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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u00a0roadmap\u00a0<\/em> with seven concrete steps to improve customer friendliness therefore starts with a good focus on customer experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Improving customer friendliness starts with the\u00a0customer experience<\/em>\u00a0(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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u00a0Closed Loop Feedback<\/em>\u00a0is valuable for embedding customer-friendliness in your organization. Because anyone who has contact with the customer also sees the effect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Determine internally how you want to handle the continuous flow of customer feedback and document this in a Way of working<\/em>. Let the way of working fit with the existing roles, responsibilities, CRM systems and processes in your organization. In this way, improving customer friendliness is done in a uniform way, where everyone knows what is expected of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Internally, you can align the account strategy with customer scores. So that you know whether a customer is ready for, for example, cross-selling<\/em> or up-selling<\/em>. Or that you may first need to work on trust and loyalty in order to retain the customer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u00a0 NPS (Net Promoter Score)<\/a>\u00a0not a 'project', but really your new way of working.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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Let the process grow<\/h3>\n\n\n\n