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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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Paving the Way for Omnichannel Customer Service

Paving the Way for Omnichannel Customer Service

Customers will contact you for service based on how it best suits them, so you need to be ready to respond in their preferred channel—or set of channels. And, you need to be ready to respond with consistency across all your service channels.

This doesn’t mean simply providing top-notch service in siloed channels—calls, online chat, email, etc.). It also means having the ability to provide that excellent customer service within those individual channels and seamlessly across them. So, if a customer begins a service interaction via chat, and then escalates to a call, those touches aren’t two discreet interactions, but instead is one interaction that bridges the two channels.

This level of service requires process and technology changes. Here are five ways to begin the move from the multichannel service most companies provide today to the omnichannel service customers prefer today and will expect tomorrow.

Be a good listener – Knowing what customers expect when it comes to customer service starts by asking them. Gather input through activities such as surveys and social listening. Also, track customers’ behaviors to surface the differences between stated and implied preferences. This combination of data will help you to determine the ideal mix of service channels for your organization. That insight will then lay the foundation for the people, process, and technology changes you may need to make to best meet customers’ service expectations in a way that makes the most business sense for your company.

Be where your customers are – Where do your customers expect to be able to contact you for service? Make sure that you’re present and available in those channels. For example, if most customers prefer to call you, have your toll-free number clearly available on your website, in your email, and in other communications channel—even on your social pages. If your customers expect service via social media, ensure you have a meaningful presence there.

Whenever possible, make service available where customers spend their time that isn’t a typical touchpoint. For instance, providing in-app service instead of forcing customers to interrupt their activity or switch channels.

Be proactive – Use alerts to inform customers of potential service disruptions, schedule changes, and the like—and be sure to do so in their channel(s) of choice. This may vary based on the urgency of the communication, and customers may want notifications via more than one channel, so be sure to provide multiple options. You can ask customers for this information during a registration or purchase process, or you can provide a preference center.

Be connected – Technologies are available to create a holistic view of customer data that allows companies to respond with greater relevance and have insight into customers’ service journeys. Consider investing in systems that allow you, for example, to know what actions a registered customer took on your website before calling the contact center, so the agent who takes the call can seamlessly handle the issue without requiring the customer to explain everything she’s done up to that point.

Be flexible – Train your service agents to handle interactions across multiple touchpoints. This allows for more leeway in scheduling and helps improves your organization’s ability to be responsive as interactions across various channels ebb and flow. It’s also an effective way to engage agents by diversifying their job and broadening their skills.

Most organizations are at the beginning of their journey toward delivering true omnichannel customer service. Businesses further down the road can use that better customer experience as a competitive advantage.

These five approaches can help pave the way for your organization to make omnichannel customer service an integral part of your successful customer experience management strategy—and give your company the winning edge.

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Business Intelligence That Supports CX

Benchmarketing is essential to CEM

The obvious aspects of the customer experience are customer-facing processes and interactions. But myriad internal processes impact the customers experience, as well. That’s where business intelligence (BI) comes in.

Customer experience leaders can use business intelligence reporting to surface opportunities and issues with critical business operations. The aim is to use BI to generate actionable information about internal operations that specifically relate to customer experience management (CEM). To increase the impact of any changes you’ll make based on your findings, segment the insights by account type (e.g. tiers one, two, and three) and contact type (e.g. decision maker, influencer). This will help prioritize any changes you’ll want to make to drive customer loyalty overall—but, first, among the highest-value customers.

Some key BI report types that focus on CEM include Balanced Scorecard, delta analysis, key-driver analysis, Net Promoter Score, and vulnerability index.

Taking a data-driven approach to CEM by continually analyzing business performance not only will help surface issues that need to be resolved, but also will allow you to explore new ways of gaining a competitive advantage. Business analytics makes it possible to combine customer satisfaction and operational data to gain deep insight into purchase behavioral overall, as well as by customer type and job role.

One especially valuable approach to using business intelligence is benchmarking. It allows customer experience leaders to see how their organization compares on various dimensions—most important, measurements related to CEM. You can, for example, compare your organization’s customer service ratings against best-in-class businesses or compare your NPS against other companies in your industry.

Benchmarking is an invaluable reality check that reveals how you stack up against competitors and category leaders across industries. The first step, of course, it to select the metrics and values you want to compare. Popular comparisons include overall best-in-class companies, top industry-specific performers, and head-to-head competitive analysis. Our NorthFace ScoreBoard Award recipients are another excellent source of comparison for CEM performance. These award winners have demonstrated that they provide world-class customer service; rated by their own customers as consistently exceeding their expectations for service quality.

Business intelligence, analytics, and benchmarking are three of the elements that comprise the CEMDNA Playbook Strategy.

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Welcome to the New CRMI

– Achieving the CXDNA Ultimate Ecosystem℠ brand requires continuous positive customer/employee experiences as the most critical components of a company’s DNA –

It is the Age of Customer/Employee Experiences (CX/EX). Delivering a consistently superior customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) has become table stakes that requires employees who have raised their CX awareness-competence-operational practices. CRMI has championed that concept since its founding in 1999, and now – as CX becomes a strategic imperative for more and more companies – is taking its mission to a new level.

The New CRMI is a membership-based resource that is intended to be your one-stop shop for “Everything CX/EX.” Whether you are new to CX/EX strategy and implementation or a veteran practitioner, as a CRMI Member you will join thousands of like-minded professionals who are eager to learn the latest advances in CX/EX strategies and enabling technologies – and share their experiences in guiding their organizations to the pinnacle of CXDNA success.

Vendors with technology and solutions that fuel the CX/EX marketplace are an important part of the CXDNA Ultimate Ecosystem. Those vendors who are CRMI partners recognize that members are a qualified, highly knowledgeable audience that is constantly seeking the latest innovations to help bring CX/EX perfection to their contact centers, tech support groups, help desks, field service organizations, and other customer-facing operations. So, with our new CX Lab, CRMI Members can test drive these vendors’ solutions and contact them directly for more information.

CX/EX vendors and training consultants and other service providers complete the ecosystem; there’s a directory with information on many of these experts on the New CRMI. Our consulting partners are well versed in the tenets of CX/EX and CRMI’s CXDNA Playbook Strategy. Consequently, they’ll be able to provide assistance with your specific CX/EX needs.

So, welcome to the New CRMI. Please explore all of the information available on our website – from our NorthFace ScoreBoard Awards for product-service-customer facing group(s) certification (CEMPRO CFG) of CXDNA professionals-employee centric companies (Voice of Employee). Also, content-conferences to webcasts-workshops to training-certification, and more. Also, be sure to bookmark our homepage and visit often because we’ll be posting new content and events frequently.

We’re all about “Everything CXDNA” and look forward to exploring this exciting ever-evolving domain together.

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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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3 Ways Customer Surveys Will Benefit Your Business

A successful business needs honest feedback from its customers to evaluate how well those customers’ needs are being met. But customer feedback should be far more than a generic gauge of customer satisfaction. Obtaining customer input is a valuable way to hear firsthand what customers think of your customer experience, products, and services, as well as how to improve them. Just as important, asking customers for their feedback builds customer loyalty and increases retention.

Here are three key benefits of using customer surveys as an information gatherer and relationship builder.

Detailed Insight

The number one benefit of customer surveys is gathering customers’ honest opinions about various facets of your business. Surveys can help you gain insight into how the customer feels about your company and the experience you deliver. Asking the right questions will help you determine, for example, how much customers value the products or services you offer, which provides additional insight into their likelihood to switch providers. Surveys can be an outlet for customers to share detailed feedback not only on products and services, but also on everything from customer service and sales interactions to billing and shipping to ad campaigns and the website experience. Surveys also can help identify potential areas for growth.

Long-term View

Surveys can be repeated. Running a survey multiple times with a defined control will provide you with data ready for comparative analysis. As you collect more surveys, you will have more data to draw deeper analysis and conclusions about your business. Over time, the data will not only reveal important and perhaps unexpected trends, but also may uncover changes you did not anticipate.

Commitment to the Customer

Asking for feedback shows customer commitment, which helps build loyalty and trust—especially if it’s clear to customers how their feedback will be used. If customers’ values, opinions, and feelings are important to your company, demonstrate that by involving customers in ensuring and improving the quality of your products or services. Their input can uncover opportunities for improvements or expansion that you might not have discovered otherwise. And using their feedback is a powerful way to build engagement and loyalty if you close the loop and communicate back to customers the ways that you’ve acted on (and plan to act on) their input and the outcomes of doing so.

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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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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.

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Create a Customer-Centric Account Strategy

Sure, customers share behaviors, preferences, traits. They have similar opportunities and face similar challenges. But no two customers are the same. Each has its own unique set of needs and business models that share their expectations of working with suppliers and vendors. Consequently, you cannot exceed each customer’s expectations if you treat all customers the same.

CRMI’s CEMDNA Playbook Strategy includes four approaches designed to help you understand the needs of each major type of customer. This will allow you to create a CEM strategy designed to success with each customer type. The process is meant to leave nothing to chance in your interactions, regardless of which touchpoints you use to connect with customers.

Segment the customer base: Determine which are your key accounts, your strategic accounts, and your marginal accounts. Key accounts typically comprise 20% of a customer base, but deliver 80% of revenue. These are accounts you’ll want to retain, which means ensuring that you consistently exceed their expectations. Strategic accounts are priorities, as well. They may be brand names or are in new markets you want to develop. Retaining these customers requires delivering a high level of service and support.

Marginal customers deliver limited value. They aren’t strategic, but do provide a revenue stream. Don’t overinvest in service and support for these customers; instead, consider self-service options. And if they’re unprofitable, you may be better off without them.

Segment key account contacts: Key accounts are a company’s “bread and butter,” so it’s worth taking the time to understand the players within each key account. Determine who, within each key account, is a decision maker, recommender, and influencer. This is vital because each will have different needs, goals, and expectations. Knowing this information will help dictate the appropriate level of service and support to correctly and consistently meet those expectations.

Build 360-degree alignment: Compare your perception of the customer experience against customers’ actual experiences. Survey and interview customers and customer-facing staff on their perceptions and experiences. (It’s best to hire an independent third party to obtain “unvarnished” feedback.) Combine the results with existing surveys to see where there are gaps in service delivery versus expectations. This will help you evaluated where you fall on the CEM maturity scale.

Create action alerts: Customer interactions and customer feedback often reveal unexpected revenue opportunities or unforeseen issues. Responding as quickly and efficiently as possible is essential to exceeding customer expectations in these situations. Being proactive—for example, using CRMI’s Action AlertsSM—can help get to resolution faster. Action Alerts include a full description of the situation and a predetermined escalation procedure, which allows an employee to act on the alert as quickly as possible.

Partner for profit: This methodology is designed to encourage key accounts to think of you as a value-added partner. The objective is to establish an ongoing, proactive relationship with your most profitable customers by consistently communicating the value of the products and services you provide. This approach typically results in retaining and growing key accounts and generating new business referrals. The goal of this approach is to help your customers get the most from your products and services.

 

Download our Account Management Strategy Infographic

 

Account Management is one of 12 elements that comprise the CEMDNA Playbook Strategy.