INNERGISE!

This week’s editorial of Marketing Week included the following words from editor Mark Choueke: “Customer experience is the next big battleground for businesses and brands to conquer.”

If we have closed Gap No 1 (see the article Mind the Gap No 1 – Know what your customers expect) and have enough insight, market research and customer feedback, the focus needs to be on designing a customer experience that works for the customer, is understood by everyone and suitably measureable.

Too often this opportunity to drive up the quality of the customer experience isn’t given enough focus. Typically this is for one of three reasons:

1. The leadership team and senior management haven’t bought into it
2. Businesses are structured in a way that is based around internal functions and not the external customer experience
3. The business does not know how to go about it

Let’s look at these in a little more detail:

1. The leadership team and senior management haven’t bought into it and don’t understand the business benefit. Service is harder to measure than products and typically the management accounts don’t effectively highlight the relevant numbers which might lead to leadership action. At Innergy, we often find ourselves less than popular with finance people because we unearth numbers that they haven’t been reporting on and should have been. Here are a couple of examples: a major bank thought that the cost of staff turnover was £17m – we showed the impact on customer retention meant the figure was in excess of £70m. A national, and very successful, distribution business identified with our help that there was £2m of cost pouring out of the business (and not being reported on) as a result of service failures. A retailer identified that those average performers who weren’t passionate about delivering an amazing customer experience produced on average 54% of the revenue of a top performer. Understanding the numbers and building a compelling case has to happen to get real leadership focus around designing, implementing and managing a fantastic customer experience. The consequence – leadership lip service!
2. The business is structured around functions and not the customer experience. Layers, functions and silos do not lend themselves to providing a great customer experience. Front line people deliver the customer experience not management, and so we must create a bottom up mentality for ideas, communication and feedback. Also who owns the customer experience? The reality is that most functions create it and touch the customer; marketing, sales, operations, finance, customer service etc. and others enable it; HR, IT etc. These functions are rarely seamless often having different functional agendas and priorities.
3. The business does not know how to go about managing the customer experience. There are three key aspects to any customer experience framework:
   1. A clearly articulated reputation (differentiated and valuable to the customer)
   2. A clearly defined customer journey with all touch points mapped out
   3. Customer led standards (which incorporate both hard standards, those you can measure, and soft standards, for which you need feedback)

The experience needs to be profitable, deliverable and powerful enough to stand out in the market place.
Done effectively it becomes not only an effective management tool but it can also become core to employee training, communication and customer feedback, without it we are all shooting in the dark.

For access to Innergy’s unique online Cycle of Service to manage the customer experience or further information about closing Gap number two, please contact Gordon on gordon@innergy.co.uk.