With a New Year upon us, many of us are committed to personal resolutions that likely involve introducing new behaviors or changing existing ones. As an organization, a good resolution to adopt in 2013 is to put added focus on developing a loyal customer base. In the same way we commit to personal resolutions, the first step is to evaluate the existing process in which customers are serviced. It is important to consider every customer touchpoint with your organization.
Our Retail Director, K.C. Blonski, recently spoke about doing this in a FastCompany 30 Second MBA video:
In the video, K.C. mentions two key words that are central to any employee/customer relationship. It’s a term I’ve written about a few times before when blogging about Owning the Customer Experience: Defining Moments.
While K.C. nicely summarizes a multifaceted customer service strategy involving defining moments in just 30 seconds (keep in mind a defining moment itself may be created in a time period shorter than this video!) we know it takes much longer to create a mutually beneficial, valuable relationship with a customer.
Even though “service mistakes happen” as K.C. pointed out in a previous 30 Second MBA, when an organization focuses on perfecting every step of the customer relationship process, then gives employees the ability to enhance it in every way they can, defining moments with customers become positive. And when a series of positive defining moments are delivered to a customer, their perception of the brand also becomes positive and they are likely to buy again or recommend the product/service.
Resolutions often turn into broken self-promises. But an organization-wide resolution to put added emphasis on improving your customer relationships while giving your workforce the skills they need to ‘wow’ customers at every step of the way is one promise worth keeping!
Sharon Daniels is the CEO and President of AchieveGlobal
