We attended a customer experience meetup last week with professionals in the New York area. It’s always exciting to meet other customer experience colleagues who are passionate about people and discuss best practices. One topic that resonated with our group was Whole Company Support — how to empower your entire company to provide the best possible customer experience. Here are three areas to consider:
The customer service team should not be the sole owner of ensuring happy customers. For example, your entire company should be aware of your customer satisfaction scores and what is driving them. Everyone plays a role in providing excellent customer experience. John Legere, CEO of T-Mobile, regularly engages his customers through live chat. Apple’s product team took their customer’s feedback to heart and provided a longer-lasting battery and stereo sound speakers for the new iPhone 7 (we’ll save the headphone jack argument for later). Acknowledging that customer experience is a company-wide effort is the first step to better understanding your customers.
One of the meetup members gave our group an excellent example of how Betterment, a fast-growing digital money-management company, requires every single employee to take time out of their schedules to handle customer service calls and respond to chat and email inquiries. Even their more introverted engineers are involved, introducing themselves to the customer and generating trust.
Harry’s, a popular grooming company, requires that a customer service representative is involved in product design sessions, ensuring the customer is in mind while going through product iterations. Other companies have created customer task forces, involving employees from key divisions to discuss the current state of their customers and identify action items.
As more customers engage companies through social channels, additional data is available to analyze. Effective data analytics can drive insights and additional opportunities to promote your brand and products to your customer base. Customer centric companies like Zappos are experts in using data to drive action across the company. They have launched an analytics team to assist customer service and business teams in ensuring a quality customer experience. In another post we’ll discuss this in more depth.
