The customer experience is expected to be consistent across the board from your company. Customers want to receive accurate and stable information no matter which department of your company they’re interacting with. In a way, you almost have to deliver service in a way that makes your company seem as though it’s one big department instead of many silos working together. But the reality in many businesses is that there are separate departments and they all rely on each other for different things. Sometimes customers have to be sent to a different department to fully get their inquiry resolved, but this can be problematic if there are gaps in the quality or timing between departments. In a recent article, Lynn Hunsaker discusses how handoff silos can often cause problems with customers and within the company. But at the same time, handoff silos can help your company be more efficient and successful when done correctly. Hunsaker gives six ways to make a customer-centric company.
1) Customer-Centric Job Descriptions: In order to hire people who will put the customer at the center of their focus, you must make sure your job descriptions include language that makes it very clear how significant a customer-centric mindset is for the position.
2) Customer-Centric Priorities: Are your employees putting the customer experience in consideration when making their priorities? Through customer experience research, companies can determine what factors are building loyalty in your customers and what key drivers need to be emphasized in employee priorities.
3) Internal Customer Experience Management: Ensure communication between departments on the customers’ happiness with their service. Departments must work together to deliver a consistent customer experience, so it’s important to foster an environment where there are consistent discussions about customer satisfaction.
4) Customer-Centric Process and Policy Audits: Companies often hold audits for various reasons, but they don’t always hold them to ensure the customer experience is up to standards. Hunsaker recommends making frequent audits to determine what is interfering with positive customer experiences, what’s causing delays/frustration with customers and internal departments, and more.
5) Customer-Centric Alliances: It’s not only your internal departments who need to be focused on the customer, it’s also your external partners and vendors. For example, if your outsource call center doesn’t match your customer-centric company culture, it will be a challenge to keep consistency across the board. Don’t assume customer-centric philosophies are implied with external partners and vendors; actually write specific criteria into your agreements.
6) Customer-Centric Employee Engagement: When you engage with your employees, it’s not enough to engage them for the sake of it or solely because you want to benefit the company in some way. You want to engage your employees in the interest of making a positive contribution to the customers’ lives. When you show positive enthusiasm about the customer experience, it can be a very contagious attitude. If employees know that management and executives aren’t just preaching customer experience, but in fact truly believe in it, the attitude is more likely to spread throughout the entire company.
This blog post is based on an article from CustomerThink. To read the original article, please click the link below:
Customer Experience Handoff Silos are the Heart of Success – Lynn Hunsaker
If you’re interested in outsourcing with a call center, we can help at no charge!
Outsource Consultants are call center experts with over 25 years of outsourcing industry experience that have spent thousands of hours vetting and analyzing the strengths and specializations of the industry-leading outsource call center vendors. If you’re considering call center outsourcing, simply call 888-766-4482 or request a free call center cost proposal today and we’ll help you find the solution that best fits your exact requirements.
