Almost every organization wants to be customer-friendly and customer-oriented. But how can you properly safeguard customer-friendliness in your organization? When translating ambitions into action, it often stalls. You must safeguard the aim and the approach in your organisation. That starts with focusing on the customer journey, measuring smart customer-friendliness and then following up on the feedback to continue improving your customer-friendliness.
There is a great hunger for tips on customer friendliness. And of course individual tips can be interesting, but improving customer friendliness is best done with a structural approach to safeguard customer friendly behavior in your organization. That starts with a good focus on your customer: because what is customer friendliness for him or her?
What is customer friendliness?
We all know good examples of customer friendliness. Bad examples unfortunately too. Customer friendliness can be defined in different ways, but customer friendly behavior is always aimed at adapting to the needs and feelings of customers. So you need to know those needs. And that is where things often go wrong. My roadmap with seven concrete steps to improve customer friendliness therefore starts with a good focus on customer experience.
- Map out customer friendliness in your organization
Improving customer friendliness starts with the customer experience (CX) that your customers offer. Map the customer journey well. Do this together with all relevant departments. This not only provides a complete picture. Involving different disciplines early is also crucial for their involvement in customer centricity.
- Measuring customer friendliness: keep it low-threshold
To properly measure customer-friendliness, a good measurement system is needed. This must be accessible and it must always ask the right smart question at the best time. The methodology for measuring customer focus must suit customers and employees. So choose a method that is easy to explain to them.
- Actively follow up on negative feedback
After measuring customer friendliness, you also have to do something with the feedback! That sounds logical, but it is often not done in practice. Actively follow up on negative feedback, including individual feedback. Then measure the effect of that action(s). This Closed Loop Feedback is valuable for embedding customer-friendliness in your organization. Because anyone who has contact with the customer also sees the effect.
- Not a project but a way of working
Bepaal intern hoe je wilt omgegaan met de continue stroom van klantfeedback en leg dit vast in een Way of working. Laat de manier van werken aansluiten bij de bestaande rollen, verantwoordelijken, CRM-systemen en processen in je organisatie. De klantvriendelijkheid verbeteren, gebeurt zo op een uniforme wijze, waarbij iedereen weet wat er van hem of haar verwacht wordt.
- Kijk ook breder voor de inbedding
Also check which additional matters in your organization can promote further embedding. Consider, for example, determining KPIs at department or employee level or sharing positive and negative feedback with colleagues (for example at the week start or department meetings).
- Let feedback flow back into customer systems
It is essential that employees who have contact with customers also see customer feedback in the systems they use for their customer contact. This way you can immediately take this into account. Customer and employee immediately experience the benefits.
- Determine the account strategy
Internally, you can align the account strategy with customer scores. So that you know whether a customer is ready for, for example, cross-selling or up-selling. Or that you may first need to work on trust and loyalty in order to retain the customer.
Let the process grow
With these tips for customer friendliness, the intended customer focus can directly contribute to the success of individual employees. They experience that too. That is one of the most important steps to properly embed customer-friendliness in your organization. This makes it possible to actively work on customer satisfaction with a NPS (Net Promoter Score) not a 'project', but really your new way of working.
Continuous feedback from customers and measuring customer friendliness requires an online platform that continuously monitors the responses. This is how you create yourselfunique customer friendliness tips about your customers for your organization. At GrowPromoter we also help organizations to ask customers the best questions at important moments. The CX results can later also be linked to the Exployee Experience (EX). In the beginning, that is often still 'future music', but it is valuable to keep in mind.
