Does your organization suffer from customer experience myopia? If so, you will experience difficulty executing a competitive vision in the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) ecosystem.
Why? You do not develop strategic foresight.
The pace and cadence of change of the IIoT is hard enough to keep up with, let alone get ahead of. When you suffer from customer experience myopia, it is difficult to execute IIoT vision and strategy.
Myopia has two definitions. The term describes an eye condition, nearsightedness, which prevents a person from seeing clearly when looking into the distance. People with myopia basically only see what’s in front of their nose. Myopia also describes the inability to connect the dots and develop insight, foresight and exercise imagination.
Take an honest look around your company. Is developing, delivering, interpreting and refining customer experience ingrained into your organizational DNA? Is customer experience (CX) woven into everyone’s daily interactions, with each other and with customers?
An “every now and then” regard for the value of CX is a hallmark of customer experience myopia.
When your organization “sees” CX as a survey emailed to customers after a customer service call, that’s a symptom of “every now and then” customer experience mindset. Customer interactions are strictly transactional. Once the survey is completed and stored in some data base until quarterly review, well, out of sight out of mind.
If CX survey results are not shared across the enterprise, then technical and engineering teams think they are doing a great job. Consequently, customer experience myopia fails to take into account the total end user experience. And that end user experience, in the IIoT, can impact customer success and customer retention.
Finally, what value is created when CX survey results gain importance because they impact your bonus compensation? CX score chasing for personal reward is completely short-sighted and most certainly self-focused. You are better than that! Come on.
To execute IIoT vision, continuously remain in touch with every stratification of customer within their organization.
Over-dependence on episodic surveys is not a recipe for IIoT insight and vision. To develop proactive strategy, keep your fingers on the pulse of what is happening inside your clients’ houses.
The best means of understanding customer mindset is executing a rock-solid customer retention strategy fueled by Voice of the Customer (VoC) methodology.
Continuously connecting with the end-users and middle-users of your products, platforms, software and machinery cures customer experience myopia. Issues are identified ahead of time and preventive actions are taken before things go wrong. Innovative ideas arise as side bars from more enlightened conversations. Teams on both sides of the business, engineering and technical table gain a clearer understanding of, and vision regarding, factors critical to customer success.
VoC methodology results in customer driven design improvements and innovations. It represents the furthest thing from a “So how did we do?” post customer-service survey that you can imagine.
Interpreting CX survey results with learnings from VoC insights creates a more holistic IIoT vision for customer retention.
Curing your organization of customer experience myopia creates strategic value. However, the first step involves liberating yourself from CX short-sightedness. The choice is yours. However, consider the long term benefits.
- Over time, teams correlate whether predictive and prescriptive actions taken, courtesy of VoC insights, reduce customer dissatisfaction.
- Next, an organization creates an IIoT vision which leverages VoC in creating a more enlightened type of customer experience program.
- Finally, an entire organization becomes very familiar with clients’ voices. Enough data is gathered to focus on innovation for customer success and customer retention.
How well do you execute your organization’s customer experience strategy? Tactical or strategic? Myopic or visionary?
Babette Ten Haken writes, speaks, consults and coaches about collaborative value creation for customer success and customer retention. She connects the dots between strategy and execution. She works across leadership, human capital / HR and technical/IT/engineering teams within the industrial Internet of Things ecosystem. Her focus? Creating enduring business outcomes. Babette’s playbook of technical / non-technical collaboration hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon. Visit the Free Resources section of her website for more tools.
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