Come on there's Got to Be More............

Great products and services at great prices are no longer enough

If a business is going to stand out from an ever increasingly crowded and competitive market place and remain profitable, it will need to start thinking about more creative ways to “add value” than just discounting prices on products and services that are no different from their competitors.

Unfortunately when it comes to gaining customer feedback business is still striving to have a satisfied customer defined as “just meeting expectations” this from Chris Bell Managing Director of Customer Experiences who along with Ray Sleeman has developed Customer Experience Tracker.

Bell says business needs to understand the goal is no longer to have a satisfied customer, that was the goal 20 years ago.

The goal today is to increase customer loyalty and word of mouth recommendation.

For the first time New Zealand business has available to it a powerful resource “an inclusive approach to gaining and acting on employee and customer feedback” in a way that will have a positive impact on a businesses growth and profitability”.

 Customer Experience Tracker is a toolkit that allows businesses to easily gain an accurate evaluation of how their customers feel about their current customer experience performance and how employees feel about their workplace and includes an ongoing strategic approach to continual improvements including greater customer loyalty, word of mouth recommendation, a reduction in operating costs,  an increase in employee engagement resulting in improved productivity and ultimately a more profitable and valuable business.

The ability to benchmark within an industry has always been difficult, resulting in business not really knowing how they are performing. The Customer Experience Tracker will change that. Not only will a business be able to easily establish their own score they will be able to compare that score against their competitors and other sectors.  The benchmarking ability will help to raise the performance of an industry’s customer experience resulting in benefits for all those participating businesses.

 Customer Experience Tracker has been made possible due to the development of an international model called Net Promoter Score© used by a number of high profile overseas organisations in the airline, car rental, tourism, and medical industries and includes e-commerce based leaders like Amazon.com and e-bay and in New Zealand by Air New Zealand, House of Travel and Westpac Bank.

The motivation for the development of the Customer Experience Tracker has come from three main issues-

1)     The continued obsession with the use of “customer satisfaction” as a measure of a business’s performance.

Clearly customer satisfaction relates to the delivery of the expected i.e. “meeting expectation”. Business is well aware that in this increasingly competitive and crowded market environment, just meeting customer expectations is not enough to influence customer behaviour and increase loyalty and word of mouth referrals.

Businesses must be asking customers the likelihood of recommending their business to others.

Organisations are beginning to understand that in an increasingly fragmented market the cost of trying to reach a target audience is sky rocketing. Couple this with new social networking technology and the power customers now have to tarnish or enhance a company’s brand reputation not just amongst friends and colleagues but to a global network then the importance of knowing how customers value their experience is paramount.

2)     The lack of action taken as a result of customer feedback and the absence of a long-term strategic approach to customer experience improvement.

A number of surveys have shown that growing customer loyalty is among most CEOs top priorities, yet customers are continually treated in a way that doesn’t reflect this priority.

Organisations are held accountable for increasing profits. Financial results are what company’s measure. Loyal customer promoters are overlooked because they don’t show up on the balance sheet.

3)     The fact that businesses will not deliver a consistently high quality customer experience that engages and builds relationships with their customers, unless their people are receiving the same

If business wants to reap the benefits of customer loyalty there needs to be a focus on creating employee loyalty.

These three issues and the fact that very few customers are actually having experiences that lead to  advocacy has prompted a united approach driven by a motivation to see more businesses profiting from a continually improving Net Promoter Score©. 

For further information – chris@customerexperiences.co.nz www.customerexperiences.co.nz mb 027 2792360