Member Article

Is your brand putting customers first?

Businesses across industry sectors are increasingly looking for ways to improve customer experience in order to boost sales and drive value.

Typically, this involves harnessing technology to gather customer data and using insights gleaned from this to make predictions and adapt business processes. Taking this approach, it is possible to create a business that is moulded to the needs of the customer rather than the other way around. However, the biggest challenge for businesses is often how to change the culture of the organisation.

A study by business intelligence firm, ORC International, has recently revealed that customer centricity is the top-rated area of importance for 84% of organisations and yet relatively few are doing anything to recruit on the basis of cultural considerations. Instead, the majority of businesses may be hoping that they can instil the right culture when people join the organisation.

Vince Kerrigan, strategic solutions manager at brand communications agency, Vital Communications, shares his thoughts on how to instil a customer-centric culture.

Do you know what customers want?

The starting point for any change programme aiming to instil a customer-centric culture is to scrutinise every stage of the buying journey in order to understand the nature of the customer experience. Is the customer pleased with the outcome of each interaction? Did it meet their expectations? Could it have been better and if so how?

The retail banking sector is currently working hard to improve customer-centricity across the board. The arrival of agile, new entrants such as Google Wallet, Apple Pay and AliPay, has threatened to undermine their market position by forging stronger, direct relationships with customers.

In response, many banks and building societies are investing significant resources to find ways to improve responsiveness and personalise customer interactions.

For example, digital systems are increasingly being used to bring ‘context’ to each customer interaction, so call handlers and branch staff are better informed about what kind of experience customers have had in the past and their preferences.

Once analysed, such data can also help to personalise marketing messages and predict the kind of services that customers will want in the future.

Is your customer feedback ’real’?

Most brands are aware of the importance of customer feedback but is it accurate and are they using it to best effect? Feedback given at the point of sale could be pointless, self-serving or both if it only goes as far as asking if customers are happy or unhappy with the product or service they have received.

On the other hand, comprehensive customer surveys that are time-consuming to complete can be off-putting and the quality and quantity of any feedback could be compromised as a result.

Keeping the survey to no more than five or six questions, it should be possible to gather valuable feedback that provides an insight into what customers want from a product or service and what they expect in the future.

If feedback quality is an issue, businesses should aim to capture live customer feedback in an unobtrusive way. For example, a growing numbers of businesses are developing user-friendly apps to find out more about buying behaviour at the point of sale.

Incentivising feedback by offering rewards such as cash to spend against future orders or entry to a prize draw can also help to drive up the number of respondents.

To be sure the exercise is meaningful, before gathering any customer feedback, organisations should consider how it will be used.

Is your organisation walking the talk?

Organisations don’t become more customer-centric simply by declaring this is their intention. Any commitment to customer-centricity requires strong leadership and must be implicit in the processes and actions of the organisation from the top down.

Increased access to online reviews and other information may require the business to rethink its approach to communicating its customer-centricity.

For example, empowering customers to act as brand ambassadors via customer portals can be an extremely powerful way to demonstrate that you are putting customers at the heart of your business by facilitating peer-to-peer communications.

Can you keep up?

Technological developments are enabling businesses to improve the way they manage customer relationships and personalise their communications.

However, new technologies are coming to market all the time and while newer market entrants might find it relatively easy to adopt these, more established businesses that have already invested considerable sums of money in their existing systems may not be in a position to react so quickly.

To address this, businesses may need to put in place a data analytics team to evaluate the solutions available and empower those involved to innovate to enhance customer experience.

Stay focused

When making any change, it is important to stay focused on the objective. Data analytics can deliver some valuable insights to the business but unless they are going to help you to improve the customer experience, it may not be appropriate to prioritise them.

Much like consumers, businesses are increasingly savvy and expect more from vendor relationships. They can be easily alienated if they feel data is being used exclusively to drive cost reduction or increase margins, rather than add value for customers.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Vital Communications .