Traditionally it was always been a remit of the sales and marketing department to create new relationships (find new customers) and develop long lasting relationships (sell more to existing customers).
But it is now recognised that every role in the organisation - either directly or indirectly - affects the customer experience, where loyalty and satisfaction are born. It is now the job of every person working in and on a business to focus on customer service, even if they are not directly responsible for communicating with customers.
We are all aware of the sales and marketing team’s contact with the outside world as they create, develop and maintain the perception of the company to its external audiences. We know about the telesales team, customer support representatives and the website and social media channels.
But think beyond these business areas, perhaps to finance? How about those making/packing products to be sent to customer? Engineers responsible for servicing/repairs to existing customer products? What about the delivery team? Human resources (potential employees are your future customer service team)? In particular, don’t forget about the administrators, reception staff and even switchboard operators…
When you consider all the touchpoints (the point of contact when products or services come into contact with a customer) in your business, you may be surprised at just how many there are.
Part of your communication strategy should be to consider how your customers feel about their interactions at all those touchpoints so that you can determine exactly what should happen and thereby ensure that it is a consistent experience for every customer. This way you leave nothing to chance, and customers are reassured that they receive the same excellent level of service every time they interact with your business. This process can help to define employee roles and responsibilities so that staff are clear not only about what they must achieve, but why (more on staff engagement another time).
There are a number of stages to becoming Customer-Centric (don’t you love all these phrases!) and these begin with simply being reactive to customer requests/comments/feedback, to tentative forays into structured customer feedback, data collection and analysis, through to formal Business Intelligence reporting on critical business processes.
The fully customer-centric organisation does all of this to some degree or another. Management and staff are incentivised on loyalty and relationship building. The business is actively tracking satisfaction and loyalty, and understands the customer lifecycle and value – and most importantly is prepared to take action when any of these measurements goes awry.
Another important part of your CRM strategy is not the ways in which you will inform your customers and prospects about what you do well but rather, what you will do when things are not 100% perfect.
From the smallest business upwards, the ability to flex and evolve our business objectives and goals in order to keep delivering excellence in customer service is what will enable us to achieve just that.
