Who is responsible for customer experience?
When you can name one specific person in your company and get consensus from the rest of your team, you're doing better than most.
Bain & Company's report on the service delivery gap found that 80% of the companies they surveyed believed they delivered a "superior experience" to their customers, but the customers they surveyed stated that only 8% of companies were really delivering.
Customers should be at the core of any company's initiatives, but few do -- or don't have a plan for improving their customer experience in the first place. In some cases, people don't even realize how far reality differs from their own perceptions.
Being a customer-centric company isn't easy alone, which is why the entire team should invest in customer centricity. Learn how companies can achieve customer centricity by reading on.
What Is Customer Centricity?
At every stage of the customer journey, customer centricity ensures that every team and department promotes a positive customer experience. It is customer-centricity that builds customer loyalty and satisfaction, which, in turn, leads to new customers being referred to the company.
It should be easy to recognize a customer-centric organization. Every decision you make about a product, the way you market a product, the way you sell a product or service starts with understanding who it's for and what their needs are.
You start with an understanding of who your customers are, and then work backwards from there to help them achieve their goals.
Even though that should be a logical starting point for any business, implementing it can be challenging, especially at larger organizations where silos and divisions create disparate views of customers.
As a result, companies may find themselves marketing to one persona, selling to another, and providing customer service to yet another.
A Forrester report cites three main pitfalls companies face when transforming into a customer-centric organization:
- - Lack of clarity. Even though parts of their organizations strove to be customer-centric, employees lacked a shared understanding of the intended experience they were supposed to deliver.
- - Failure to get broad-based buy-in. Some companies failed to transform their cultures because they didn't embed customer-centricity into all parts of the organization.
- - Loss of interest. Many companies embarked on a cultural transformation journey, only to lose focus before they've completed the job.
Customer experience spans the entire organization, and the end result -- the experience -- is determined by both large-scale organizational initiatives and small decisions. Customer focus isn't a project - it's a way of doing business at every stage of the buying process.
How to Build Customer-Centric Companies
1. Define a shared vocabulary and definition of who the customer is
Even though many organizations have buyer personas, few use them consistently. In some organizations, different departments maintained different personas.
It is important for organizations to build personas based on actual conversations with customers and not overcomplicate them. Ensure that they are simple enough for everyone in the organization to understand and remember.
(And if you're looking for help with this, get started creating buyer personas with our template)
2. Create a comprehensive view of customer experiences
Marketing doesn't define the customer journey alone, and it's not linear. In order to improve customer experience, companies should at least map out the various interactions a person has with them during the path to purchase and after they become a customer.
A brand or agency can use these points to determine where the experience is lacking, what conversion paths need to be adjusted, and how to improve it overall.
3. Create a multi-dimensional view of customers and their needs
Creating a better customer experience means understanding not only the company's demographics and behaviors, but also the customer's needs and motivations. You can tailor the experience to meet the needs of customers in the most personal way if you anticipate their emotions or desires.
4. Measure the customer experience
We are guessing our way toward customer-centricity until we can measure the quality of the experiences we deliver.
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Rather than worrying about whether or not the metric measures every small interaction, the key is to identify a metric that can prompt action.
No matter what metric a company uses to measure customer success -- Net Promoter Score®, customer satisfaction, or customer happiness score -- measure it frequently, and obsess over customer feedback. Ensure that each and every employee is aware of it and can play a role in improving customer service through compensation and bonus packages.
5. Make executives and leadership accountable for customer experience
If no one knows who is responsible for the experience, that likely means that no one is.
Leadership must ultimately be accountable for a customer's experience because it spans various departments. The departments will either disregard the customer experience or create their own, which may not be aligned with the brand's goals, or the department that is in charge will not have the authority to make changes that affect another team's work. Priorities and budgets are also determined by the leadership, and if an initiative cannot secure a budget spot, it is not a priority. Customer centricity can be hindered by all of these factors.
In addition, customer experience should be considered in all company decisions, including the shipping company. Answer this question in every decision you make -- from choosing vendors to informing customers of service outages.