“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

-Bill Gates

Undoubtedly, having a great relationship with customers is paramount to become and stay profitable.

But it’s a major challenge. A positive customer experience is elusive for many companies.

If your company is having obstacles to improving your business with customers, by renovating your customer experience quotient there are steps you can take to lay a foundation for strong results.

What you need to do:

  • Become strongly committed to customer experience.
  • Launch a closely controlled course of action.
  • Continue to fine-tune your decision-making and synchronization.

Along the way, you must be focused, invest in the process, and stay committed. Do these things and you’ll make more productive decisions and execute at a higher level.

Big picture thinking

You must deeply think about the big picture – addressing the whole concept of customer experience.

Understand how to engage customers on an emotional, mental and physical level – all while considering salient social factors.

Rethink everything including your business model for a fundamental mindset to focus on your customers.

This usually means improving your operations, information technology, employee morale and cost-effectiveness.

Your management team must get on the same page with a shared vision.

You must identify the right strategies, and revamp your approach end-to-end for a customer-centric enterprise. This includes creating a real-time infrastructure with your employees and customers.

You’ll be able to engage your customers as soon as possible, engage them continuously and keep your employees in the loop.

Where to start

Start with a philosophy of creating maximum value with a happy buying environment and eliminating any obstacles to customer satisfaction.

You’ll want employees to feel connected and to join in the effort to provide value. This is why motivating your employees is vital.

Plus, employees are where the proverbial tire meets the road — they’re communicating with your customers on a daily basis. Often, as your human capital, they have great insights.

If they’re encouraged to think outside the box, it’s easier than you think to motivate your employees to offer profitable ideas.

Implement visionary training programs so your employees become more loyal and better understand what is important to customers – how customers feel. With them test ideas for a permanent, better customer experience.

Remember your employees have emotions, families and needs. You can have employees who feel appreciated, value the new culture and work environment with affordable, creative and proven employee-loyalty ideas.

Metrics

Include the vital metrics to realize customer needs and wants to attain the highest-possible sales performance.

Know and use key performance indicators. Yes, there are best strategies to use online key performance indicators.

Oh yes, here’s a caveat regarding employees: Know your employees.

Understand that not all employees will get it. Take precautions to upgrade your staff and optimize your talent management with a stellar coaching culture so that you can achieve continuous improvement.

It’s dangerous to think you can maintain your old systems and outdated mindsets.

Your new system must have accurate data in your voyage to maximizing customer satisfaction that encompass your customer-improvements vis-à-vis your cost-saving initiatives.

In essence, your measurement system must have the right metrics to customer satisfaction: Knowing what drives customer satisfaction with employee professionalism – from the touch-point experience to key-performance indicators for heightened service levels.

Good luck!

From the Coach’s Corner, here are related articles:

A Marketing Priority: Enhance Your Internal Communication — Businesses have two communication sources that are expenses but conversely are sources of profit – the external marketplace – and internal factors, their human capital. But all your money poured into marketing doesn’t accomplish much unless you devote equal resources to employee programs and communication.

9 Strategies to Measure, Boost Your Business Performance — If healthy revenue and profit margins are your goals, you must determine the critical factors that lead to success. In essence, business is war in commerce. In order to win, you must know how, why and when to attack.

Strategies for Maximum Customer Loyalty, Profits — Customer retention is important for profits in good times and bad. Here’s what to do.

Energize Your Customer-Loyalty Program in 6 Steps — The quickest way for established businesses to optimize revenue is to have a stellar customer-loyalty program — there are six steps you can take for repeat sales and referrals.

Improve Your Customer Retention with 6 Digital Tips  — Outstanding loyalty programs for stellar customer engagement play an important role to improve your prospects for lifetime customer value. That goes for e-commerce, too.

8 Strategies to Enhance Your Customer Service Image — Poor customer service is a salient reason why consumers aren’t loyal to businesses. True, today’s consumers are very demanding. It’s worth noting they’re demanding because they constantly encounter poor customer service.

“Innovation needs to be part of your culture. Customers are transforming faster than we are, and if we don’t catch up, we’re in trouble.”

-Ian Schafer

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Author Terry Corbell has written innumerable online business-enhancement articles, and is a business-performance consultant and profit professional. Click here to see his management services. For a complimentary chat about your business situation or to schedule him as a speaker, consultant or author, please contact Terry.