Business is ultimately about meeting the customer’s needs, which is why for so long ‘Customer Satisfaction’ has been the primary CRM measure. Yet surveys indicate that 60-80% of customer’s who defect reported that they were ‘satisfied.’
So the bar has been raised, and now it’s all about the ‘customer experience’ and creating ‘customer delight.’ Yet even while raising the bar, the judgement remains subjective and it is still all about perception. However, if that isn’t difficult enough, the challenge is compounded by the question, “Who is responsible for the customer experience?”
The fact is that customer experience is not, nor ever can be, the responsibility of any single person, for it is the culmination of the way things pull together. For example, the best efforts of a salesman to ensure that a delivery is made on the date the customer requested can be futile if the despatch process is chaotic. Customer experience can, and most likely will, vary in every single instance. Customers might change the experience themselves: after all eating the same meal in the same restaurant will not be the same two nights running.
Yet even that is not the end of it. So much of the customer experience is determined by others outside the organisation and over whom one has no control. For example, imagine flying with a group of friends to go snowboarding in the Alps and arriving to find that some of the party’s luggage, including snowboards, had not made the journey with you! This happened to a relative recently. Initial enquiries resulted in a promise that the missing luggage would be sent out on the next flight and would be with them by lunchtime the following day, but in fact it only finally arrived 3 days later. Certainly not much ‘customer delight’ in an experience where the sole purpose of a holiday is adversely affected for literally half its scheduled duration! The inconvenience and inability to use their own equipment was offset, but not compensated for, by insurance. In this instance, however, the problem was caused by the baggage handlers at the airport and not the airline. So who here really shaped the customer experience?
Such inter-dependence is mirrored in countless organisations every day and, with the prevalence (curse?) of outsourcing, is becoming ever more commonplace. How will any organisation that aims to have loyal customers ensure a delightful customer experience in such conditions?
This inter-dependence is why an organisation has to be considered as a team, and why it is so very important that people be regarded as assets and treated as such. There can be no organisational alignment when there is no organisational teamwork, or people are not fully engaged and prepared to collaborate effectively. This can only happen when people assets are treated as such and feel like assets. Only then will you have the role-ownership, combined with the sense of team with its concomitant sense of collective responsibility. Furthermore, it is only when all this happens that it will become possible to ensure that there is proper inter-company liaison, that, even if service itself isn’t seamless, the standards of service and commitment will be universal.
Only then will it be possible to drive the customer experience.