Almost every organization wants to be customer-friendly and customer-focused. But how can you effectively embed customer friendliness in your organization? Translating ambitions into action is often where things stall. You need to embed both the ambition and the approach in your organization. This starts with a focus on the customer journey, measuring customer friendliness intelligently and then following up on feedback to keep improving your customer friendliness.
There is a strong appetite for tips on customer friendliness. And while individual tips can certainly be useful, improving customer friendliness works best with a structured approach to embedding customer-friendly behavior in your organization. This starts with a clear focus on your customer: what does customer friendliness mean to them?
What is customer friendliness?
We all know good examples of customer friendliness. Unfortunately, we know bad examples too. Customer friendliness can be defined in various ways, but customer-friendly behavior always focuses on adapting to customers' needs and feelings. You therefore need to understand those needs. And that is often where things go wrong. My roadmap with seven concrete steps to improve customer friendliness therefore starts with a clear focus on the customer experience.
- Map customer friendliness in your organization
Improving customer friendliness starts with the customer experience (CX) you offer your customers. Map your customers' customer journey thoroughly. Do this together with all relevant departments. This not only provides a complete picture. Involving different disciplines early on is also crucial to their commitment to customer focus.
- Measuring customer friendliness: keep it accessible
Measuring customer friendliness effectively requires a good measurement system. It must be accessible and consistently ask the right, insightful question at the best moment. The method used to measure 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 need to act on the feedback! That sounds logical, but in practice it is still often overlooked. Actively follow up on negative feedback, including individual feedback. Then measure the effect of those actions. This Closed Loop Feedback is valuable for embedding customer friendliness in your organization. After all, those who are in contact with the customer also see the impact.
- Not a project, but a way of working
Decide internally how you want to handle the continuous flow of customer feedback and document this in a Way of working. Align this way of working with the existing roles, people responsible, CRM systems and processes in your organization. This ensures that customer friendliness is improved in a consistent way, with everyone knowing what is expected of them.
- Take a broader view of embedding customer friendliness
Also consider which additional measures in your organization could help embed it further. Examples include defining KPIs at department or employee level, or sharing positive and negative feedback with colleagues (for example, during weekly kickoff meetings or department meetings).
- Feed feedback back into customer systems
It is essential that employees who interact with customers can also see customer feedback in the systems they use for those interactions. This allows them to take it into account immediately. Both customer and employee experience the benefits directly.
- Determine the account strategy
Internally, you can align the account strategy with customers' scores. This lets you know whether a customer is ready for, for example, cross-selling or up-selling. Or whether you may first need to work on trust and loyalty to retain the customer.
Let the way of working grow
With these tips on customer friendliness, the intended customer focus can contribute directly to the success of individual employees. They experience this too. That is one of the most important steps in effectively embedding customer friendliness in your organization. This turns actively working on customer satisfaction using an NPS (Net Promotor Score) from a ‘project’ into your genuine new way of working.
Continuously gathering customer feedback and measuring customer friendliness requires an online platform that continuously monitors responses. This enables you to generate unique customer friendliness tips about your customers for your organization. At GrowPromoter, we also help organizations ask customers the best questions at key moments. The CX results can later also be linked to the Exployee Experience (EX). At the outset, this is often still ‘something for the future’, but it is worth keeping in mind.
