Strategic Viewpoints

The blending of The Customer Group's proven consulting methodology with our suite of targeted service offerings - driving customer interaction and business results.

What is your company’s “customer strategy”?

You have a Company Vision. A mission statement. Principles and values. But do you have a customer strategy? A customer experience vision? There are many ways to deliver on your mission and vision. Who is responsible for your customer vision? Have you clearly articulated what you desire your customers to experience as they interact with your business? Or is this left to chance or to be defined and audited by a quality department.

Our work leverages the knowledge and research of Peter Senge and the folks at MIT when they published the book The Fifth Discipline (19##) to discuss learning organizations. Companies must have a “shared vision”, pictures of the future, both of where they are going and how they intend to get there. Nowhere is the need for a shared vision more important than in defining how a company is to interact with its customers. As the saying goes, if you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there. However, companies with a strong understanding of a clear customer experience vision can then determine the necessary roles, responsibilities, tools and measurement required to make the vision a reality.

Do you know you’re company’s “moments of truth”?

Jan Carlson’s Moments of Truth (1988) very effectively captured the concept and essence of why the customer experience is so important. A company is not simply a collection of assets, but rather a collection of customer experiences. Each customer interaction presents the company with an opportunity to increase or erode a customer’s perceptions of that business. Company’s must identify each moment of truth, understand what is important to customers and organize its resources around delivering on each moment of truth effectively.

Do you know what matters most to your customers?

Sure they complete surveys, but we all know the limitations of typical feedback mechanisms. We hear from those vocal minority and typically only after something really bad has happened. Consequently, companies review daily and trended operating reports that illustrate the data that is most readily available. Very few businesses take the time to truly understand what matters most to customers, and then develop measurement and reporting systems to guide their operations and decision making. Guessing can be extremely costly, however insights derived from effective reporting can be extremely valuable.

Who is defining your quality customer experience?

Many companies need to be reminded that only your customers define quality. Typically by the time they have shared with you their opinion of quality, they have voted with their feet and moved on. Companies are left scrambling to understand drivers of retention or churn. The investment of time and effort would have been much better spent up front and understanding what customers consider “critical to quality”. Understanding what is “critical to quality” is leveraging a vital component of the proven Six Sigma methodology. Companies shy away from Six Sigma for fear of the need for an intense degree of data collection, analysis and measurement. We have extracted the component of Six Sigma that espouses the need for customers to define quality in determining what customers consider to be their “CTQ’s” or critical to a quality customer experience. Through research, both qualitative and quantitative, we begin by understanding how customers define a quality customer experience – often by segment and by stage within the customer lifecycle.

Do you rely on a “do it yourself” approach?

Once you have identified what is most important to customers, what they value, what they prefer, do you then rely on the people currently delivering the experience to transform their daily interactions. Do it yourself (“DIY”) can work well for home improvement, but it can be extremely costly in the arena of business improvement. Your people are critical to the success of any transformation effort, however they may not be the best people to design it, plan it and lead it. Expertise from outside your business with a proven track record in successfully designing and implementing, across industries and across solutions is your best approach to avoiding the pitfalls and achieving the desired results. Avoiding the mistakes that “first timers” make will keep improvement and transformation efforts from losing momentum. The “muscle memory” of organizations is incredibly strong and the tendency to revert back to “what we’ve always done” is an ever present risk. Whether your transformation partner is The Customer Group or another proven advisor, seeking external guidance is, at a minimum, “success insurance”, and often times an accelerator and multiplier of the benefits expected from your efforts to improve.