As entrepreneurs and business leaders, you know that customer service is vital to success. If customers aren’t happy, then they don’t stay customers for long. But as you grow and hire more employees, it becomes harder to keep the quality and feel of that small business that made you successful. It’s a viscous cycle, but CX training can help.
CX is simply short for Customer Experience. So the first step in harnessing CX is understanding what your customers expect from your business, and there is no off-the-shelf answer. You founded and grew your business with particular values to develop your ethos. That ethos combined with general customer expectations is what you need to understand through CX research. People LOVE to talk about themselves, so ask! Send a survey, conduct a focus group, review social media comments.
Then, put what you learn into action! Standardize the most important values expressed by your customers through employee training and policy changes. Weigh out the pros and cons, but remember the value of a happy customer. If 86% of customers say they will pay more for better customer service, it might be worth hiring that part-time employee or charging a little more for that high-end packaging.
In the end, business owners and managers cannot assume they know what their customers want. They need to stop, look, ask, and truly listen. And then, they need to put what they learn into standardized, replicable processes so that they keep their customers happy AND maintain the ethos that attracted those customers in the first place.
If you would like help implementing any of these CX steps, Root Cause Consulting can help. Contact Sheri McClure, Ph.D. at SheriLMcClure@gmail.com today!
Root Cause Consulting 