This week on the What’s Next! podcast, I had the pleasure of speaking with Tamara McCleary, international branding expert, technology futurist, and CEO of Thulium. Tamara and I chat about a lot of fun things, like how excited she is about 3D printed custom high heels, but one topic we really decided to dig into was where the ownership of customer experience lives within a business.
No matter what survey you read, it seems like every executive and line of business leader wants to own customer experience. But the truth is that delivering a fantastic customer experience should be everyone's job: it's marketing's job; it’s sales’ job; it's customer service’s job. The list goes on.
We both vehemently agreed that the customer's experience with the product or service is an amalgamation of all the players at a company. Whether through the website, an actual person, or a chatbot, the customer is influenced at every touch point. Not only along their purchase journey, but after they become a customer as well.
This is all well and good, but you know what they say about too many cooks in the kitchen. The problem with no specific person or department owning customer experience is that if everybody owns a tiny piece then it’s difficult for anyone to take responsibility, or for that matter, accountability, for actual measurable results.
To make sure everyone in your organization is held accountable, there first needs to be a well-articulated vision on what it means to provide customers with an amazing experience. Then and only then can common metrics be developed which everyone can get behind. Tamara believes that the common metric — the connective tissue between all of these different teams — is Net Promoter Score, or NPS. Your NPS is an index that measures how likely customers are to recommend your goods or services to other people. (The data is usually collected through a short survey.)
When you measure customer experience in this way, you develop a simple but concrete understanding of your customer's satisfaction with your company. From there, you can enable everybody to do what's right by the customer and empower them to improve their piece of the experience.
What's more, Tamara points out that leaders must go beyond metrics to enable the organization as a whole. To encourage everyone within the organization to take on customer success as a responsibility, leaders should open up traditional incentives beyond the sales department. There’s nothing more empowering than knowing that your hard work is going to be rewarded.
When you incentivize everyone in the company, you’re increasing the lifetime value of a customer. Tamara and I both strongly believe fostering relationships is imperative for success. That means realizing that marketing, sales, product development, and customer service are all playing on the same team. When you can make your people better understand their worth within the company, they will realize that what they do matters.
Relationships are everything and there are no shortcuts to relationships, especially with the customer.
Have a listen to our conversation and subscribe to the What’s Next! podcast on Apple Podcasts.