How customer-centric is your culture?
Ask yourself some questions about your company: Do consumers find it difficult to do business with you? Are your frontline workers handling an intelligent number of visitor complaints? Do leaders believe that it is their regulations and policies that make them successful? Do you have workers who have recommended better tactics to satisfy visitors’ desires but were rejected? Are all members of your team aware of what potential consumers find exciting about your competitors?
The answers deserve to give you a fundamental concept of how customer-centric your culture is. But then, what do you deserve to do? Here are 8 key things you can do to start focusing your team members more on your customers:
1. Give them face-to-face time.
The way to measure what consumers think is through conversations. That means talking, whether in person or over the phone, not just through surveys. Great leaders take time out of their busy schedules to pay attention to their consumers. And if a visitor gives a suggestion, you rephrase it in your own words to make sure you perceive it correctly and then take notes.
2. Prioritize requests.
When you start asking for feedback, some consumers will receive a multitude of requests. Ask those needy souls to rank their counsel according to its importance. Often, a list of twenty tips yields one or two decisive points.
3. Thank them.
Most people don’t bother sending comments to vendors or merchants because they’ve been conditioned that such things go ignored. Let your customers know how much you appreciate their feedback by sending them a thank-you note or discount to your services. And give them the best thanks of all: Update them with honest feedback about what your team has been doing about the suggested change.
4. Listen on social media.
Social media offers us “listening platforms,” a great term coined by Dave Frankland of Forrester Research. Monitoring social media makes it easier than ever to listen to authentic customer concerns, find out what makes them happy, and catch any problems before they fester.
5. Listen to your first line.
Employees receive the most regular evaluations from customers they serve every day, so ignore your frontline workers and your salespeople at your peril. Teach them active listening skills, and help employees strive to understand in detail what it means to “wow” your customers and what we can do to deliver that better. Over time, smart companies use this data from the front line to make process and policy refinements that add up to a better experience for everyone.
6. Create a forum.
Create an online forum where consumer teams can connect with each other and with you. Treat consumers who provide feedback this way like super VIPs and pay close attention to what they have to say. You can also assemble a small organization of determined users to form a visitor advisory board. Select a dozen clients who will not only sense where you want to go, but will also tell you directly if you fail.
7. Bring clients to your people.
At your next workers’ assembly, host a visitor panel of two or three key consumers who talk about what they like about your organization, what frustrates them, and what the competition says to attract them. It will be a workers’ assembly where no one is disconnected.
I have seen this last idea firsthand when I’ve worked with pharmaceutical companies. To close conferences, leaders often ask a customer to speak for a few minutes about how medicines made by their company saved or improved their lives. These emotional addresses make very real the role these professionals have—no matter where they work in the company—and the impact their work is having on patients and their families.
In good organizational cultures, leaders focus on what they do and how they do it; in great cultures, leaders remind their people why they do what they do for their customers.
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