Welcome to our brand new Customers 1st blog
series entitled, “Customer Experience Conversations.” This series will highlight
customer experience leadership ideas and insights from the experts who will be
speaking at the 2014 Total Customer Experience
Leaders Summit (TCEL) in April.
This year, TCEL will explore the new realities of building
brands and relationships in today’s socially driven and data abundant world. The
event will shine an important lens on the power of insights and the critical
need for marketers to focus on factoring emotion into the bigger equation to
get a return on customer relationships.
With the onset of the New Year, I wanted to get an in-depth
look at the ever-changing customer experience landscape from an expert’s point
of view. I was fortunate to sit down with Len Ferman, managing director, Ferman
Innovation, to discuss the importance of empathy when it comes to customer
experience leadership.
Here is what Ferman had to say:
IIR: Describe
your best customer experience.
Ferman: When I
think about great customer experiences I like to focus on the intentional
experience rather than the typical story of a "lone wolf" hero acting
on their own and bending the rules. I absolutely applaud those who go
above and beyond the call of duty and shows true empathy for a customer. However,
from a corporate point of view we should be creating intentional customer
experiences that demonstrate empathy for our customers.
In this light, my best customer experience involved my
teenage son losing his iPhone. Verizon delighted me with their
process of transferring the account to a new phone two times in the same
day at no charge and without having to visit the store. First, my son
transferred his account to an old droid phone I was no longer using. He
needed a phone immediately because he was driving back to college. Then
when he got back to school he found a friend who had an extra iPhone. He
then contacted Verizon and transferred his account a second time. Each time the
transfer was handled remotely in a couple of minutes and at no charge. This was
a huge improvement over several years ago when you would have needed to bring
the phone in and might be charged a transfer fee.
IIR: Why are
empathy and emotion so important in when it comes to customer experience?
Ferman: Corporations
often lose sight of customer needs in the perpetual quest to meet
next quarter’s earnings. What's good in the short term for the stock
price is usually at conflict with long term customer satisfaction and
shareholder value. Corporate leaders need to spend more time
attending traditional face to face focus groups and watching their
customers talk about their pain points and challenges in everyday life and in interactions
with the company.
When you see customers face to face you pick up the body
language and expressions that you cannot discern in the most disciplined
reading of a market research report. And, only when you have
seen your customers talking about your company can you truly empathize with
their needs. This is what is required for companies to develop
the stimulus to identify the improvements they need to make to their products
and services.
IIR: What are the
key traits of a great customer experience leader?
Ferman: Great
customer experience leaders ensure that the customer comes first, always,
period. What's good for the customer will ultimately be good for the
shareholders and stakeholders of the company. This doesn't mean you
give away your products for free. This means you design your products and
services in a way that they create value and intentional "wow"
experiences for your customers every day. By creating value for your
customers you create customer advocates, and you spawn
a willingness to pay that will generate superior returns for the
shareholders.
IIR: If your
customers have a bad customer experience, how do you reconnect with them moving
forward?
Ferman: The most
important thing you must do immediately following a bad customer experience is
to acknowledge and apologize for the bad customer experience. You must
empathize with the customer and show you are on their side. Customers want
to know that you are a partner, not an adversary. But, just a simple show
of empathy is not enough. There must be a short and long term
strategy to reconnect with the customer.
In the short term, you can actually leverage a bad
customer experience as a way to create a valuable customer advocate.
I have seen repeatedly that an individual customer's bad experience can be
turned into a unique opportunity to delight that customer when the solution
is handled properly. Often these customers report higher satisfaction
scores after the remedy that prior to the problem. Long term, you need to
incorporate the bad experience into the process you need to have for
continuously evaluating and improving your overall intentional customer
experience for your products and services.
IIR: How has the
digital revolution changed the overall customer experience?
Ferman: The
digital revolution has changed the game in terms of the expectations of
customers and has provided an expansive array of new opportunities to delight
customers. In the digital age customers expect change to happen
fast. Customers expect that your systems all "talk" to each
other and that they should not have to explain their problem more than
once. Customers want instant gratification, so you must be prepared to
solve their problems quickly on the first call.
From a corporate point of view the digital revolution has
created fantastic new opportunities to create intentional great customer
experiences. Forward thinking companies are finding ways to use the web
and mobile platforms to deliver their products and services in a way we couldn't
dream about 20 years ago. The possibilities are limitless
and simply require a commitment to constantly understand customer needs
and generate new solutions.
IIR: Employee
recognition can positively influence employee behaviors and cultivate a
customer-centric culture. How do you recognize and motivate your employees?
Ferman: I have
found the best way to motivate employees is to include them in the process of developing
customer solutions. When you ask an employee to participate in a
brainstorming session to determine how to improve the customer experience you
create a "wow" experience for the employee. Instead of showering
employees with costly incentives in an effort to buy positive behavior it is
much better to partner with your employees and make them feel like they are a
valuable part of the equation to create a customer centric culture. In addition,
you will find that your employees are the best source of great new ideas.
IIR: How do you
strategize and innovate on your company’s customer experience to continuously
improve it as the marketplace grows increasingly competitive?
Ferman: The key
is to have a standing process in place of continuous customer innovation. It
can't be something you do once in a while. You have to have a team in place
that is constantly gathering and synthesizing information about your customer's
experience. This includes primary market research with your customers as
well as a disciplined approach to capturing and evaluating customer
problems. Then you have to have a process that looks at all the data and
identifies and evaluates potential new customer solutions. When you do
this continually you create the ability to identify and respond to your most
pressing customer experience issues.
Want to hear more
from Len Ferman on customer experience? Join me at Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit 2014
in Miami in April. To learn more about the event and register, click here: http://bit.ly/1dton09
About the Author:
Amanda Ciccatelli, Social Media Strategist of the Marketing Division at IIR USA, has a background in digital and
print journalism, covering a variety of topics in business strategy, marketing,
and technology. Amanda is the Editor at Large for several of IIR’s blogs
including Next Big Design, Customers 1st, and ProjectWorld and World Congress for Business
Analysts, and a regular contributor to Front End of Innovation and The Market Research Event,.
She previously worked at Technology Marketing Corporation as a Web Editor where
she covered breaking news and feature stories in the technology industry. She
can be reached at aciccatelli@iirusa.com. Follow her at @AmandaCicc
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