What happens when you deliver poor customer experiences and get complaints? You might ignore your customers — or worse, blame them — and lose them for life. Or you might fix their problems and earn their loyalty. What you and your employees will do depends on your customer culture. In a global survey by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, 56 percent of companies described themselves as customer centric. Only 12 percent of their customers agreed.
The technology industry continues to face a number of challenges when it comes to the development of improved customer experience and services.
Customer experience is a top priority for 86 percent of executives, according to Gartner’s “Amplifying the Enterprise: The CIO Agenda” report. Technology can enhance many aspects of customer experience, but most companies continue to miss the biggest opportunity—providing anticipation and proactive service to their willing customers.
Although technology companies often push the use of technology for their customers as they sell their products and services, they themselves rarely deploy new types of technology internally — and combine it with robust business process — to meet the particular and ever-expanding needs of their customers.
Although Amazon has received a lot of attention for its proposal regarding drone delivery, its basic strategy has always been one of anticipation and prevention. Amazon knew that once a book was ordered, the next question would be, “When will I receive it?” Therefore, the company proactively sent an email stating: “You will receive your order on Tuesday,” which eliminated a phone call and impressed customers with Amazon’s service.
Some of the problems are self-inflicted due to missteps and news reports of suspicious industry activities; employees who are not prepared, trained or authorised to provide flexible solutions to specific customer difficulties; some of the problems have developed due to the lag in the development of business & customer strategy processes; and emerging technologies can allow for better customer-centric strategies are not implemented fast enough (if at all.)
In truly customer-centric companies, all individuals (regardless of their roles) base their decisions and actions on the belief that what’s best for the customer is best for the business. New evidence shows how a strong customer culture drives future business performance and supports market strategies.
New research, based on a quantitative study across more than 150 businesses, spanning various industries and functions, identifies seven cultural factors that drive customer satisfaction, revenue and profit growth, innovation, and new product success.
These are important predictors of future results and early indicators of risks and opportunities related to retaining customers and acquiring new ones.
This research on highly customer-centric businesses like Amazon, Virgin and salesforce.com tell us that these factors are disciplines that, if practiced and embedded, create superior value for customers and sustainable growth in value for stockholders. They can be measured and benchmarked for any organization.