Vol. 2 — No. 2

Quality Customer Experience = Faster Growth and Improved Returns

While many businesses pride themselves on their customer service, they actually fall short of meeting customer expectations. The quality of the customer experience is measured in each and every customer encounter at a local level regardless of the corporate commitment to the concept. If you customer service practices are not ingrained into the people and practices at the point of contact, you may be falling short too.

How do you know if there is a gap?

  • Are you experiencing higher than desired customer fall out?
  • Are your established locations lagging in their ability to attract new customers?
  • Are you dissatisfied with retention of your valued customers?
  • Are your customer referrals lower than you think they should be?

If you answered yes to one or more of these questions, you may need to pay close attention to how the customer experience is managed in your company.

Enhancing the customer experience adds value to your business. In a recent J. D. Powers study monitoring the correlation of customer satisfaction and shareholder value from 1999 to 2004, companies that improved their customer satisfaction scores more than doubled their shareholder value while companies whose rank in customer satisfaction declined lost one quarter of their value.

To improve customer service delivery requires that you first determine it’s role in your overall strategy and what specific customer benefits your business plans to deliver to its customers. Next, the current customer experience---the human interaction points involved in meeting your customer needs---must be mapped out. This helps identify areas of opportunity. This is followed by the identification and prioritization of service delivery improvements. The enhanced experience might include upgrading the physical environment (a recent Jiffy Lube strategy), upgrading service personnel hiring or training practices (hiring great people is a point of difference claimed by Southwest Airlines), or aligning policies with customer expectations. Finally, these new practices are captured in sustaining systems and monitored and measured on a regular basis to track implementation and assure results.

For more information on how to improve the customer experience at your company, contact Margaret Reynolds, Managing Principal of Reynolds Consulting, LLC at mreynolds@reynolds-consulting.com or 816-350-7680.