Getting CX right,
when everything
seems to be going wrong!
By Paul Linnell
At the time of recording this episode, many businesses and public services are finding it a great
challenge to satisfy customers. It has particular relevance while
many parts of the world are recovering from a global health crisis, and suffering from disrupted
international supply chains, travel disorder, economic instability, domestic and geo-political
tensions.
(Huge kudos to all
those involved in travel, hospitality, health, energy, food
distribution and retail – and all the other industries suffering from
current
uncertainty and turmoil).
But being ready to
“get CX right when everything seems to be going
wrong”, is just as important when everything seems to be going well.
With Murphy’s
Law stating that: “Anything that can go wrong - will go wrong”. and Finagle’s Law
stating that when it does go wrong, it’ll happen, at
“the worst possible time”, and
with so many variables at play when you’re dealing with
real live customers, you must always be ready for Murphy’s and Finagle’s Laws
to strike.
All it takes, for your systems, processes, customer journeys, and
desired customer outcomes to be thrown off course, is for a
customer or member of staff to take a small step in an unplanned
direction, or an unplanned event to occur. And it can be a challenging and expensive task to get things
back on track.
Even a simple incident can seriously undermine productivity, customer
satisfaction, and staff wellbeing. In other words, in
“Getting CX
Right”, you always need to
be ready for everything to go wrong.
What you’ll learn in this episode:
I’m afraid I can’t help with the prevention of unplanned
events, but in this episode I'll be looking at a selection of some of
the guiding principles we use in our customer
experience transformation programmes to help our clients to be
in a much better position to respond to their customers when problems do occur.
These guiding principles can be used to underpin your
business-as-usual strategy, and also relied upon to support how your
organisation responds to unplanned events or a crisis.
They can
help you
to reduce costs, reduce reputational risk, and recover faster from
unplanned events or a crisis, whilst improving productivity,
improving customer satisfaction and loyalty,
and improving staff capability and wellbeing.
Next Episode: #011: How to Lose Customers -
without really trying!
You
can’t help noticing today that some organisations seem to have “stopped
bothering about customers”. Perhaps it’s an indication that some in our
“throw-away society” now consider that an existing customer is no more
than a passing encounter that can be simply cast aside, and easily
replaced with a new one.
In this episode I’m going to tap into our
customer experience research again, and give away the secret of how you
can make your organisation incredibly successful at what it does, by
getting CX right. It’s how a business can out-perform its competition,
and how a public service can build incredible public support. But first
I want to take a look at what NOT TO DO. I’m going to look at three key
things our research confirms about: “How to lose customers – without
really trying!”.
About Paul Linnell
Paul Linnell is a customer experience and service quality
improvement champion, working internationally with senior managers
and their teams to help them achieve business success, reduce risk
and build customer loyalty and advocacy by taking actions to improve
customer experiences. Paul specialises in the design and deployment
of customer experience measurement, service quality improvement,
complaints handling and preventive analysis programmes. Industries
he has worked with include, Automotive, Consumer electronics,
Consumer goods, Electricity & Gas retail, Financial services,
Information technology, Local Government and Public Sector, Media /
Publishing, Passenger travel (Rail, Air and Sea), Pharmaceuticals
and Telecommunication. Paul has worked with clients and presented on
these subject at conferences and corporate events in the UK, Europe,
North America, the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand.
Originally from the UK and now based in New Zealand, he continues to
serve clients globally.
Managing customer experience transformations with support from CTMA