Customer service has become the core of everything we do – it’s not even a customer service strategy, it’s our business strategy”
Ashok Vaswani – Barclays
It’s that time of year when organisations start completing the budget and strategy plans for the year ahead.
Many of these plans will have exhaustive detail on market trends, sales growth, cost reductions or containment, staff development and company growth.
I met a company recently with such a document and it included a section on Customer Management; one line stood out – and we will continue to achieve high levels of customer satisfaction –
Yet the document didn’t have any metrics on how these levels of satisfaction would be achieved, or indeed of any one individual who would take responsibility for the results.
In fact, 2018 would be more of the same in terms of the customer experience.
In a recent survey for their article on the ROI (return on investment) of NPS, Satmetrix found that 91% of marketing leaders believe that in two years they will be competing primarily on the basis of customer experience and last year 18% of marketing budgets were spent on customer experience initiatives, making customer experience the highest marketing tech investment.
Businesses are finding that customer turnover is costly and customer retention is both cost effective and efficient – improve your customer experience to improve your bottom line
This is relevant in the context that The White House Office of Consumer Affairs reports that is 6-7 times more costly to attract a new customer than it is to retain an existing customer and the RightNow Customer Experience Impact Report found that 89% of consumers have stopped doing business with a company after experiencing poor customer service.
In 2018 if your customers is not at the front of your strategy then you are well behind the curve.
At Customer Care Insights we have developed the ASPIRE programme to help business owners and managers to focus on improving the customer experience, and improve the bottom line performance.
