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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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What?! Another Poor Customer Experience?

How often do you encounter this situation? You’re working with a reputable and reliable company and the event quickly turns into a fiasco. It moves so far from delivering customer success that you ask yourself if this could be the same company.

To make matters worse, it’s often a company that prides itself on delivering the highest level of customer experience (CX). Doesn’t it make you wonder how much substance or truth is behind their claim?

My recent misfortune, which I will describe shortly, reinforces the message I continually deliver to clients: Every company looking to maintain loyalty and grow financially should continually ask themselves, “Would our customer’s experience be considered easy and effective?” and “When was the last time we looked at our customer journey?”

I will share with you some proven ideas to become better connected with your customers, and deliver loyalty-building and profit-growing results. But, before I begin, I’ll set the stage with the story that precipitated this article.

I needed to contact a company for TV support. When I did, as in the past, I am addressed as a preferred customer and they thank me profusely. Oh yes, I have worked with them for more than 12 years. By now, you would think, my confirmation information, my issue, etc., will travel with me regardless of where I’m transferred during the interaction. After 4 transfers and repeating the issue each time, I was able to resolve the issue. Or, so I thought. After I hung up, the issue recurred. So, I called again…three more transfers…resolution, finally—and an email confirmation, which wasn’t part of the process the first time.

It’s about the customer experience…delivery and results

I wonder how many companies really follow through on the CX strategy they’ve put in place. Why? Think about how often companies fail to deliver a quality customer experience regardless the investment they’ve made.

It’s clear from my recent experience that the TV support process has never been thoroughly vetted from a customer’s perspective, which is where the customer journey map process would be so useful. This is evidenced by the complexity of my having to weave through multiple barriers to resolution and the company’s poor execution. It makes me wonder how many other companies own CX strategies are built on a house of cards.

The path to delivering positive customer experiences begins with understanding the customer journey

Delivering a consistently satisfactory customer experience is more challenging than one realizes. Organizations learn that there is much more to the job of engaging and retaining customers than just putting some processes in place and moving on to the next challenge. While they may recognize the need to provide easy and rewarding experiences, they’re challenged with designing, developing, executing, and delivering an integrated customer experience strategy. In fact, many businesses still do not walk the journey from their customer’s view.

Today, there are still far too many of you who feel you already know what needs to be done and how to do it without taking time to walk it from your customer’s side. Well, let me help you: That is simply not going to work!

Know how to ask the right questions about your process

The challenge is to move your game to the next level by taking an approach that links strategy, vision, measurements, technology, organization, engagement, and the like. At the same time, nail down customers’ outcomes and then design around it. You can no longer be good at CX; you have to be better—even best at it. Any less than this no longer suffices.

I like customer journey mapping as a powerful tool of choice. Customer journey mapping is a proven tool that allows you to focus on the customers’ experiences with your company. This way, you learn more about your customer: how they define success, how to deliver successful customer experiences, and how to make them happy while growing your profits.

To move from delivering a good experience to a better or great experience requires that you set aside past practices and consider some changes. These are 12 that I share with clients:

  1. Have your processes been customer journey mapped?
  2. Have the barriers to successful performance been identified and removed?
  3. Has the journey map allowed a good look at your internal technology, is that technology easy to use, and does it make the right information available to the right people when they need it?
  4. Is there organizational alignment?
  5. Has the journey map added clarity to your rules of channel engagement?
  6. Has the journey map provided the clarity needed to demonstrate why your silos must melt away and set the course for a mind-set that foregoes silo thinking to facilitating customer success?
  7. Are your customer processes aligned to metrics that gather insight to move forward?
  8. What personas are you addressing?
  9. What type of feedback do you want to collect, and how will you engage customers to obtain it?
  10. Is your organization robust with passionate employees who are engaged?
  11. Has the journey mapping effort given you the needed focus on the customer segments, micro-experiences, and channel details that are at the core of your strategic business processes?
  12. How will you measure success?

My takeaway

How you answer these questions will give you insight into whether your CX effort is built on a house of cards, like too many businesses today, or built to deliver those customer loyalty–building experiences—or, as I like to say, that aha customer moment, one that delights your customer as it delivers customer success.

 

Dennis GershowitzAbout the Author
Dennis Gershowitz is founder and principal of DG Associates, a consulting firm that specializes in driving service revenues and profits through the development and implementation of customer experience management (CEM) strategy and service operations improvements. Contact Dennis at dennisg@dgassociates.net

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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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65% of Tech Firms Consider Service as a Profit Center

When service excels, it drives business.

This is evident from the results cited in the “Service Industry Outlook: 2017 Research Report,” by Service Strategies. The report highlights finding from surveys and interviews with executives from 50 technology firms.

Many of the executives interviewed are bullish on the benefits of providing stellar service. Sixty-five percent say their service business is run as a profit center, and 5 percent note plans to shift to that approach; only 35% say their service operation is run as a cost center.

In fact, for a majority of respondents, service revenues are increasing. More than half (57 percent) have seen an increase in service revenue over the past 12 months, and 49 percent cite an increase in profitability; 31 percent say service revenue has remained consistent, while 37% note that profitability has stayed the same. Only 12% say they experienced a decline in service revenue over the past year; 14% saw a decrease in profitability.

Most of the study’s respondents also share a positive economic outlook over the next 12 months. Fifty-one percent say the economic outlook for their business will improve over the next year, and 7 percent agree that it will significantly improve. Similarly, 59 percent of respondents predict that their maintenance and support revenues will improve over the next 12 months, with 5 percent expecting that revenue to improve significantly. About a third of those polled (37 percent) predict no change to the economic outlook for their business over the next year; while 29% expect their maintenance and support revenues to stay the same in that time frame. Only 5 percent and 7 percent, respectively, expect a decline.

All this positivity is leading some respondents’ companies to invest in their service operations. Sixty-one percent is planning to invest in service training and in quality improvement over the next 12 months; and 60 percent plans to invest in service technology. Nearly half (45 percent) of executive polled say their company will invest in staffing over the next year, and 35% plan to increase compensation.

Other reasons for these investments? Strategic priorities, of course. Respondents’ top priorities for the coming year are:

> Service quality – Improving process quality and consistency

> Customer experience – Driving improvements to the customer experience

> Increased revenue – Offering value-added services to grow revenue

View the full report here.

 

Ginger Conlon, MKTGinsightAbout the Author
Ginger Conlon, chief editor and marketing alchemist at MKTGinsight, catalyzes change in marketing organizations. Previously, she served as chief editor of Direct Marketing News, 1to1, and CRM magazines. She was honored with a Silver Apple lifetime achievement award for her contributions to the marketing industry, and was cited as one of the “Top 100 Most Social Customer Service Pros on Twitter” and one of the “Top 25 CRM Influencers You Should Be Following.”

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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.