Alan DraperAs a small or medium-sized business, your culture is unique. It affects how everybody views your company: employees, customers, and stakeholders. It’s the edge that makes customers choose you over your competition.
How valuable can a culture and branding be? Millward Brown completed a study in 2013 on the value of intangible assets like culture and brands. They found that three companies had over $100 billion of these assets! That’s before you even take into consideration their products, services, and tangible assets.
Here’s everything you need to know about why customer-centric culture matters, and where to begin:
The Importance of a Customer-Centric Culture
When a company decides to shift their culture to focus on the customers, lots of good things start to happen. A Forrester study found that customer-centric approaches are a great way to improve your marketing ROI.
Marketing Sherpa also completed thorough studies of companies that underwent customer-centric transformations. Here’s some of their most interesting findings:
Focusing on customers leads to huge click-through rates
Cincom decided to implement customer-centric marketing efforts. They used customer success stories to make other customers champions of their brand. They used analytics to provide relevant content, focusing on customer experience. The result was an incredible 236% jump in click-through.
Making a customer-friendly website improves key metrics
Biolabs’ website was suffering from bounced users and low time spend. They decided to implement customer surveys, leaning on these suggestions to revamp their internet presence. The result of this customer-centric website was a 7.5% decrease in bounce rate, and almost 75% increased time spend.
There are lots of other similar success stories, but these two case studies make a clear point. Taking the time to focus on customers will reap significant benefits. Unfortunately, it’s often difficult for a small or medium-sized business to find the time and effort to undergo such a significant undertaking.
In the next section, we’ll take a look at technology that makes gathering these insights easy, so you don’t have to waste resources on such an enormous campaign.
Using Technology to Drive Customer-Centric Culture
The heart of your culture and brand is in the contact center. This is where you really focus on customers. Your employees touch customers every day, leaving them with lasting impressions of your organization. If you really want to start grabbing customer data, this is the place to start.
In a call center, you already have lots of different systems to worry about. Your phone systems, customer relationship management systems, ticketing systems, and much, much more. For quality control, you need call recording and audio mining software, to go back to previous calls and review them.
The beauty of an audio mining solution (also known as speech analytics) is that it’s able to tie these systems into a unique system that makes it easy to track exactly what your customers are talking about. It records calls, and uses algorithms to analyze customer calls, scanning for unique phrases. Speech analytics make it easier to identify strengths and weaknesses while gathering critical business intelligence.
Here are some of the common business challenges you can tackle with speech analytics technology in place in your contact center:
- Higher customer satisfaction scores.
- Efficient workforce training programs.
- Improved agent performance and accomplished KPIs.
- Access to business and competitive intelligence.
- Improved script development.
- Increased regulatory compliance.
Driving Change in Your Business
As a small or medium-sized business, you’re probably worried about changing culture. You need to make sure you don’t lose your unique identity. Employees, customers and stakeholders can’t get the impressions you’re simply imitating large corporations.
The good news is that you’re already at an advantage over these behemoths. As a smaller business, you’re in a better place to institute changes. Less moving parts makes you nimble and agile, able to adapt on the fly. Fewer stakeholders mean that you don’t have to answer to anybody except your customers.
Here are some things you can do to make sure the process goes as smooth as possible:
- Gain employee buy-in by involving them in the process. People are more likely to buy-in to changes if they have a hand instituting them. Ask them what flaws you have in your systems, and what they think your customers care about. Their answers might surprise you.
- Empower your organization. You can’t drive change by simply instituting new policies. You need the proper tools to succeed, but your employees also must know how to use them. Training and implementation is critical. Knowing this, the CallFinder team will work with you to provide pre and post-launch support.
- Fine-tune your staff. Culture starts with people. In order to truly ingrain your culture, you need a team of people who are onboard. Consider reorganizing staff to play to their strengths. If certain people are resisting and just not working out, you might need to make the tough call to replace them.
If you’re ready to see how a speech analytics solution will improve overall business operations and enhance the customer experience your business delivers, start with a demonstration of a cloud-based speech analytics solution today.
Sources:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/case-study/b2b-marketing-best-of-2014
http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/2013/09/04/5-qualities-of-a-customer-centric-company/
http://blog.roberthalfmr.com/the-role-of-corporate-culture-in-small-business
https://hbr.org/2012/12/to-change-the-culture-stop-try
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This article was written for Business 2 Community by Alan Draper.
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Perhaps one of the most effective and cheapest customer experience management tool are buyers’ reviews. Showing initiative and satisfaction from doing your job is a massive magnet for customers. You always want to go back to a place where you feel welcome and valued as a customer. It’s also very important to let other potential clients know that they could also have an excellent experience at your store.
A great way to sustain customer retention is through proactively monitoring the feedback and engaging in a fulfilling customer-experience. Clients highly value personalised experience and even negative reviews can help companies showcase their initiative, thus boosting loyalty and satisfaction.
In my opinion the easiest option to manage that is through hiring a third-party feedback collecting company, like eKomi or Feefo. It is very important that the solutions they offer be purchase-based to boost the credibility of your brand. Independent reviews gain much more trust that in-house managed testimonials.
By carefully listening to what your customers have got to say, you can quickly react to any issues or make changes to your product to make sure your clients don’t start exploring the competition’s offer.
It is said that the customer defines your brand. We may want our customers to perceive us a certain way, but in the end, they have the final decision about how we are perceived. Culture is the same thing. We strive to create a customer centric culture, but in the end, the customer decides if we are (or aren’t). I enjoyed this article and the ideas of why and how to create a customer centric culture.
Success of an organization completely depends on the customer experience. I read a few articles about how certain organizations are beating others in internet offerings and achieving online customer conversion rates of up to 57%. This clearly demonstrates that customer centricity and aligning organizational behavior with current trends is a huge attraction, however an organization needs to maintain a balance and be able to differentiate that customer centric behavior is not viewed as customer complicity and inability of organization to say no to unreasonable demands. Hence know your customers, manage their expectations and ensure organization’s perceptions in the eyes of their customers are positively maintained as well.