It’s not what you do - it’s the way that you do it…

I concur wholeheartedky with UK based consultant Neil Woodcock who blogs: "Customer experience - It’s not what you do - it’s the way that you do it…and that’s what get results!”

He continues: "The moment you have attracted new interest from a potential customer, their journey with you has begun. Have you thought carefully enough about what you would like customers to feel and do at each stage of their journey with you? For instance, what have you, and other functions, got to do and what way do you have to do it to impress customers enough for them to come back to you time and time again? Did you know that satisfying a customer’s functional and emotional needs can increase sales by up to 40% (*Research International).

Many companies have researched customer satisfaction, have internal service measures and have analyzed customer transactions and sales. But few have proactively combined this knowledge to build a successful customer journey which appeals to the customers both functionally and emotionally.

The way customers think and feel about large organisations has subtly changed over the last 18 months with trust becoming a much more important element of what customers value. In addition, your internal cost cutting may have inadvertently altered the customer experience."

Now is a good time to re-design customer journeys to improve how customers think and feel and increase customer retention, share of wallet and sales. You can do this rapidly and successfully using CJM or customer journey mapping as an effective tool. I will be glad to help.

Customer cynicism about handling complaints

A study done by RightNow & YouGov Plc in 2007 of 2,800 British consumers found that 69% of the respondents had actively complained between one and five times to a company.

The results were amazing. 60% of the respondents expected the problem to be fixed to their satisfaction. Only 27% claimed the problem was fixed to their satisfaction while 34% said no action was taken at all.

What makes this remarkable is not the 34% no action or 27% fixed, but that there were fully 40% of the respondents who called not expecting the problem to be fixed.

What kind of model do you need to reduce this incredible lack of trust and restore some measure of faith in the company’s customer service? This is pretty deep cynicism.