Don’t Boil the Ocean: Focus on Important Customer Experiences

When budgets are tight, your customer rules more than ever. Whether they’re internal to your organization, a B-to-B supplier, or a B-to-C end-user, how you handle these customer relationships becomes crucial to your success. Here’s a few essential tips to good customer experience management:

1. Today’s environment dictates working across silos to achieve maximum customer impact and business efficiencies. Sales, marketing, R&D, logistics, support and partners typically work independently. Just as important, they’re measured that way. Your customers can see this disconnect, so working together to design and deliver an integrated experience with “one voice” is crucial.
2. Customers increasingly view everything as a commodity. More and more of their purchase decisions are driven by competitive differences. What makes an offering unique in a competitive environment is a decisive factor. These experiences should be identified and designed with this goal in mind, and delivered throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
3. Build a system that insures a customer-centric view is embedded in your culture and is repeatable. How you sell and market to and support the customer in mind is critical. This benefits the customer, and just as important, yields remarkable business efficiencies.
4. Make sure customer loyalty and key business metrics are aligned and correlate. Increasing customer loyalty will drive market share and revenue growth. Linking customer experience solutions to your business processes will provide focus, key resource commitment and accelerated delivery.
5. Don’t try to “boil the ocean.” Choose the experiences that are most important to your customers, and deliver them in an exceptional manner. This may require alignment at the highest levels, but will set the tone for execution and meeting customer commitments throughout the organization.

Rick Graves is director of consumer experience management practice at Corebrand.