A World Class Client Experience
December 04, 2013
A world class client experience starts with an organization that has a culture of being obsessed with seeking out and affecting ways to enhance the client experience. Its starts with every employee believing that every client interaction is an opportunity to build on the goodwill that led to the current interaction. It’s not a sales or customer service or engineering thing – It’s a company thing. It’s an institutional value.
The best run companies understand this. They understand the economic value of innovating the client experience and what it means to their brands long term viability. They understand that innovating the client experience is every bit as critical as innovation in product development or technology.
So if innovating the client experience is so important, then why do so many companies get it wrong?
Leadership – Leadership needs to be invested. If leadership creates a culture of empowering their people to innovate the client experience, celebrating the win, and then regularly tieing it back to other key business tenets like creating shareholder value, great things happen.
Understanding – Recognize that there is no one thing that makes for a great client experience, its1001 little things. And they happen over time. So they key is to configure your business to be sufficiently dynamic to respond to all the client and non client cues as to what makes for a world class client experience.
Benchmarks – Measuring yourself against your peer group, is likely a quick path to kidding yourself about the quality of your client experience. Your peer group may not be that good. A world class client experience is peer, industry, and vertical agnostic, so the right benchmark is the best client experience across all business sectors. As a B2B company, you might ask yourself what you can learn from the likes of Nordstrom’s, Zappos, Amazon, Google, and Disney. The answer is plenty.
Measurement – Use quantitative measures to support the qualitative initiatives that keep your clients coming back. A world class client experience requires investment which requires a through return analysis. Take the time to tie back your client experience initiatives to things like improving share of wallet, client lifetime value, client retention, and ultimately creation of shareholder value.
Rinse and Repeat – Client experience initiatives need to change at the speed of business. As business evolves, so must the ways in which we spoil our clients. Creating a culture that empowers its people to tune in to and adapt the business to the ever-changing needs of the consumer is the business that ultimately wins the client experience race.
Here at Park Place Technologies our clients are truly special to us. We know that a world class experience allows us to earn their business every day.