Responsibility: Achieving Customer Satisfaction through Team Engagement

Dmexco 2018 focuses on users’ needs, through the motto “Take C.A.R.E”. 4 letters for 4 topics: Curiosity, Action, Responsibility and Experience. The opportunity for us to share on these themes in a series of 4 blog posts.

Your curiosity can lead to many important learnings about your customers’ behavior throughout the buying process. Continuously listening to your clients on a local, cross-channel level will result in both positive and negative feedback that will certainly demand your careful attention!

The practice of processing these data as they are created presents you with a significant opportunity: you can analyze key customer relationship and satisfaction indicators, and implement broad-sweeping or laser-focused action plans to address individual detractors, introduce marketing strategies and motivate your employees.

And now that we are on the topic of management, we would like to present the third section in our “Take C.A.R.E.” series dedicated to the theme of “Responsibility,” where we will demonstrate how to foster the virtuous circle of a customer-focused approach at the heart of your business!  

REINFORCING CUSTOMER-CENTRICITY

Many companies claim to be customer-centric, and this is hardly a new theme. However, being customer-centric goes further than basic customer considerations for core business activities. What defines a truly customer-centric approach? Why have 63% of CEOs ranked customer-centricity among their top three investment priorities?

Customer-centricity: Back to the Basics

Being customer-centric means being able to evaluate the effects that brand decisions will have on customers. More than simply saying, “the customer is important,” it means saying, “we will keep the customer at the center of our thoughts and all our actions must be planned accordingly.”

Thus, this quality of reflection extends to every part of the organization and not only the teams that are traditionally focused on the customer (client services, product support, etc.). From this perspective, employee efforts become essential: businesses must train their employees to understand that in every decision they make, the customer comes first, and the customer will be affected in the end.  

Consideration Symmetry

Have you heard of “consideration symmetry?” This principle teaches that the quality of any relationship between a business and its customers is equal to the quality of the relationship between that business and its employees. Businesses that succeed in making their employees happy will better satisfy their customers.

In the case of a customer-centric business, where customer input is used to motivate and engage employees, this notion can become extremely valuable. By globally promoting the happiness of your teams, while still managing people and performance through customer input, you give yourself every possible chance of fully satisfying your customers!

MANAGING YOUR TEAMS THROUGH CUSTOMER INPUT

Raising your team’s awareness of regular changes in customer relationships is a motivational strategy that cannot be left up to chance. Your employees need direction to blossom in their work, and customer input is an important source of stimulation.

Share positive and negative feedback

Feedback is precious for your businesses because it gives you priceless information about your customers’ satisfaction, as well as their expectations and pain points. Their feedback offers guidance, particularly for your employees. Sharing this information enables you to boost your teams’ morale. Positive customer comments will please everyone concerned and will show how their efforts have a concrete impact on customers and their experience.

When implementing a customer feedback loop, do not hesitate to display the data in your office, in open spaces, in meeting rooms, on team dashboards or via email. Take advantage of every point of contact at your disposal.

Used appropriately, negative comments enable your employees to be more engaged, and to push themselves to do better in the future. In addition, your managers can use these comments as vital leverage to “turn lemons into lemonade.” By implementing customized follow-ups for dissatisfied customers and introducing actions that will remove frustration, your teams will create new sources of satisfaction and transform detractors into ambassadors!

Analyzing these key indicators and their evolution over the course of several months will create new enthusiasm amongst your teams, and can even enable you to seal any leaks by correcting the factors contributing to dissatisfaction.

Establish incentives

Recognition through customer input is an excellent way to boost team engagement and motivation. Do not hesitate to tap into customer satisfaction indicators deployed upstream, such as the customer relationship score or even the NPS.

In the end, what is the most important step in this whole process? Without a doubt, it is ritualizing incentives. At Nocibé (Douglas Group), for example, stores and employees are rewarded for the efforts they make with the intention of satisfying each customer. Employees are congratulated and even given trophies symbolizing the gratitude of both customers and upper management.

There is another possibility for incentives, too: variable compensation. Why not put into place a bonus scheme tied to customer satisfaction, connected to satisfaction metric objectives, the NPS or agent response times?

You now have all the keys to differentiating your company through customer experience, and we will discuss this fascinating topic in the final blog post of this series:  Dmexco 2018 - Take C.A.R.E. Project #4:  Experience.

We share the same strong values about Customer Satisfaction? Let’s meet at Dmexco!