Eight Tips for Running a Customer-Friendly Business

As a consultant, I need to be knowledgeable of market trends; my passion is customer experience. So I decided to write about Canadian aspects of customer experience, and not many consultants are in this field, most of the literature and studies are center on customer service or other issues of the overall cx.

Indeed, most consumers have experienced poor customer service, and they’re wary of services offered by businesses after a bad experience. They waste no time running away from a product if they are not satisfied.

Let’s assume your organization has the best product in the world. People will one way or another learn about the product and flock to your business, but is that enough?

Let’s start with your services. Ask yourself three questions:

· How easy is it to do business with our organization? ( Effort Score)

· How positive or negative is our customer satisfaction? (Customer Satisfaction)

· Is our Net Promoter Score trending up or down? Why? (Net Promoter Score)

Those three questions may appear dull, but they offer surprising insights on how you should approach customer strategy in the market. Use those questions as a starting point for helping to place your business in perspective. Recognizing the maturity level of your business is essential.

Ignore — These are companies that don’t view customer experience as a crucial differentiator. There are no efforts towards developing a CX strategy or measuring CX initiatives.

Novice — These are companies that recognize the need to improve a customer’s experience. They’ve put necessary steps in place to identify and measure CX-related issues, but don’t have a clear CX strategy in place.

Competent — These companies make an effort to deliver a high-quality experience for their customers. They have a clear CX strategy with processes firmly in place to measure results.

Mature — These are the cream of the customer experience crop. Their CX strategy is in everything they do. Customer feedback forms the core of their policy and decision-making, and they continuously iterate their CX practices to meet customer demand.

Once you know which maturity level your company has, then go through the following eight tips to run a customer-centric business.

1. Leadership Direction. Create a customer vision statement for your company. The ideal vision statement highlights what your company seeks to achieve in the future. It displays on your website and other company literature. Include a change management plan that you could deliver working with a cross-functional team.

2. Communicate, communicate, communicate, the importance of customer satisfaction at every stage in the organizational structure. Every employee should understand the importance of customer satisfaction. Everybody in the company should join in to make every customer experience unique and memorable. And that is possible only if you communicate and provide adequate training to employees

3. Listen to your customers, understand the level of experience your customers are seeking. How do you discover the experience of your customer requests? Do a competitive analysis. Analyze the services offered by your most successful competitor. How do they interact with customers? How well are their products accepted? Become inspired by them.

4. Set standards for customer satisfaction. Analyzing your customer’s feedback and identifying the gaps with your competitors. Create excellent customer satisfaction experience by introducing or ensuring the following:

a. Customer-friendly processes to make it easier to do business with you

b. A standardize customer-feedback listening mechanism

c. Training and empowering your experienced customer-facing team

d. A customer-grievance rectification mechanism, action plan or close loop processes to eliminate services gaps or value proposition gaps

5. Make sure you create a systematic framework or process with steadfast dedication by your team! Set high enough standards to make it tough for your competitors to replicate and make sure your team pursues those standards.

6. Make every customer your number one fan. Let’s word of mouth and organic growth bring new customers. Engage with them in the best way possible. Write regular posts that showcase your credentials as an expert in your domain and how you are listening and taking action to improve your value and customer experience.

7. Reward employees who treat customers well. It’s essential to encourage and empower employees who make customers feel special. Y with opportunities to make a difference and add value, to show that you appreciate their contribution toward making your business a success.

8. Keep evaluating your customer strategies. Staying ahead of competitors is possible only if you assess your customer strategy at regular intervals. Measuring and calibrating all the components, people, processes, and technology.