Satisfying customers is a costly process; some would say it costs everything. That is, I have owners who tell me their entire business is configured around the idea of making customers happy! Kudos to those men and women! Diffusing customer engagement activities throughout the organization is difficult to do, especially for my clients in the billion dollar club. With $5 million in revenue, you probably already had a hard enough time reaching everyone and getting them on the same page, much less in the same room. But by the time you are operating in 5 continents and include all the cultural things that expansion may imply, implementing customer engagement activities can be difficult.
An article from McKinsey Quarterly titled Five ‘No-Regrets’ Moves for Superior Customer Engagement recently caught my attention. It dealt with two subjects dear to my heart, 1) getting customer satisfaction to occur at every touch point and 2) controlling the cost of customer satisfaction. Here are the five ideas encapsulated:
- Hold a customer-engagement summit: get all of the touch points across the organization together for a summit on how to treat the customer right.
- Create a customer engagement council: organize an executive group to oversee efforts and expenditures that crosses silos so that budgets and goals can be combined across traditional scope boundaries.
- Appoint a “Chief Content Officer” to centralize decision making and management of all the various content that is published by the organization to ensure a single purpose and strategy.
- Create a “listening center” to capture things customers say on the phone, through the mail, via tweets, thru email, etc. and then to act on what they say, not only at the individual level, but at the corporate level as well.
- Challenge your total customer-engagement budget: take a look at traditional marketing and consider repurposing it to do more outsized customer service, like paying a courier to get a package there in time for a deadline or adding temporary staff to reach a tight/stretch deadline.
Several of these ideas, if done well, will not only contribute to overall customer satisfaction, but will reduce costs by coordinating spending across functions and repurposing dollars to be spent in new, more effective ways.
Click here to view the original article. I recommend you read it.
