CXREFRESH revolves around the notion of a “Customer Experience (CX) Mindset.” High-end hospitality companies have owned the CX space for years because they maintain this mindset that every touch point they have with a customer has to be excellent. They want customers to leave their hotel or restaurant feeling like “wow – that was an amazing thing that I just experienced.”

Here’s the secret though – high-end hospitality’s mindset can (and should) be applied to every industry – it’s the way of the future.

Insist on a great experience

We work with a variety of companies in many industries at CXREFRESH, and we’re seeing that the companies thriving in their given sectors are the ones who have a mindset that “our customer is someone who must have a great experience.”

Whether that somebody is visiting a retail bank; having a field service agent visit their home to perform utility service, or even if that somebody is a patient on medication for a rare disease that requires additional support services from a case manager. What’s it like to walk into that retail bank; to have that field service visit the home; to experience that specialized drug?

Treat every customer like a house guest

High-end hospitality companies approach their customers as guests. Every touch point needs to go really well on every channel – whether it’s online, in-person, or calling a call center.

If you think of your customers as guests, and make every interaction with them feel like they’re a guest coming into your home, your business will change dramatically.

Think through your touch points

Again, it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. Start by thinking about how your customer would feel interacting with your company at any given point in time. How does your customer feel when they call into your call center and your agents answer the phone? Does the agent answer the phone like the customer is a welcome guest in their home, or are they answering with one eye on the clock with an attitude of “I’ve got to get off the phone in 30 seconds – I can’t talk to anyone for too long or I’ll get fired”?

To create a Customer Experience (CX) Mindset across your organization, make yourself think like a high-end hospitality company – even if you’re not one – and you’ll have an incredible competitive advantage going forward.

Do you ever wonder if you’re doing as well as your competitors? Of course you do! This is the familiar exercise of external benchmarking, or comparing key metrics of your business against others in your space.

Business leaders use this all the time as a way to set standards for performance evaluation on metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) or overall satisfaction; and many look to external benchmarking results as key indicators for how to improve customer experience.

External benchmarking is insightful, of course, but have you ever considered utilizing the power of internal benchmarking?

In this edition of CXSecrets, we will explain how you can use insights from internally benchmarking against yourself within your own organization to quickly enhance your customer experience program.

Why internal benchmarking?

We all agree that external benchmarking is important, but we find that looking inward can be even more important to increasing your company’s customer experience.

Start with the best

To start looking inward, you must identify the best locations, work groups or entities within your organization that are delivering a fantastic customer experience.

If you have a large organization, we can guarantee that you’re going to have variability in customer experience between your very best locations and your worst locations.

Exemplify best practices

Let’s say you’re a hotel. Take a look at your best five locations.

Don’t just look at the customer experience survey feedback or social review feedback that you’re receiving. Go to each location. Observe what they’re doing. Interview the people who are delivering those fantastic experiences. Now that you’ve observed and listened, figure out a way to create processes and procedures inspired by the practices of your best locations that you can apply across your entire organization. It’s really that simple.

Now get out there and do it!

Internal benchmarking is an incredibly effective, low-hanging-fruit way to enhance the customer experience across the enterprise, and you can be incredibly successful in improving your customer experience program if you take this approach.

Are you familiar with all the different ways your customers interact with your business? Whether you’re a seasoned CX professional or you’ve never heard of CX, chances are you at least have some basic notion of the areas, or touchpoints, where customers interact with your organization. Your website, call center or storefront are all examples of possible customer touchpoints.

When mapping out these touchpoints to better understand the customer journey, some companies will identify 5 to 10 touchpoints, while others might identify 50 or 100. Numbers aside, though, companies often tend to overlook one vital touchpoint when conducting these mapping exercises: the touchpoint of asking their customers for feedback.

We will reveal why it is essential to include customer feedback collection as a part of your overall customer touchpoint map, as well as a few quick tips for optimizing the feedback collection experience.

Touchpoints vary

Touchpoints will vary depending on the type of business you’re in. If you’re a B2B company, you may think about the first interaction prospects have with your sales team. If you’re a hotel, you may think about the first interaction guests have with the doorman, or the team at the front desk. If your business makes frequent home visits to customers, a touchpoint might be your customers’ first interaction with your field reps.

The forgotten touchpoint

The one touchpoint that most people forget about, however – and it’s a very important one – is the touchpoint when you reach out to your customers and ask them for feedback. That is a touchpoint in and of itself.

The experience that your customers have as they’re providing feedback affects their NPS score going forward in the same way that your other touchpoints, like your website or call center, affect NPS.

If a customer has a negative experience providing you feedback, it affects their likelihood to come back, their likelihood to buy more, and their likelihood to continue using your products & services.

Optimizing the feedback collection experience

Think really hard about how you’re interacting with your customer when you’re asking them for feedback. Are you doing it on their time, in a way that they would want to provide feedback? Are you asking for feedback in a way that’s as short as humanly possible so you’re not wasting their time?

Customer experience is cumulative. Every touchpoint counts towards the bigger picture. Be sure to dedicate time to optimize this vital piece of the customer journey, and your overall customer experience program will reach greater heights.

Listen to any company in almost every industry, and you’ll undoubtedly hear phrases like customer-centric and customer-focused touted as top priorities. But what does that exactly mean? When leaders of a company fail to explain or provide specific examples of what it really means to be customer-centric, employees often see these words as little more than corporate platitudes.

Companies feel obligated to go on record as being customer-centric. It makes sense. Which company is going to publicly announce that they do not care about customers and what they have to say? But the reality is that becoming truly customer-centric is about more than developing vague marketing statements. The more important question is this:

“As an organization, what can we do today to put the customer first?”

And to really make this really real, each employee at a customer-centric organization should ask themselves this question:

“What can I do today to create a better customer experience for our customer?”

The reality is that becoming truly customer-centric is more than developing marketing statements—it is a fundamental shift in a company’s mindset to focus on the customer.

The best way we know for companies to actually become more customer-centric is to consistently listen to the customer. It starts and ends there. We believe that the choice is simple—either listen to your customers or die. It sounds a bit dramatic, but it is true. Ask RadioShack, Blockbuster, BlackBerry, Kodak, and any other companies that were once on top and then stopped listening to their customers.

Becoming Customer-Centric

We recommend accomplishing customer centricity by using an organization-wide, customer listening program called Voice of the Customer (VoC).

Customer service experts agree: customers have changed. They are more likely to share their feelings on different channels such as social media or blog articles, have higher expectations and are keener than ever on the customers’ lifecycle. 89% of customer service professionals agree that customers are more likely than ever to share the good or bad experience they had with businesses.

On the other side, most companies are not equipped to connect with and answer with their customers on every channel. They simply haven’t adapted yet to this new multichannel environment that is growing fast. I believe companies still have to shift to a customer-first-mindset to just not grow bigger, but also better.

Customer service is the new marketing, here is why it’s important

As stated before, customers lifecycle has been modified and is now increasingly complex. Customers can interact with businesses on multiple touchpoints and are waiting for the fastest answer at the highest level of quality.

By 2020, it is believed that customer experience will be the main brand differentiator instead of price or product.

For example, according to Forrester’s customer index, customer experience leaders gained 43% in performance compared to customer experience laggards who saw a decrease of 33,9%.

Customer service is a form of marketing

Whatever people say about the customer service they experienced, it has more impact due to the internet. A potential customer usually wants to know what are the main feedback about your product and there are lots of ways to do it.

85% of consumers trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations.

With a great customer service strategy, you can market your services or product through word of mouth, reviews, comments on social media, testimonials and so on.

Customer service is important for your company to grow

When you offer good customer service, you retain your current customer and gain more customers. The only side effect can be your growth and the troubles that go with it.

Customer service is very powerful when focusing on repeat buyers and I believe every company should have that focus rather working on acquisition.

More than repeat buyer, it can also increase the global lifetime value of your customers which is even greater if you want to invest in acquisition then because it will increase your acquisition cost.

Regarding B2B, great customer service leads to a shorter sales cycle which leads to a lower acquisition cost too.

More than acquisition, customer service can also help your business to retain your customers. Bain and Company revealed that increasing customer retention rates by 5% could increase profits by 25%

As customer retention is key for every business, the latest technology can help a lot to improve your customer service.

Customer Service   Customers Lifecycle   Customer Experience Leaders  Customer Service Strategy  Customer Retention