Andrew McMillan

Inside out customer service:
What do your customers really experience when they interact with front-line employees and how do they subsequently feel about your organisation? Many organisations focus on their product, services or processes when they think about customer experience, or attempt to train the experience they aspire to deliver. Engage employees with common behaviours and attitudes and your customer experience becomes an external reflection of the organisation’s internal relationships and consequently has consistency, integrity, depth and sustainability. It’s a major point of differentiation in a crowded marketplace and one that many organisations fail to capitalise upon.

Differentiation:
Why are you in business from your customers’ perspective? Why would customers choose your business over your competitors’? What attitudes and behaviours should your business be adopting to ensure potential customers always choose you? In an increasingly commoditised and transparent marketplace businesses can’t just rely on product and price to differentiate themselves. Creating a powerful reputation so that you are proactively chosen by your customers is critical for long term success.

Productivity:
Fun at work can be seen as frivolous and rarely finds itself on the leadership agenda. However, it can create an environment that attracts millennials, reduces employee turnover, improves productivity and employee engagement. Really engaged employees deliver a better and more consistent customer experience which in turn improves reputation and turnover. Perhaps not so frivolous after all!

Leadership change:
Inspiring and engaging leadership at every level of seniority seems to challenge organisations globally at a time when agile responsiveness to change requires confident, capable leadership more than ever before. Many organisations assume leadership skills training is the answer but it rarely is. Ensuring managers have the opportunity and time to lead as well as manage is critical, followed by the right skills and sufficient self-belief to use them effectively.

Storytelling:
When the right environment is created, employees will become brand ambassadors and spontaneously do some remarkable things for customers. Capturing and celebrating these ‘stories’ through internal communications across the whole business is a really powerful way of recognising individuals, while reinforcing the customer and employee engagement ambitions of the organisation.

Marketing:
Many organisations attempt to create their image and personality through marketing, which can be a disappointment to customers if the reality falls short of what is promised. Rather than working from the outside in, smart organisations start from the inside out, creating their business personality through engaging their employees with a common purpose and using that to drive their customer experience. Their marketing is then authentic, reflecting the reality of their customer experience rather than a marketing team’s imagination and creativity.

Sales:
So many organisations take a short term view to sales – maximise the sale today and don’t think about tomorrow. However, taking a longer term view of customers and focussing on their individual needs rather than the immediate needs of the organisation can, over time, build a degree of trust and loyalty that will provide a robust defence to the unpredictable economic challenges organisations will inevitably face.

Complaints:
We’ve all heard the figures that a satisfied customer tells x number of people whereas a dissatisfied customer tells x+++ number of people. However, many dissatisfied customers who experience a swift positive resolution are likely to become the strongest advocates of an organisation while providing some free consultancy as to how that organisation can become more customer friendly.

Retail:
Bricks and mortar retail is said to be in terminal decline and for many retailers they are frankly experiencing what they deserve. To tempt customers away from their tablets, smartphones and PCs, high streets and shopping centres need to offer a personally affirming experience to make customers’ effort in visiting them worthwhile. Other sectors are successfully using this retail based strategy to differentiate themselves in a globally commoditised marketplace, yet many retailers seem to have forgotten how to do it.