A Best Practices Driven New Customer Bill Of Rights

Organizations striving for excellence in customer satisfaction and loyalty now have a template to follow with today’s announcement by Omega Management Group Corp. of a groundbreaking new Customer Bill of Rights -- the first benchmark standard for the global services industry. Omega is a recognized expert in customer experience management strategies.

The new Customer Bill of Rights comprises 10 articles that define best practices for organizations to use when interacting with customers and employees:

1. Deliver Quality Products and Services
2. Provide a Supportive Workplace Environment
3. Reward Employees for Customer Service Excellence
4. Appoint a Senior Customer Advocate
5. Measure Levels of Customer Satisfaction & Loyalty
6. Report on Customer Satisfaction & Loyalty
7. Take Corrective Action where Needed
8. Benchmark Performance within the Industry
9. Seek Independent Audit of Customer Service Processes
10. Conduct Annual Review of Customer Service Processes

The Customer Bill of Rights is the result of research and analysis of global best practices in business-to-business (B2B) customer service and support operations conducted this year through a web survey of members of Omega’s new View from the Top (VFT-500) Research Panel-500SM program. Announced in October 2007, the VFT-500 program consists of VP-level executives in customer-facing positions and/or chief customer advocates at 500 leading global companies, and is devoted to the continuous improvement of the global customer service industry.

Omega’s Center for Loyalty Research conducted the survey -- the first ever based on customer responses exclusively -- and analyzed and reported the results. The survey examined best practices in virtually all customer-facing operations and methods of customer interaction. Companies sponsoring the initial VFT-500 research are Customer Relationship Management Institute; Anthony & Alexander Group, LLC; GoldMine TeleServices Group and ProSearch Services Group. Sponsorship includes contributing to the research process and/or providing other services to the VFT-500 program.

8.75 Ways to improve the Customer Experience

I just read one of those blogs that made me think: I fully agree and I could not have said it better. This blog hits a lot of nails on the respective heads. So, I would like to relay it and mention that this post was by Pierre Hulsebus of the EHTC Technology Solutions CRM Team.(CRM Rocks)

These are the 8.75 Key Recommendations:

1. Build a Diverse Team: Customer experience initiatives teams are often comprised of people who are responsible for customers across the organization. We suggest a diverse group from sales, marketing, customer care, administration, and management.

2. Design Processes from the Customer’s Viewpoint: Mapping the customer experience requires your team to walk in the customer's shoes for a while. The exercise will reveal the difficulties that customers have working with you. Build a touchpoint map that lists the touchpoint, customer importance rating, and customer satisfaction rating for each one.

3. Actually Listen to the Customer: Feedback is a better indication of faulty processes and procedures than surveys. The challenge is not how to solicit feedback, but actually listening and taking action on the suggestions. Confronting internal process managers with raw customer feedback can be very painful. However, when the changes are deployed as the customer suggests, this needs to be communicated to employees and the customers who offered the feedback. Customer communication is a two-way street. They need to hear back from you that you heard them and that you worked to improve their experience.

4. Get Up Close and Personal: Personalization is complex, and complexity can mean increased costs for the company. But increasingly, customers are expecting an Amazon.com experience. Organizations mastering offerings and services tailored to customers' expectations are beating their competition by almost every measure. Reward customer loyalty with personal attention and friendly, helpful, and caring employees.

5. Build Institutional Memory: Ensure that information gleaned from a customer at one interaction is not forgotten later on. Customers hate repeating their stories. From their perspective, they think we all work together and know everything about them because they just told the last person at our company the same information. So they get irritated when the next touchpoint in their journey does not know what happened before.

6. No Sacred Cows Allowed: Extending hours, or giving web access to order history are typical first steps, but organizational improvements often take courage, innovation, and risk. The team should be transparent and clear, open-minded and inclusive. Basically, everything should be on the table and nothing should be so sacred that it can not afford to be changed. This is where a committee structure can often be detrimental to success, as a committee will often skip over process improvements that are too hard, even though the reward may be very high. Failure needs to be allowed, and risk need to be taken.

7. Get An Attitude Adjustment: I have stated often that the lowest paid employees in a company have the highest effect on a customer’s perception of value. Training employees to how to behave with customers on the phone, in person, or in writing will make a good experience better. It is personal “one on one” interaction that defines the core customer experience.

8. Eat The Whole Enchilada: Taking charge of the experience from end to end is not an easy task. Expect resistance and barriers from people. Many of the managers that are stake holders in their specific processes fail to realize that their process, although important to company policy, may be negatively affecting the customer. You will find these the most difficult issues to deal with.

8.5 Pull Up A Chair You Are Going To Be Here A While: You may want to change team members every six months but this process will never be complete; it is a journey not a destination. The process is a continuous quality improvement, unless you never expect your customer’s needs or wants to change. This process of improving the experience will keep going moving as long as customers needs and wants change.

8.75 Embrace The Ambiguous: Solutions to effective customer improvements are locked up in the heart of your customers. What improvement is going have the good ROI, or please customers enough to stay longer, or spend more money with you is often a mix of common sense, innovation, and failures. There are a lot of “Best Practices” that consultants are can bring to the table. The ones that work best vary from project to project.

Remember that most of your customers like working with you. Let their wishes, feedback, and direction be your guide.