You are being judged. By everyone who interacts with your business. Everytime they do.
You can't avoid it. You can't stop it. You can't fight it. But you can manage it!
Every customer or prospective customer gets an experience of your business and how it operates every time they 'touch' it anwhere on your touch map.
The main touch points are: face to face, email, web, phone, fax and mail.
At each point they get an experience. The simple question is this."Is it the experience you want them to have?"
Rik and Janel Villegas in the Saipan tribune put it this way "The experience that customers have with your organization should be a central consideration in the short-term growth and long-term health of your business. The simple fact is that your customers cannot not have an experience. The question, then, is how do you manage that take-away impression formed by their encounters with your products, services, and overall operations; and do it so that your customers have an experience that is consistent with the experience you would like them to have?"
OK so manage the experience. But manage what exactly?
There are three factors that go to making up the customer experience. Your customers could experience them individually or together.
People, Operations and Technology.
Change one and you impact them all! That's why over 50% of CRM installations fail. In most cases the technology is upgraded - a major CRM vendor is usually pushing this - and it's expected that by osmosis the operations and people will adapt as well.
Managing the Customer Experience is about managing all the touch points and their relationship with the people , processes and technology so that they are coreographed to achieve the same outcome.
The keys for 100% success?
Prepare the people for the changes. Train, explian and refrain - refrain from cristisism when it's all new.
Design the operational systems for the new environment so they don't sabotage the new iniatives and ...
Impliment the technology upgrades as the first two are done.
That's it for now. Feel free to comment or ask for topics you want answers on.
Iven
