To improve customer experience take a look inside your corporate culture

There is a increasing recognition of the fact that a customer’s experience with your company plays a significant role in customer satisfaction, retention and profitability.

So where do you start with a customer experience initiative?

In our experience the best place to start is by defining a vision and goal for a customer experience initiative that inspires people to want to get involved. This creates a reason for change, a compelling vision of the new customer experience that will be created and delivered by the company over time.

While customer experience is a process that can be mapped, refined and improved over time what is important in the beginning is to capture the hearts and minds of the people that are going to have to deliver the new experience. Why should they do things differently, how will changes in their behavior benefit them?

A good place to start an initiative is to gain a sense of the organization’s current culture as it relates to customer experience. Is the company’s culture already customer focused? Meaning there will be less resistance to changes that will clearly benefit customers. Or is the culture an internally focused one that sees the customer as a necessary evil?

The Market Responsiveness Index and the Customer Responsiveness Index are two tools we use to gain a sense of where the culture lies against a benchmark. This provides a great rallying point for company’s to self diagnose just how big a journey they need to undertake.