Executing on customer excellence
Executing on customer excellence
Generally speaking, leaders in customer excellence pursue all six pillars in some form or another. They may excel in one more than the other, and they may dial one up or down based on their immediate priorities, but they keep each in their sights as they transform. And even if they aren't making progress in one of the pillars today, they have prioritized plans and roadmaps to do so when the time is right.
Having an objective or being a client obsessed organization is a never-ending exercise. You don’t need to be exceptional at all of these things, but you need to be exceptional at things you deem most critical to your business.
We've offered some perspectives on how to begin building and strengthening each pillar. Nevertheless, there are "must haves" that apply to each that every organization must consider along with their customer-led transformation.
They include:
- Top-down commitment: The commitment to customer excellence must live at the top. It must be taken to heart by the presidents, department heads, and supervisors who themselves need to be empowered to keep that commitment at the top of mind across their corners of the organization. While it's all too easy to write down one's customer excellence goals in a binder and shelve it away until the next boardroom meeting, real change occurs when those words are put into action every day and shouted from the top.
- The outside-in perspective: Knowing your customer is central to customer-led transformation. As such, it's important to encourage that “outside-in perspective” through customer feedback and then build that 'customer voice' into one's strategies.
- Employee engagement: Common throughout the pillars is the need to get your entire team on board. Those who score high across all six pillars are typically ones that have active employee engagement and again are committed to excellent employee experience. They are authentic in their values, have a culture that is aligned to putting the customer first, and focus on both customer and employee journeys.
- The connected enterprise: Consistency and transparency are key to building a customer-led organization. That can be difficult in companies where departments are siloed and disconnected from one another. This can create incongruences in the way customers are being handled, how transactions are being processed, and how important issues are being resolved. When everyone is on board, then the customer experience becomes consistent. And when the customer experience becomes consistent, trust and loyalties strengthen.
- A commitment to monitoring: Monitoring and measuring one's transformational initiatives is essential to making sure they're improving the customer experience and maximizing investments. Having metrics tied to each pillar helps organizations adjust their strategies or pursue improvements if those initiatives fail or programs plateau.
The leaders in customer service excellence know their customer needs better than anyone else. And not just those needs today, but what they’ll be one, five, or ten years down the road.
A continuous journey
There is no checkered flag in the journey to becoming a customer-led organization. There is no winners’ circle or end-game trophy. Instead, transformation – digital or otherwise – is an ongoing journey that requires a business to be agile, innovative, and at peace with change.
We've taken a bird's eye view of the ways in organizations can become customer-led. Take the next step by contacting us.
And when you're ready,
let's do this.
