Accountants Must Step Up to the Plate

Accountants Must Step Up to the Plate – By Chris Bell

Less than 5 percent of New Zealand businesses have a clear customer experience strategy in place. This number decreases dramatically for smaller organisations.

High employee disengagement, low productivity, declining customer loyalty, a lack of innovation and creativity, a lack of leadership skills, the continual focus on price, a lack of a sustainable competitive advantage, the inability to add real value and a operational focus over a customer focus are just some of the areas of business performance that are directly linked to a customer experience strategy.

A lack of knowledge and skill to develop a long-term customer experience strategy are two of the reasons behind the lack of action to address this critical situation.

A recent Temkin Group customer experience survey found that 80 percent of respondents from corporate organisations understood the benefits of a customer experience strategy however only 13 percent knew how to develop such a strategy within their organisations.

The result is a tourism industry that is struggling to meet visitor’s expectations, a retail industry struggling to come up with any competitive advantages other than price with the resulting negative impact on margins and profitability and our largest Telco recently reassuring us that one day it will be a customer focused organisation.

A recent iStart- Microsoft survey found that 80 percent of us have taken our business elsewhere because of bad experiences and a third using social media to vent their frustration.
And from the same survey 80 percent of business leaders surveyed believe that NZ business had an average to poor approach to customer satisfaction.

We continue to waste money on research to determine how customers feel about the service and overall experience they have received, workplace research that repeatedly shows the increasing levels of employee disengagement and the reason for it and still we do very little with the results to improve the performance in these areas.

We believe accountants are in the best position to influence a turn around in this performance. Accountants need to look first at their own customer experience strategy. They will only impact business performance in this area if they themselves are role modelling the behaviour they want SMEs to adopt.

Business leaders must develop the skills required to lead a customer centric culture. Currently 67 percent of employees go to work everyday disengaged (JRA workplace survey). This is a result of poor business cultures and poor leadership skills and is the prime reason our productivity is lagging at 22 out of 30 in the OECD.

In July for the first time in this country a two day Customer Experience Management conference will be held covering all aspects of this strategy. This conference has been organised to meet the increasing interest in this key area of business. It is hoped that the adoption and development of customer experience strategies will increase as a result of this conference.
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