Customer Experience NOT the Flavour of the Month
Customer Experience NOT the Flavour of the Month
Don’t even think about developing a customer experience strategy for your business unless your organisation is fully committed long-term.
This warning comes from Chris Bell Managing Director of Customer Experiences an organisation that specialises in the development of quality customer experiences.
New Zealand businesses are starting to understand the benefits of embarking on the development of a unique experience, an experience that will distance a business from increasing competition and commoditisation.
However in a number of cases the motivation has not been about adding customer value, its more about being seen as adopting a new trendy business strategy, rather than a genuinely fully committed approach.
The lack of a long-term commitment to the development of a customer experience strategy can potentially have damaging consequences to a business including confused and disengaged employees and high customer churn as a result of inconsistency.
Today’s customers can see through attempts at window dressing, they are not impressed by initiatives that have been created with little understanding of customers expectations or real needs. These initiatives will lose more customers and increase levels of negative word of mouth according to Bell.
On the flip side those organisations that have made a genuine commitment to the development of their customer experience are reaping the benefits of increased customer loyalty, less of a focus on price and today’s most powerful form of advertising customer recommendation.
A 2011 Bloomberg Businessweek survey revealed that “delivering a great customer experience” has become the new imperative: 80% of the companies polled rated customer experience as a top strategic objective.
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