Businesses have a customer experience gap. Do you know where your gap is located?
I’ve spoken with many business owners, consultants, sales people or post-sales support professionals. Each individual I’ve spoken with is adamant that: “We stick close to the customer to create great experiences.”
Which is great, in theory. However, stuff gets messy, in practice.
The customer experience gap starts with self-focus within departments.
First, each department within an organization has their own, specific protocol for sticking close to the customer. As a result, everyone is busy executing their departmental version of sticking close to the customer. However, the impact of their activities often extends only as far as the boundaries of their departments.
Consequently, the quest to achieve good-better-best customer experience survey scores becomes the focal point of activities. Particularly around the time those CX surveys are distributed to client decision-makers.
After all, each department has their own KPIs to meet. Which begs the question: who is working on behalf of whom? The last time I checked, customers do not work hard to make sure your own department fulfills their quotas and KPIs.
The customer experience gap is just plain unproductive and unprofitable. Watch this video where I discuss one of my client’s business cases. Professional intimidation and siloed mindset creates a huge customer experience gap, which this organization recovers from in stunning style!
To detect the customer experience gap, think laterally, rather than limitedly.
When I work with clients on customer retention issues, we focus our forensics on locating gaps in customer experience execution and delivery. We start thinking beyond departmental confines. Across the organization.
When organizations make the excuse that they do not have the time to make time for this exercise, these gaps only widen.
Consider this. Customer experience has its own velocity. Regardless of whether, or not, organizations actively survey for it. In the time in-between customer experience surveys, there is plenty of room for the customer to fall through these gaps. And feel abandoned, ignored or mismanaged.
Do you know where each customer experience gap is located? These gaps will not go away on their own. Take the next step forward. Contact me to learn how to detect these gaps which take away from the business you have worked so very hard to build up.
Start moving one millimeter forward, today.
- Engage me to speak or conduct an interactive workshop at your next corporate or association event.
- Has what you read Today started you Thinking about tomorrow? Contact me. Let’s create a One Millimeter Mindset™ program that fits your needs.
- Subscribe to my blog. Share your email address in the red box in the right column. Never miss another insightful post.
Babette Ten Haken delivers her One Millimeter Mindset™ workshops and speaking programs to help individuals, teams, organizations and associations leverage productive and profitable collaboration to catalyze professional innovation, workforce engagement and customer retention. Babette Ten Haken serves organizations as an inspiring speaker, strategist, coach and storyteller. She is a STEM-trained scientist, corporate catalyst and design thinker. Babette’s playbook of collaboration tools, Do YOU Mean Business?, is available on Amazon. She is a member of SME, ASQ, SHRM and the National Speakers Association.
Image author: freshidea Image source: Fotolia
Leave a Reply