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WISDOM TALK

To create customer success, an evolution of customer centric culture is required, first to be established and then consistently get measured. Let’s look at the 80/20 rule (the Pareto Princi-ple), 80% of business comes from 20% of your existing and consistent customers – if I describe it more, a small portion of your customers ac-tually generates the major chunk of your sales revenue. Now that’s the implication of customer loyalty. That’s why acknowledging and respect-ing these 20% valued customers is vital. After all, loyal customers are the biggest assets of any business, globally and nationally!

In fact, customer loyalty is an after product of a customer focus & centricity culture. The key determinant of a brand’s success. Yet many companies still keep focusing more on seasonal sales and spending funds on putting bill boards at prime locations with “SALE up to 50% or 70% Off” Getting new customers is important,

but are these companies actually working to bring them and then give them a great shopping

experience and keeping them coming back on a regular basis?

HOW TO BE THEMOST SUCCESFULL

CUSTOMER CENTRICCOMPANY!

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A great service is the most emotionally per-ceived factor for a customer. Now in Pakistan as well, customer looks for acknowledgements and a fine purchase assistance. They like to be valued. Though this was not a culture 10 years back but now more awareness and wide prod-uct choices has raised the standards of customer expectations as well as customer services stand-ards in Pakistan.

Now a days, it’s important to seek the customer preferences in your industry on regular basis and then creating a framework or process which meet their expectations in a nicer way. A per-sonalized shopping experience with resolution of issues and problems quickly leads to the cus-tomer advocacy for your company. Remember customer advocacy is the most genuine way of increasing customer database and referrals.

Front end business to customers B2C must have a customer advisory platform associated with them. As customer advisory groups or ad-vocate communities share feedback, it’s impor-tant to actually listen, use it and then tell them how it was used.

Activating your brand advocates can be a de-lightful way to increase marketing reach and grow your business. Great companies are founded on an insightful knowledge of their customer’s preferences and they actually invest a reasonable budget on their customer service rather than placing everything for advertising which has rather a short term impact.

A Great Customer Focused

Organization Looks At:

As a customer centricity specialist, let me share few of the important strategies which should be a part of every brand’s daily life, if they want to excel in the current competitive market:

Customer feedback is the key to your Success:There really is no substitute for asking cus-tomers what they think. Our brand teams are doing very creative work these days and that is admirable but are you really listening to your customers? After all they are the ones who drive revenues for your companies. There are many ways you can do it: via the web, on your website, after calls into your contact center, via email or even face-to-face. You can even set up polls through social media. One great interface I can suggest is electronic feedback interface “the feedback experience” by Static-A, which collects and deliver your customer feedback in a very philosophical and unbiased approach.

Customer Advisory Board/Specialist: A Customer Advisory Board is a “representa-tive group of customers and or set a customer experience specialist that meets periodically to offer advice on the customer centricity plan and company direction”. It was old days when company ran without them but now it’s a need of the moment if you want to stay competitive and add value to your brand life. Focus groups are another great example to work on these areas.

Web monitoring:How much valuable information slips through the fingers each day of companies that don’t monitor their web page analytics? Doing so would allow them to gather information on things like where customers were referred from, on which page of the site customers left, what percentage of customers left the site after only viewing one page (the bounce rate), how long they spent on each page of the website, what path they took through the website, and what percentage of customers who viewed a product’s features actually went on to buy it on the site (funnel analysis).

Social listening:The most used channel of this decade. Every day, somewhere in the world, it’s very likely that someone is talking about your company at social media. More and more, these conversa-tions are happening online either through social networks or online forums. The companies can use social analytics to learn the expectation of their customers coming through the social me-dia channels and how to image the brands ef-fectively through service them.

Voice of Front Line Employees: Frontline employees deal with your customers every day. Tap into their knowledge (and engage them in the process) by asking them about your custom-ers. I guarantee you will get responses you did not expect and it may help you dramatically!

The success is core related to achieving custom-er loyalty, positive word of- Mouth and, ulti-mately, profitable growth. The experience needs to deliver on your Brand’s promise, and you need to understand where you are succeeding - and failing - So you can create selling experi-ences that keep your customers coming back to your company.

Three Stages To Achieve Loyal Customers!

In this lovely info graphic by Static-A, we see the 2016 one point strategy for brands/banks to win loyal customers. Our info graphic basically differs between 3 sorts of customer experiences at your branches – the Random one, the Predictable one and the Branded one.

The Random one is the worst experience with inconsistent and unintentional experiences at your sales channels– your customers most likely won’t come back.

The Predictable one is a bit better – your customer is consistent, they enter your stores in-tentionally. Still, they don’t feel valued enough neither felt you differentiated then usual. This is what happen to most of the Pakistani brand stores here. Trust me, this includes big brand names!

When you’re “Branded”, that’s when you get loyal customers. That is when they come – they know they won’t find, what you offer in other places…Remember: What you offer is not only the product in your showcase, it’s the pack-age of elements they come for!

Hence it’s a detailed strategy and entirely a sep-arate topic, to know more how you can convert your random and predictable customers into your branded ones, you can write to me.

The Impact Of Customer Services On Consumer Buying BehaviorsThrough a recent survey conducted by Static-A which is Pakistan’s finest Customer centricity advising platform, the survey was conducted among the potential customers in between the age group of 18 to 65+.This was observed that 95% of the people has recommended a business to their family and friends, after a positive experience and the 87% discouraged a business after having negative ex-perience at any touch point. Hence this is very important to learn the experience insights from your customers to know what they are going

through emotionally at our sales points. Net promoter score is an ideal metrics to measure that trend and by running NPS system across your organization can give you a great insight, how to run things perfectly!

Many companies are searching for and invent-ing new ways and tools for boosting customer engagement. My way is do everything simply. Simplicity is the key to greater performance and greater results.

If you look at how your business is organ-ized and functioning at the moment, you will observe there are so many things that can be done better with whatever resources you already have, without bringing in new tools and new people. You can do this simply by optimizing your current procedures.

If your customers know it’s super easy to get support from your company, they will no doubt expand their business with you and spread the good word, which will lead to more clients and greater engagement.

There is nothing worst then a business without a customer service model or with a bad custom-er service trait. Still in Pakistan, many mindsets still do not take t a serious business and that is

the reason, most of the business do not survive on long term. Some of the major problems I have noticed in companies business models are:

Relying heavily on Sales figure Metrics: Numbers in business matters a lot, they tell you accurate measurements about how the process is functioning and provide base for you to sug-gest you need improvements but when organi-zations focus only on daily sale figures. Trust, it will lead you to nothing but gradually a de-cline, no matter how big company you are. We have seen huge names came in Pakistani brand market. They came, conquered but fall after they reached high on their growth curve and now we don’t see them around. I can name many!

Not Optimizing Channels efficiently:The aim of Omni channel service is to provide customers with options for how they would like to communicate with a brand if they have a query or a complaint to make. It is about pro-viding a seamless experience to the customer, regardless of the channel they choose to use but many companies haven’t fully grasped the im-plications. Multi-channel also offers the benefits of providing personalized service to individual customers more efficiently. It’s important to be where the customer is, whether that’s chat, email, social media, etc.

WISDOM TALK

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Considering Customer Service & Research as a “Cost Center”:In Pakistan even now at modern age, Customer service departments are mostly considered as a liability, people usually consider them as a “Cost Center” that is increasing expenses with-out adding any revenue. Only few of us have understood the importance of maximizing every opportunity to interact with customers. Imagine your all sales men handling the visitors well, they make them delighted, advise well, sell and make them feel important to come again; do you know how many opportunities can be generated out of it? You do not need to even advertise if your team deliver that level. But it cannot happen so simply, you need to regularly invest in customer experience measurements and insights and then these handsome sales figures will be a by-product to that investment!

3 Socket Customer Centric Ap-proach

With the support of this info graphic designed by Static-A research team, I would like to share 3 point model for you to put into daily busi-ness practice and you will see amazing changes in your revenues and goodwill. Though there should be a genuine, consistent ad a long term effort required to win the trust of your custom-ers. But once it’s achieved, you don’t need to

spend high on advertisements or get desperate with your sales people:

Now you may have realized the power of cus-tomer services and realized where you are positioning your companies. As I say to most of the CEO’s and executive management that

customer services is not a department, it’s an attitude, a mindset and a culture which takes a simple organization to the heights of unbe-lievable success. It’s not a short term route but requires a scientific approach designed by cus-tomer services/experience passionate people at your organizations and requires constant efforts and devotion but the Return of investment and the pay-back benefits are enormous.

Ali M. Malik is a Business Performance/Customer Experience Enabler (CX Man) for the leading

brands in Pakistan and the contributor/ writer of this article. He can be

contacted at ali@static-a.com for a professional consultation.

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