Customer Experience Management Methodology & Tool-Kit

I believe that a key part of any methodology and tools relating to customer experience should firstly be to challenge if providing a good customer experience is what the organisation really wants.  That is compared to driving profits and other short term gains.  For some companies these are the only drivers and customer experience only becomes important when dealing belatedly with the inevitable complaints and bad publicity.

The culture of a company is also important.  Employees closest to customers need to be able to feedback customer comments, openly, honestly, and importantly without fear.  The methodology should challenge how the culture of the company affects both management and staff attitudes to customers and also how keen senior management really are to receiving both positive and negative customer and working practice feedback from staff and managers.

In competitive B2B markets, good service which adds to the customer experience can be the main differentiator in retaining key accounts.  Some businesses are very good at providing high levels of service, but are not as good at remembering all the great things that they do to help the customer and then importantly put values against all that good work.  The customer experience tools could include templates to help sellers to recognise and record their good customer service activities.  Then from a competitive angle place a value on those tasks, so that if and when the account is under threat from a competitor, the business is prepared to defend itself. 

Some of the largest sales increases to existing customers often come from an initially defensive position.  Having established what the company does to go the extra mile, (which the customer had perhaps not either fully appreciated or placed a value against), it is logical to then compare the level of service and customer experience with the customers other suppliers, who may well offer far less support, but may even have a higher share of the customer’s business.  The tools could help to demonstrate the relative value of the support provided by different suppliers.  This may be very useful in reminding the customer that it should not be down to the cheapest price alone.

I hope these comments are helpful.