Focus on Your Customer a Must in 2012

Focus on Your Customer a Must in 2012

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, little innovation and creativity, a lack of leadership skills, the continual focus on price, the inability to add real customer value and a operational focus over a customer focus are just some of the areas of business performance that are directly linked to the lack of 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 reluctances to address this critical situation according to Chris Bell Managing Director Customer Experiences www.customerexperiences.co.nz a company specialising in the development of quality customer experiences.

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 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.

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

Retail is one of many industries that would stand to make substantial gains if more were to adopt and develop a customer experience strategy. As customers we are bored with the majority of retail experiences currently being delivered and we see little action to change. It is time to stop complaining about the state of the economy and to start thinking creatively about the value that could in many cases be added to enhance the customer experience.

Right now Customer Experiences is making available a free Customer Experience Development guide download to encourage business to adopt and develop this vital strategy in 2012.

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