It’s the experience you offer that will shape the product in the eyes of the customers…

With the intersection of social media, mobile and cloud technologies, customer experience has taken a very dynamic change. Customers are now more than ever empowered as they go about buying goods or accessing services. Customers are now able to make informed decisions as information becomes readily available to them. They are taking an active role in purchasing activities and take time to learn more about the products and services they buy. As such by the time they engage with your brand they are already well informed.

So yes, if you are a business that understands that your success ties back to how you treat your customers, you definitely need to take a closer look at how you deal with them. This is becoming more and more apparent and companies coming to this realization are revolutionizing how they handle their customers. Apple, Southwest, Nordstrom and Amazon have realized customer obsession is the one hallmark of brands that stand out!

 

But how do we “Wow” our customers?

 

 

To cultivate the “Wow” culture, businesses need to redefine and redesign their customer interaction platforms. They need to implement strategies that are pro-active and can help predict customer issues before they happen or before they escalate. Every slight change in customer behavior should be identified and solved in real-time.

 

Capturing holistic feedback cannot happen if we depend on only one channel. A call center that is currently the popular option is just not enough. Customer interaction needs to be digitized.  In this digital era when things are moving really fast, enterprises can no longer wait for the customer to tell them what was wrong with the product or how they were served at a particular moment. No, it’s time they went to the customer and sourced for the information. Every customer-centric business should prompt feedback from customers and not the other way round.

 

“We should not wait for the customer to tell us what is defective with our products or services, let’s be proactive”

 

One big mistake that many organizations make is trying to model sophisticated channels to get customer feedback. Cultivating great customer experiences is not a one-time thing; every business has its own uniqueness and should focus on that. Success only comes by understanding what really works and resonates with customers. As such a simple customer models starts by allowing real-time engagement with customers, learning from them and iterating.

“Holistic Customer Experience cannot be scripted”

 

In this digital era, scalability is unlikely if dependent on human interaction only. Apart from human interaction a touchpoint based customer feedback is necessary. Conversations need to be held with customers on transactional basis, and the beauty of the current times is the availability of data and seamless integration across platforms.

But before we get too technical, one key question to answer is, what is that holistic metric that will help capture experience across the whole business. Is there a solution?

 

There is indeed one number that has revolutionized customer centric organisations such as Apple and ensures that they lead the market year in year out.

 

The Net Promoter Score

 

The Net Promoter Score, developed by Bain and Company, is a question that segments your customers into three cohorts, Detractors, Passives and Promoters by asking two simple questions;

 

1. On a scale of 0 – 10 (0 – Very unlikely, 10 – Very Likely) how likely are you to recommend XYZ to friends or family?
2. Please tell us why you gave this score.

 

Detractors ( 0 – 6) are defined as unhappy customers and are quite likely to say bad things about your business.

 

Passive (7 & 8) are customers who are neither happy nor unhappy and form a very good candidate for your competition.

 

Promoters (9 & 10) are the happy and enthusiastic customers and will tend to talk good things about your business, they will also stand by you even when the business on fire.

 

Question 2 “Please tell us why you gave this score” is used to contextualize the score and also tell the business in verbatim what the customers issue was. This allows for quick real-time resolution.

 

The success of Net Promoter Score

 

Net Promoter Score has had tremendous success when used in customer centric organisations.

 

“B2B companies adopting Net Promoter Score, successful companies saw their revenue grow by 23%”

 

“A business telco provider used NPS to increased orders by 150%”

 

<http://www.genroe.com/blog/net-promoter-score-success-stories-and-case-studies>

 

“And locally by using mSurvey platform a local company was able to convert 43% of its detractors into promoters”

 

Using a transactional based survey does not have to be a nightmare. Companies in Kenya are doing it and are revolutionizing their customer feedback channels using the NPS product. So reach out and ensure you “Wow” your customers !