Customer-Centricity: Getting a Smile Every Time

When your customer gets in touch with you, what should their experience be like? Well, regardless of any metrics or measures, the bottom line is that they should go away with a smile on their face. Sometimes we are so tied up in the strategic management of customer service that this simple truth is forgotten.

This rings true for the customer service operation of course, a place where customers are usually in need of help. If you can quickly help a customer to fix their problem then it will leave that customer smiling, but it is also worth thinking about just how much customer interactions have changed in the past couple of years.

The team that you have regularly engaging with customers is no longer communicating just on the phone or by email. Much of their work is now conducted on social networks and is open and visible to all. Many of the questions are from prospective customers rather than actual customers.

The nature of how customers engage with brands has changed dramatically. Customers now use many channels, they often hop from one channel to another in the course of engaging with the brand, and they expect brands to react to requests for information as well as to post-sale comments and complaints.

What this means for the customer is that it is easier to get information about products and services. The customer can call, tweet, text, email, or leave a message on Facebook with any question and expect a company to get back to them with the information promptly – using the same channel that the customer chose to use for the question.

Prospective customers also have access to a lot of additional information that has only really been available in the years since smart phones became common, namely price comparison and reviews from other customers available at any time. Customers have really never had it so good both in terms of the amount of information available and also the reactivity of brands to their queries.

From the company perspective there is a complex change taking place that many will struggle to adapt to. Instead of being able to maintain company departments in silos with distinct teams and management measures, any department that has some interaction with customers now needs to be working with the others.

In fact, it is likely that some companies will start merging all their customer facing tasks into a ‘customer engagement’ or ‘customer relationship’ department rather than maintaining the traditional silos. Practically this means that your marketing team, your sales and advertising team, your product research team, and your customer service team all need to be working as one.

It is likely that in many companies, the customer service team will be seen as the heart of the organization as it becomes more customer-centric in structure. The people who interact with customers on a daily basis are really the heart of the company if your aim is to engage with customers and build long-lasting relationships.

This relationship building inspires loyalty far more than any points-based program so as customer centricity becomes a more important strategy in many industries, we will see marketing strategies shift in a way that places the customer at the heart of corporate strategy.

If you have not seen the marketing strategy in your own business change this way yet you might want to ask yourself this question, has the way you interact personally with brands changed in the past five years? What are you own expectations for the way that retailers, airlines, or hotels interact with you? And if you own expectations have shifted then don’t you need to start examining the departmental silos in your own organization?

What do you think about how customer interactions are changing? Please leave a comment here or tweet @AmitShankardass. Photo by Sean Jackson licensed under Creative Commons.