drive Higher & Better Quality Responses to Customer Service Surveys

Using Telephone Surveys

Surveys have always been crucial when it comes to determining the next steps any company must take to improve its customer service experience. By tapping customers for their honest perspectives, brands open themselves to information that would otherwise remain unknown.

Yet while collecting actionable information in real time drives improvements throughout the organization, the processes behind gathering such data have shifted in recent years. Online surveys have gained prominence, as such methods cost less and are easier to deploy.  Online surveys typically are used to measure customer satisfaction with specific service incidents, such as the handling of trouble tickets.  Multiple choice responses allow customers to comment on such things as first-call resolution (yes or no and how many contacts were needed), the agent’s knowledge and helpful attitude, etc.  Transaction surveys are not meant to evaluate customer loyalty, just the degree of satisfaction with the handling of a specific recent service incident experience.

Particularly in B2B markets, telephone surveys offer invaluable insights and significantly increase survey responses to achieve statistically valid sample size.  As we know, valid sample size is the key component in all survey research.  Also, research shows that telephone responses provide a higher quality response in measuring the customer experience and allows capturing detailed information from key customer contacts (e.g., decision maker, recommender) on critical failures.  This invaluable information can trigger action alerts used to initiate the appropriate corrective action to address key customer issues from the key customer contacts.

In addition, telephone surveys allow a company to insert that personal, human touch that online surveys lack.  Such an approach enhances customer loyalty, as respondents feel they’re part of the process and that their input can effect change. Online surveys do tend to offer open-ended opportunities for feedback, but telephone surveys enable customer service representatives to speak directly with customers so they may gain thorough insight into the reasoning behind the responses as well as the loyalty based on the customer’s overall relationship with the company.  While such data may ultimately be difficult to quantify, it’s this qualitative information that’s necessary to get to the heart of what might be plaguing the brand in question.

Companies must identify their market research objectives carefully before they can determine the ideal channel that will help them achieve their goals. For those looking for responses that go beyond the multiple choice styling of the average online survey, phone surveys are likely to deliver those precise results—but only if the company proceeds with caution. While telephone surveys embolden customers to speak up, such methods must be strategic and succinct.

Researchers must develop hard-hitting questions that maximize value in the shortest amount of time. In today’s busy world, few have the time or desire to spend 20 minutes talking to anyone without adequate notice. The questions, therefore, must allow both representative and customer to get down to business relatively quickly. Prioritizing time in any and all customer interactions, survey or not, demonstrates how deeply the company values its customers, for time has become currency in its own right.

Once the brand has chosen its sample, representatives will conduct the interviews to gather data. The information collected will then be analyzed in an effort to assess the primary pain points driving customer frustration and the overall highlights sustaining customer loyalty.

To further increase survey response rates, companies might also benefit from incentivizing customers to complete the initial online survey. For instance, a company might offer discounts upon survey completion to gain basic feedback. This will allow the company to ease customers into the idea of connecting via telephone. Regardless of channel, however, all companies must reward customers with a consistently superior service experience. By demonstrating that they’ve listened to their base, leaders can bolster brand loyalty and advance their bottom line simultaneously so everyone wins.

Always remember, it’s customers, not products and services, that are the source of all revenue and profits.  Follow these recommendations to drive higher and better responses to customer service surveys and you’ll strengthen your efforts in customer acquisition, retention, growth and even win-back.

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Weaving CEM Into the Fabric of an Organization

CEM and Employee Engagement

The overall objective of any customer experience management (CEM) strategy is to evolve your organization’s DNA to the point where it is entirely customer driven. That’s not going to happen without a robust change management program.

CEMDNA Change Management is one approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from a current state where customer experience is not a primary focus to a desired, future state where the customer is central to all decision making. The approach involves implementing organizational processes designed to encourage stakeholders to accept and embrace customer centricity in their business environment. These include:

Management coaching: Senior business leaders can’t just expect managers to suddenly manage differently because of a decree of customer centricity. Managers need to be trained on how to implement CEM within their team, as well as on any related skills. What the training will entail should be based on your CEM strategy and the specific objectives of any related CEM programs.

Benchmarking: Use best practices examples from your existing customer interactions to showcase your preferred future state. This will demonstrate to employees that customer centricity not only is possible, but also is an established, successful approach that savvy employees are already using.

Measurement: Set performance metrics, such as financial results and operational efficiencies, to guide the change efforts. Also create and track goals for leadership commitment and the effectiveness of internal communications related to the CEM change management efforts.

Process tracking: It’s essential to monitor the progress of your CEM change management efforts. This will allow you to see where you’re succeeding, as well as where you’re stalling. In case of the latter, you’ll be able to quickly uncover the cause of the situation and resolve it to allow for continued forward momentum.

Team coaching: Consider external coaching on the job and soft skills needed for customer centricity to be a part of your organizational DNA. But just as important, ensure that managers are trained well enough to provide initial and continued coaching on the skills most important to the CEM transformation and to ongoing customer centricity.

 CEMDNA change management is part of the Act phase—along with corrective action and employee engagement—and one of the 12 of the components that comprise the CEMDNA Playbook Strategy.

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Treating Employees as an Asset

Employee Engagement

Do you consider the quality and performance of your employees as a major business asset? You should. Indeed, many firms list “our people” as their biggest competitive differentiator.

It’s also true that payroll, benefits, and other direct costs linked to employees are the number one expense item for most organizations. This includes the cost of replacing employees, which is similar to the cost of acquiring new customers.

Add to all this the fact that employees are the ones who interact most frequently with your external stakeholders, and it becomes obvious that happy, satisfied employees breed satisfied, loyal customers, suppliers, business partners, and shareholders.

Even so, most organizations lack a formal, structured employee engagement program to engage, reward, and retain employees for delivering outstanding customer service or to educate them on strengthening their CEM knowledge and skills.

Employee engagement means understanding, measuring, and improving the emotional relationship between employees and their work. It’s about more than employee satisfaction; it relates to measuring and improving items that will directly affect business outcomes. According to Gallup, companies with more engaged employees outperformed the earnings-per-share of their competitors by 18%.

Employee engagement is typically not wholly owned by the HR organization, but requires the active involvement of line management, as well. Here are two areas to consider as you work with HR to build out your employee engagement strategy:

  • Employee recognition and compensation –Set balanced goals based on achieving key performance indicators (KPIs) for customer satisfaction and loyalty. Recognize and reward employees individually and/or by groups. Most important, link employee compensation to achieving measurable gains in customer satisfaction.
  • Employee training– Commit to a continuous employee training program on customer experience management (CEM), including soft skills such as conflict resolution, as well as technical or job-based competence. In addition, take advantage of certification courses that are available in customer experience, CRM, and CEM. This advanced-level instruction can pay big dividends for your company and provide career advancement for employees.

Employee engagement is part of the Act phase—along with corrective action and change management—and one of the 12 of the components that comprise the CEMDNA Playbook Strategy.

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Corrective Action Planning in Customer Experience Management

Corrective Action Planning in Customer Experience Management

Corrective Action Planning in Customer Experience Management

A natural result of benchmarking your current state customer experience against your CX goals is change. Of course, you’ll need to make changes to your customer experience management strategy over the short and long term. But, remember, an essential part of that planning is determining how you’ll respond to issues that customers raise—especially concerns raised by high-value clients. That’s what we’ll focus on here.

Take these five steps to get your customer-focused corrective action plans in place.

Prepare a corrective action plan – Corrective action plans address critical external customer issues. Formulate your plans with two goals in mind: quickly responding to key accounts based up their experience and issues that emerge; addressing internal systemic issues that negatively impact customer-related processes. The latter are often discovered in addressing the former.

Create closed-loop Action Alerts – A critical element of a corrective action plan is to “close the loop” on every action needed. Create alerts that allow you to track the progress of actions taken to resolve immediate customer concerns, as well as address larger systemic issues. This will enable you to be sure that issues are attended to and resolved. Or, they’ll alert you to take any further action required.

Build in accountability for results – Assign responsibility to frontline and management-level personnel to carry out the corrective action plans. Clearly delineate their objectives and roles in taking immediate corrective action, as well as recommending solutions to longer-term systemic issues.

Verify and communicate results – Develop a system that allows you to verify that the corrective actions taken have resolved customer issues. For immediate concerned raised by a customer (especially a key account), be proactive and reach out to other customers who may have experienced the same issue and present your solution.

Additionally, confirm internally that you’ve address any systemic problems that caused the more immediate issues in the first place. Action Alerts are essential to this process.

Once you’ve verified that an immediate concern or systemic issue has been resolved, communicate that out to key stakeholders. Those stakeholders may include customers affected by the issue, account managers, sales or customer service leaders, employees in teams related to the issue.

Review the plan – Your corrective action plan should be flexible enough to evolve over time. Examine your plan’s progress and results on a quarterly basis and make appropriate changes to the plan based on that insight.

Corrective action is part of the Act phase—along with employee engagement and change management—and one of the 12 of the components that comprise the CEMDNA Playbook Strategy.

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5 Keys to Maintaining Customers Relationships

Consumers and B2B purchasers are spoiled for choice. Nearly any product or service they desire is available at the click of a button, in a 100-page catalog, or a short drive away. And they’re spending on those wants and needs. Consider: Retail sales grew 3.8% in 2016 and is predicted to increase between 3.7 and 4.2% in 2017, according to National Retail Federation. And the Institute for Supply Management predicts manufacturing revenue to increase 4.6% and B2B non-manufacturing revenue to increase 4.1% this year, as well.

But that doesn’t guarantee growth for sellers. In fact, while some companies thrive, others stall or fail completely. What do these growth companies do differently than their less successful counterparts? Businesses that flourish tend to use five key strategies to customer engagement and interactions, laying the groundwork for customer loyalty and repeat purchases.

1. Engage, Engage, Engage

Customers want to be served, but they also want to be noticed. They don’t want to feel as if they’re consumers first and people second. In a retail or B2B setting, don’t just pitch the company’s wares; strike up a conversation with the customer and actively listen to what they’re saying. Respond to their questions or comments in detail. This will give them a sense of belonging and help to build trust.

2. Be Available

You never know when your customers are going to need you. B2C businesses should have multiple touchpoints for service, including chat, social, and traditional contact centers. B2B companies will see significant benefits from monthly courtesy calls to their high-value customers, just to check in. Send customers relevant content, such as links to how-to articles, industry news, and product updates. If you’re available to your customers when they need you, they won’t turn to a competitor.

3. Take Advice

You’re never going to survive as a business if you don’t take customer feedback to heart. Feedback helps to highlight problems and opportunities that those within the organization might never notice. Being attentive and concerned, acting on customer input wherever possible, and keeping customers apprised of your actions and outcomes communicates to customers that you’re willing to do whatever it takes to keep their business.

4. Keep Improving

It’s not possible to make every single customer happy all the time. But if you continuously work to improve your customer experience and always aim for fairness and satisfaction, you’ll come out ahead. Complacency is not an option in today’s customer-driven markets.

5. Focus on the Experience

One of the biggest mistakes that a company makes is attributing customer satisfaction to customer loyalty. It’s more complicated than that. Satisfied customers often leave for a competitor that offers a better customer experience—however customers define it: better service, product, price, attentiveness or responsiveness, etc. Customers are driven by their buying experience. So, understand what aspects of your customer experience keeps them loyal to your company and continue to focus on and excel in those areas.

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Do Customers Know You Care?

Retaining today’s fickle customers takes more than discounts and loyalty points. Customers want to know that businesses are there to help improve their life or solve a problem—not just empty their wallet. Here are three ways companies can demonstrate the kind of customer commitment that helps retain customers and bolster loyalty.

Express Compassion and Empathy

Stellar service has long been and continues to be a leading ingredient for promoting a healthy long-term customer relationship. Compassion and empathy during service interactions show that your business cares about its customers. Resolving customers’ issues quickly also highlight that you take their concerns seriously. Acting on customers’ feedback in another way to demonstrate empathy that helps to cement customer loyalty.

Stay Abreast of the Customer’s Contentment

A business should keep in touch with customers from the moment they make a purchase. Automated thank-you emails give the customers a sense of appreciation after they buy from you. An onboarding series can help customers get acquainted with your products, services, and processes, which improves their customer experience. Follow-up messages are also excellent ways to see how customers like a product, as well as proactively uncover any issues.

Frequent check-ups based on customers purchasing habits will increase the likelihood that customers will stay engaged. Personalizing those messages helps keeps customers engaged and allows you to send relevant messages at the right time.

Fresh and Frequent Content

Great content adds value to the customer experience. It engages customers through articles, videos, events, and the like that provide information, education, and entertainment. Savvy marketing teams use content to educate customers on all aspects of their products, services, and brand’s unique abilities. High-value content builds brand affinity and bolsters customer loyalty.

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Avoid These Employee Motivation Killers

It’s essential to arm yourself with various strategies you can use to motivate—and retail—your employees. But, it’s equally important to learn what not to do. Here five are workplace motivation killers to beware of.

Negativity
If you’ve been around someone with a bad attitude, you likely understand how detrimental that energy can be to their colleagues’ work demeanor. Use clear policies and coaching to minimize the risk of employees spreading toxic energy through.

Lack of Growth
If employees aren’t growing, they may get complacent or bored. There should be constant learning opportunities for the betterment of the team, and, thus, the company. Professional development is an investment in the success of your business.

Blurry Vision
Transparent communication and a clear vision and mission set an effective company direction and focus. If the vision is muddled, even the most formidable employees won’t be able to operate at their peak performance levels. Ensure that all employees have a clear understanding of the company’s vision.

Trashed Time
If your organization holds two-hour meetings where nothing is truly accomplished, it’s likely your employees harbor frustrations. Don’t waste people’s time. Make sure the goal of each meeting is explicit , the agenda is clear, and that there is follow up afterward.

Lack of Appreciation
Employees don’t expect a gold star at the completion of each task, but it is important to recognize a job well done–especially when someone goes above and beyond expectations. If an employee puts in an extra few hours each day on a big project, devotes weekends, or exhibits extreme dedication, management should recognize those efforts. Recognition can be as simple as a sincere in-person thank you or god big by circulating an email about the person’s accomplishments to the team or company. As the adage goes, a little goes a long way.

Don’t let these employee motivation killers hurt your business. Improve your workplace by recognizing potential demotivators and creating effective solutions. In doing so you’ll build, strengthen, and maintain passionately loyal employees for life.

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How Customer Centric Is Your Organization?

Customer centricity is evident in many ways. These include superior customer service, product quality, personalized communications, and responsiveness. By creating a customer-centric culture from the CEO down to your customer-facing employees, your organization will build and sustain long-term, profitable customer relationships.

Being customer-centric starts by placing the customer at the center of a company’s strategic planning. Doing so will help ensure that you get the buy-in you need from across the organization. It also will help to make sure your organization provides positive consumer experiences not only at the point of sale, but also post-sale and throughout the customer lifecycle.

To achieve true customer centricity, a company needs to commit to a culture of customer success. Elements of a customer-centric culture include:

  • engaging with customers in their channels of choice
  • providing top-down support
  • recognizing individual customers across all lines of business
  • designing and implementing processes from the customers’ point of view
  • measuring what matters most to customers
  • fostering customer innovation

Taking a customer-centric approach adds significant value to a company by enabling it to differentiate itself from competitors who do not offer the same experience. Do you think your organization is truly customer centric? Take our quiz to find out!

This self-assessment will reveal you how your company rates in such essential areas as Corporate Leadership, Employee Engagement, Brand Values, and overall Customer Centricity. The results will highlight your areas of strength and show where improvements can be made to bolster your customer experience management (CEM) Strategy.

Take the CEM IQ Quiz today to see exactly how your company rates on the customer-centricity scale.

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Are You Ready for Customer Experience Management?

Customer centricity will only take hold when it’s woven into the fabric of an organization. And that will happen only when customer experience management (CEM) is embedded into a company’s entire operations.

Getting to the point where CEM is a part of a company’s DNA takes time. There are five key areas to examine to determine what actions to take and improvements to make to embed customer centricity in an organization. These comprise CMRI’s Road Map to CEMDNA.

Review current business performance: This includes all operations that contribute to revenue, costs, and profits. Which ones are most directly tied to CEM? Consider dynamics such as growth, retention, win-back, and return on investment (ROI).

Determine current CEM maturity level: Review the actions in the chart below to determine whether your organization is reactive, tentative, engaged, or customer centric. Knowing your starting point is vital to setting CEM objectives and measuring progress and results.

Conduct management interviews: Interview key senior leaders in all customer-facing areas of the business. Doing so is critical to achieving buy-in on CEM processes and building consensus on the key CEM objectives.

Draft vision and mission statements: These shared principles are essential to making CEM part of your organizational DNA. Vision and mission statements should include customer-centric language to maintain a consistent focus on your CEM goals.

Set long-term goals: Based on your current CEM maturity level and the findings from the management interviews, set realistic, achievable goals for a CEM implementation. Create a detailed timetable for achieving each objective within the implementation.

Brand the CEM program: Show that CEM isn’t just the initiative of the month by branding it; for example, “Customers First.” Branding your CEM activities will make the initiative more memorable, help to ensure high visibility and long-term commitment, and set it up for a successful outcome. It also helps to rally support among stakeholders, include employees, customers, suppliers, shareholders, and channel partners.

Road Map to CEMDNA is one of 12 elements that comprise the CEMDNA Playbook Strategy.