The challenges facing many businesses today are greater than ever. Growing customer expectations, more online competition, and digital transformation, not to mention squeezes on resources and margins! Those businesses with a competitive edge are the ones that are customer focused.
How can you tell if your business is customer focused? Here are 5 key questions to ask yourself…
What priority do you give to your customer experience?
During your monthly management meetings – where does the customer focus and the customer experience stats get put in your agenda? Are they at the top of the list or the last thing that is talked about?
If your company doesn’t prioritise customer experience from the top down then all employees won’t see the importance of the customer.
Do you have Customer KPI’s?
If you don’t set customer experience KPIs (and regularly review them), it’ll be difficult for you to evaluate how your company is doing. You need to track and review the relevant KPIs and metrics, so that you can gauge whether your customer experience efforts are paying off, and fine-tune your strategies if necessary.
Is there too much focus on sales?
It’s not just about acquisition it’s also about retention. It costs far less to keep a customer than it does to acquire a customer. Companies should be rewarding customer loyalty and working hard to keep customers.
How much time do senior managers spend talking to the customer?
Leaders of any company should be interacting with their customer experience on some level every day.
The CEO and managers should listen to calls, walk through a digital experience or roam the floor of a shop to really experience what customers do everyday.
If leaders do this, even for 15 minutes a day, they’re much more likely to understand the issues and help correct them quickly. It’s one thing to hear customers are complaining about something, it’s another to stand there and hear the complaint directly.
How engaged are you with your customers?
Analytics alone won’t get inside your customers head. What are their needs? Their frustrations? Qualitative data from talking to and listening to customers is necessary to get a 360 view of your customer experience.
Whether it is due to limited resources, workplace politics, or merely old school thinking, the lack of customer focus in your company may cost you market share or even more…so make changes today and put customer experience at the top of your list!
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