Customers watch out for better service

Look after your customers by delivering consistent quality experiences and you stand a good chance of being one of a very small select number of businesses that are benefiting from increased customer loyalty and word of mouth recommendations.

Failure to take this onboard will almost certainly ensure a business will be part of an economy that is suffering from high employee disengagement (67 percent), low productivity (ranked 22 in the OECD), declining customer loyalty, a lack of innovation and creativity and poor quality leadership skills, according to Chris Bell Managing Director of Customer Experiences a company that specialises in the development of quality customer experiences.

A recent Temkin Group customer experience survey found that 80 percent of respondents from corporate organisations understood the benefits of a customer experience strategy however only 13 percent knew how to develop such a strategy within their organisations.

A lack of knowledge and skill to develop a long-term customer experience strategy and the complacency that comes from an inside evaluation of current customer service experience performance where most businesses think they are performing better than their customer think they are – these are the major reasons why customer experience performance is not improving.

The result is a tourism industry that is struggling to meet visitor’s expectations and a retail industry struggling to come up with any competitive advantages other than price with the resulting negative impact on margins and profitability.

"A recent iStart- Microsoft survey found that 80 percent of us have taken our business elsewhere because of bad experiences and a third using social media to vent their frustration," says Bell. "And from the same survey 80 percent of business leaders surveyed believe that NZ business had an average to poor approach to customer satisfaction.

Bell and his team are focused on making the skills and methodology to develop a high quality customer experience available to business at a price and a format that will give all businesses the opportunity to address this important area and improve financial performance across both online and brick and mortar customer experiences.

Customer Experiences has just launched an online customer experience development programme (www.customerexperiences.co.nz) that allows a business to work through a seven-step development process with support from Bell during the process.  

A 2011 Bloomberg Business week survey revealed that “delivering a great customer experience” has become the new imperative: 80 percent of the companies polled rated customer experience as a top strategic objective.

However, only 20 percent of these companies believe that they, themselves, are actually doing a good job.

Bell said that the Bloomberg survey highlights the fact that more businesses are starting to focus on customer experience. "What we are focusing on is providing the programmes to ensure a successful outcome for those businesses that adopt this as a top strategic objective."