One of my clients has done an excellent job in the last couple of years improving their customer experience. However, much of it was the easy stuff and hasn't had the breakthrough effect they hoped to get. I wasn't surprised by this problem, and I will explain why in this issue.
It is critical to mention that my client has done an excellent job prioritizing. They focused their attention on the customer-facing teams at first. This strategy is ideal for getting an improvement program off the ground. After all, no one can address everything at once.
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However, to create a breakthrough to change the organization's culture, you can't stop there. That would leave one group with a customer-centric mindset and the rest without one. This situation can lead to policies and procedures that conflict between the groups.
Therefore, everyone in the organization has to embrace the customer-centric mindset—even those who never interact directly with a customer. Customer centricity should be an entire organization's philosophy, not specific departments.
So, today, let's take a closer look at some of the areas that need addressing in this change effort. Starting with…
Help People Realize How Their Role Affects The Customer
Many people in the organization who do not work with customers might need help with this connection. For example, we worked with RICOH Printers, Canada, which became our case study based on their improvement of 34 points in the Net Promoter Score® over 30 months. This increase in NPS also resulted in a ten percent revenue growth in a declining market. The CEO once told me that the only thing he would have done differently would have been to put a measure in every person's compensation tied to customer experience metrics from the beginning. In his case, RICOH did that later in the process, but when they did, significant improvements manifested.
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Net Promoter®, NPS®, NPS Prism®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter ScoreSM and Net Promoter SystemSM are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.
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Don't Forget the Critical Role Human Resources Plays
Human Resources (HR) significantly influences your efforts to have the whole organization embrace the customer. First, they handle recruitment and talent acquisition. Employing the right people is a significant ingredient in your recipe for success. Next, HR often conducts training, which is another big part of the success of your improvement program. So, having the people on board with your philosophy that will train your team is essential.
Another massively important area that HR deals with is employee engagement and internal communications. We all know happy employees make happy customers. So, you can see that HR plays a critical role in this agenda.
In another case study, the world's largest shipping company, Maersk Line, improved its NPS by 40 points over a 30-month period, leading to a ten percent rise in shipping volumes. We helped them set the strategy to deliver a customer experience where the customers felt they could trust Maersk and were cared for and pleased. Getting there required every person in the organization to reflect on how they could help achieve that.
So, Maersk's HR recruited people who are naturally good at creating trust or feeling cared for, and then they trained them to embed those principles into their work.
However, it doesn't stop there for HR. Next, they created an employee environment that mirrored that, making employees feel they could trust the company and that the company cared for them. They also determined how to incentivize people and communicate those principles in their internal communications.