4 Requirements To Make A Customer-Experience Focused Company Environment

A recent article by Lynn Hunsaker discusses the significance in understanding and respecting your customer experience ecosystem. Basically, a customer experience ecosystem would include customers, employees, vendors, departments like marketing and communications, and basically everything that contributes to how a business functions. Hunsaker says that many of the major mishandled situations companies make are a result of not properly respecting the customer experience ecosystem, which should be incorporated when developing a customer experience strategy. If you don’t fully have a firm understanding of your company’s culture, voice, customers, and employees, the chances of disrespecting the ecosystem will rise and could lead to a loss in customer loyalty. So, what can companies do to give their customer experience ecosystem its proper respect?

Hunsaker says the key is to understand and respect your brand’s essence from the perspective of everyone involved with your company, including customers, employees, suppliers, partners, and more. When you respect the views of everyone involved with your company and its successes and failures, you’ll be able to properly implement a customer experience program that works. The article gives the following four requirements to having a customer experience focused company environment.

1) Understand Your Company’s Whole Ecosystem

This includes knowing what department or component of your business is the strongest and knowing all of your company’s rituals and traditions. Basically, the goal is to know why things are done the way they are and what can/cannot be changed. You should also know how making any changes would affect every customer, department, partner, vendor, etc.

2) Respect Ecosystem’s Needs in Customer Experience Hierarchy

Prioritizing the components of your business will create an environment that will influence people to think about the hierarchy with every decision. Hunsaker gives an example of how the hierarchy should be ranked with customers and employees at the top and competitors at the bottom.

3) Weave-In Customer Experience to Everything Everyone Does

Practice what you preach with putting the customer experience as the company’s number one priority. If you expect your customer service agents to put customers as number one, then people across every department on every level of the company should also have this mindset. Customer experience metrics, goals, and management should be discussed in most, if not all, meetings.

4) Maintain Strength of Customer Experience in Your DNA

The most important thing is to make sure you make a customer experience centric mindset a part of every decision and program the company makes. It should also be one of the key criteria when hiring new managers and executives to ensure that customer experience starts at the top and influences the rest of the company on every level. In addition, it’s important to constantly be listening to your customers to develop your company to serve their needs as they evolve. When a customer-centric mindset is firmly established, a company will be more likely to please its customers and less likely to suffer from major blunders.

This blog post is based on an article from CustomerThink. To read the original article, please click the link below:

What is Customer Experience Ecosystem? – Lynn Hunsaker