I guess it’s true: you are never too old to learn. This past week I learned about the Customer Experience Index (CXi); used to benchmark customer experience. Maybe I am behind the times and you already know about it and even have it as a key performance indicator (KPI). If so, have you given proper consideration? If you haven’t you may well be setting yourself up for failure.
Don’t get me wrong. Providing a good customer experience is, or should be, the single most important goal of any business. After all, if you don’t keep your customers happy you won’t have customers for long. And that means you won’t have a business for long, either! Thus customer experience should be the central axis of your entire business strategy. But, if it isn’t and you have Customer Experience as a KPI you are very likely setting yourself up for failure.
Naturally you will almost inevitably insist that your customer is central to your business strategy. I would, however, ask you to challenge yourself on that. For, if you do not look at every strategic and tactical decision you make without considering how it will affect your customer, you are deluding yourself.
Yes, that is a sweeping statement, but please, pause to give it further thought.
Ask yourself:-
- How many initiatives do we introduce with the goal of reducing costs?
- How much do we rely on outsourcing?
Of course those are important considerations. Only, before you run with them, you need to be very clear about their impact on your customers. Certainly you should be very, very wary of outsourcing any service that places the provider between you and your customer. Let me give you an example of the dangers of this.
My wife and I flew from Manchester, England, to Houston, Texas to spend Christmas with family there. Unfortunately our first flight was late and, although we made the connecting flight with no difficulty, our suitcases weren’t so fortunate! At baggage reclaim we were paged and informed of that fact. The agent was very efficient and provided us with all the information we needed to follow up, and gave us a pre-loaded card with $100 so we could buy any essentials we needed. She informed us that our suitcases were on the next flight arriving later that evening and would be delivered that night or the next morning.
In fact my wife’s suitcase arrived after dinner the following night and mine arrived over 24 hours later! Thus it would seem that, despite the airline’s own expectations, reuniting us promptly with our luggage was not really a concern for the baggage handlers.
Bad though that was, it wasn’t the end. On the return flight, my wife’s suitcase also failed to arrive with us in Manchester! Furthermore, this time there had been no delay; we actually had several hours in transit. Yet this was an airline that, when we called, told us that they wanted to ensure that we had a good experience as they wanted to be sure of our future business. And even now I am awaiting a response to my complaint.
Thus the slip between cup and lip, strategy and implementation, can be enormous if your focus is wrong and your people are not fully engaged. So make sure when you set customer experience as a measure that it is something over which you have total control and that you are not setting yourself up for failure.
Bay is the founder and director of Zealise, a company created to help larger small to large business organisations to properly value their people and thereby inspire them to optimise their self-worth and so engage them that they transform organisational performance and bottom-line results. Bay is also the author of several books, including “Lean Organisations Need FAT People” and “The 7 Deadly Toxins of Employee Engagement.”