In this article, the second in our five-part series on gaining and retaining talent in 2021, the focus is on communication. CXM chatted to Rebecca Brown, co-founder and CEO of Think Wow, the customer experience transformation company whose goal is to help progressive businesses grow by making customer experience transformation accessible and easy.
Rebecca believes that with the onslaught of the Covid-19 pandemic, customer expectations and needs are unsettled and prone to change. She says, “You can ensure that you work in an agile way and your organisation is adaptable to those needs, by making it as easy as possible for customers to communicate with you; and by acting quickly on what they tell you.”
It’s evident that changing expectations can lead to gaps in process and staff knowledge which, understandably, causes frustration with both the customer and staff. “Increased customer frustration can lead to lower customer retention and lower spend from existing customers,” says Rebecca.
According to Rebecca, the goal is therefore to drive increased customer satisfaction by implementing easier feedback channels for all customers as well as creating listening cultures and clear agile processes for acting on insights within your teams, whether customer facing or behind the scenes.
But how do you do that?
Well, these simple steps set out by Rebecca, are an excellent starting point and will certainly help your business retain your customers. It’s obvious that communication is key:
- Ensure that customer facing staff are trained on and understand the importance of both positive and negative feedback; know to treat any little grumble seriously and record all feedback
- Enable all customers to feedback as easily and conveniently as possible on their agenda, at a time and place and in a way that suits them
- Ensure that all feedback is circulated to the relevant team, that they listen with an open mind for any opportunities and can take part in improving customer outcomes
- Ensure the relevant teams know how to respond to, track and utilise customer insights to improve customer outcomes
- Ensure that overall ownership for insights is clear and that key stakeholders are assisted to make progress.
It’s easy to measure your success, too! Rebecca believes that you’ll soon see the following flow through your business:
- Increased staff confidence and satisfaction
- Initial uplift in complaints and feedback logged
- Increase in actionable customer insights to feed into improvement plan
- Eventual decrease in negative feedback as improvements made
- Increase in positive feedback/reviews
Communication is a key factor in every successful relationship. It’s important to view your customers and employees as being in a relationship with your business in order to gain and retain your staff and your customers!
Rebecca Brown is one of the nominees of the CX Stars 2021 Influencers list.