Are you hearing the customer voice?
This blog post created by Jo Leckie, owner and lead consultant at Big Picture Training, muses on the challenge of hearing the tenant voice
In the words of Monty Python… What did the Romans (substitute customers here) customers, do for us?
What do customers do for us?
They pay our wages and what’s more they hold all the cards. They dictate whether we succeed or fail. They are the only people who can tell us what they want.
I’ve been musing on the challenge facing organisations to listen to and hear the enant voice by maximising customer engagement, whilst minimising the cost of delivering an outstanding customer service.
Customer focus groups, panels and surveys capture information from a small proportion of the customer base. The problem with using this approach in isolation, is that the people who participate don’t generally represent the views of the majority.
Customer engagement and putting the customer at the heart of the service goes much further than that. It’s about using all the tools in your toolkit effectively. Managing all the channels of communication open to us to listen to, and hear, what all of our customers are telling us.
How many organisations combine their learning not only from focus groups and surveys, but also from those golden nuggets of information handed to us on a plate, complaints, e-mails, phone calls, face to face exchanges and analysis of trends?
Let’s be maverick here and include communications with our internal customers via meetings, 1:1s, appraisals, employee forums and surveys to get a truly holistic view. One of the key drivers for outstanding customer service experiences is employee engagement.
I’d wager that a lot of organisations say they do. I’d even go so far as to bet that those organisations have CRM systems and HR performance improvement tools.
However, from experience, I hesitate to believe that these organisations have managed to collate all of their real time interactions with customers, both internal and external, to provide a truly representative picture of what the customer really wants.
I’d go even further and say that only a very small proportion do all of this and do anything truly innovative with the information they receive.
Let’s not fall into the trap of doing what we’ve always done and getting what we’ve always got.
I love a challenge. My tea’s gone cold. One lump or two?