by Marcel Stroop | April 11, 2019
The most successful companies make listening and understanding their customers a vital part of their business strategy. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, the reality is different. In a time where customer preferences are evolving faster than ever, ignoring these might turn out to be quite costly.
In this article, I will share a couple of strategies and principles I use in my daily contact with our clients to help them put the voices of their customers on the corporate agenda.
The mindset of traditional companies is still very much inward, company-focused: “we’ve always done it this way, and it is successful, why should we change?”. The point these companies are missing is that pushing their product and their way of thinking on the current well-informed customer, will not create sustainable long-term results.
Instead, they’d rather focus on creating documents, making fancy presentations and having endless meetings. Unfortunately, these are still part of everyday life in most companies.
The actual question employees should continuously ask themselves: what value do my actions add to our customers and to our business? This question should be embedded in the workflow of all companies.
Changing an inward-focused culture to a customer-centric culture is not easy, it requires organizational discipline from top management.
Think about it. Companies that understand their customers are much more likely to retain them, deliver a much better service and attract new ones. Your customers connect and engage with your business through many different touchpoints. Funneling these experiences back to your business will help you improve your product in numerous ways. I see these as the most important ones:
I can hear you thinking: “but this does not generate sales?”. It does — a lot.
Nurture your customers, point them in the right direction, focus on how your product will make their life easier, make it interactive and be there for them at each moment in the customer journey.
Data is a key element to measure your performance across different customer touchpoints. Visualize the customer journey and add relevant metrics for each step in the journey.
Don’t be too picky about choosing the perfect metric. The result of your efforts will depend mainly on what you are doing with the customer feedback, not how you measure these. Before you know you’ll end up debating for days on which metric to use: CSAT, NPS or your own ground-breaking metric.
It’s much more important to spend your time on making these insights actionable on a strategic, tactical and operational level.
Identifying the key frictions is a good start of the process, implementing a feedback loop helps bring it all together.
To properly close the feedback loop you should first solve the issue with the individual customer. After this is done, you make sure together with the key stakeholders in your company to remove this friction from the process or product.
Some frictions may require a minor change at the operational level; others require a change at the core of the business.
Closing the feedback loop is not easy. It requires persistence and patience, listening to and acting on your customer’s feedback is a continuous and never-ending process!
I’d be happy to hear your thoughts and strategies to make the life of your customers easier. Feel free to reach out!
Marcel is our Sales Manager and heads up the team of Account Managers. He is very passionate about making the life of our and your customers easier. Marcel also loves to work on the growth of 5CA, and to confirm some stereotypes, as a proud Dutchman he loves to cycle.
Gaming is the world’s #1 lifestyle choice, played by more people than any other form of entertainment. We’ve had a ringside seat for its evolution, working hand-in-hand with our clients to support their customers as they enter huge, new immersive worlds.
The times, they are a-most-definitely-changing. As seasoned CX veterans know, plenty of the received wisdoms of third-party contact center management have received something of a battering over the last few years.
If you were not able to attend “CX Strategy: What now?”, our panel debate from last week, then here it is. An insightful, thought-provoking hour with industry gurus Mark Hillary, Stephen Loynd, Peter Ryan and our own Robert Van Diem. Here are some of the themes that really stood out for us.
I’m pleased to announce that I will be participating in a debate hosted by 5CA on October 27th. The title is CX Strategy: What Now? It’s going to be particularly topical, as one of the key things we will discuss, in the midst of this pandemic, is working from home (WFH) in the CX arena.
I’m pleased to announce that I will be participating in a debate hosted by 5CA on October 27th. The title is CX Strategy: What Now? I know that there are a lot of webinars and online debates these days, but I really think you should make time for this one:
Following on from National Customer Service Week, our Chief Customer Officer Rob van Herpen reflects on the journey that customer service has undergone in the last decade, and the role it plays within the wider scope of the whole customer experience.
I’m pleased to announce that I will be moderating a webinar hosted by 5CA on October 27th. The title is CX Strategy: What Now? I know you might be thinking “another day, another webinar invitation,” but as I’m chairing the debate I want to try making this one a little different. We can’t meet at conferences right now so the very least anyone planning a new webinar can do is to ensure it’s interesting and this one should hit the ball out of the park.
Gaming has been one of the few beneficiaries of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic. Global quarantine and stay-at-home orders preventing people from traveling, commuting, and socializing has resulted in a boom for the gaming industry. Maximize the value of your VIP players and discover how work from home (WFH) support helps you add more value to your gaming whales.
Game launched? Check. Player hype? Check. Champagne? Crack that bottle, you deserve it! But while it bubbles on your tongue, let me ask you this: Have you considered how to respond to players who need assistance or want to provide feedback? And when your player base grows (and let's be honest it will - your game is awesome), what will you do when those interactions start exploding in languages you do not speak? How will you manage the volume of requests coming in, but still provide the best possible user experience to your fans?
Yes…. Another thought piece on how COVID-19 is re-shaping life as we know it and what can we learn from it going forward. With people stuck at home and shops closed, several industries, such as e-commerce, streaming entertainment, and gaming, are experiencing hyperactivity. The influx is driving revenues but also customer support needs.
Did anyone see that Assassins’ Creed Valhalla announcement trailer? Of course you did. Chances are you did not discover it on your own, but instead it appeared on your social media channels, most likely shared by a fan of the franchise or an influencer. At least that is how it happened to me. Game marketing truly has changed in the era of digital, community, and influencers.
In BPO, we often talk about how we deliver the best possible customer experience. We focus on training knowledgeable and empathetic agents, we run and rerun staffing simulations to ensure minimal wait times. These things are important, but, for the most part, once a customer is reaching out to us, it’s already a ding to the overall customer experience. Customers want an easy experience that works as it should and is intuitive.
Last month, Vice ran an interesting article by Jess Morrissette on how games marketing invented toxic gaming culture by promoting toxicity and harassment as value propositions for gaming. While considered perfectly reasonable at the time, games marketing has luckily taken a turn for the better.
One of the most interesting things about the gaming industry is that gamers don’t behave like customers. Sure, they have no problem spending like customers, but their devotion and passion makes them more like super-fans.
With more and more companies providing work-from-home possibilities, and children spending more time at home during school breaks, many tend to fill the time previously spent commuting or at after-school activities on picking up new or old hobbies. It comes as no surprise that playing video games is one of those favored hobbies.
The World Health Organization and almost every national government has encouraged everyone in non-essential roles to stay at home. With millions of people in self-isolation, there is a real need to ensure these people have something to do.
In this new day and age where no one spends more than 67 seconds away from a screen without at least a hint of anxiety, recruiting and engaging this new wave of job seekers is no less complicated than swiping right, get a match and then not really knowing how to open a conversation anymore (sound familiar?).
In today's business world, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who does not agree that Customer Experience is an essential aspect when building and maintaining a profitable business.
We’ve probably all heard of quality assessment (QA) before, where a quality specialist goes over agent interactions and checks to see if there are any possible areas of improvement or development...
The most successful companies make listening and understanding their customers a vital part of their business strategy. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?
In this article, I’ll provide you with five tips to shape your customer service organization in such a way that you can prevent your customers from experiencing exactly this.
When you think about Customer Experience I’m willing to bet you’ll typically think about the experiences customers have when evaluating a product or service, choosing and buying it, and then actually using it.
