Is your organization "human"?

Relationships are personal. Some more than others, but none-the-less quite personal. Similarly, buying decisions can be personal. It is not necessary that I will go out and purchase the cheapest and most positively reviewed product. I may spend a few more dollars to get the product from a local store, or a store where I like to visit, or an online store that accepts my PayPal account. The reasons are un-ending, the irrationality behind the reasons is constant though. But I digress, I will surely touch on this in more detail in a later post.

Customer Experience Innovation: Does Innovation Require a Framework?

Recently, I shared an interesting article, on one of the social network sites, that I had read about Customer Experience Innovation. Among the comments that I got, one was regarding organizations going about customer experience innovation by requiring employees to simply "do it". Without a framework or a business plan or strategy behind it.

How Customer Centric Are You?

Many organizations tout that they listen to their customers and gather customer feedback. These organizations have a good presence in social media and say they have a good understanding of their customers. If you go and ask them, they will be able to tell you why customers buy their product or services.

But is that really being customer centric? Is just listening to the customer and maintaining a knowledge base of customer buying trends enough? Is just implementing customer feedback sufficient to becoming a customer centric organization.

The "We got your back" concept for Customer Services

We all know that Customer Services is a very important, if not the most important, touch point to maintain a great customer relation and influence the customer experience overall. If it is through call centers or through the growing social media channels, the same rules apply and we see the same impact on the overall experience.

With all the different ways that customers can reach us today, and the large customer service teams, are we strangling our own capabilities to influence the customer experience? This question led me to think about, what I call, the "we got your back" concept. This is based on what the organization philosophy is with regards to the freedom that a customer service representative/agent has to influence and manage the overall customer experience.

Organization Cultures - Is yours Customer Centric?

In one of my earlier posts, I discussed that employee satisfaction is directly proportional to customer satisfaction. Recently, while reading about customer loyalty and how each organization considers "loyalty" differently, I started thinking about organization cultures and how employees are a big part of it.

Like each culture has its own set of beliefs and traditions and thus its own way to define faith, similarly we will find that organizations, over time, develop their own culture. This culture does not always come from the top down, it sometimes flows the other way. Whichever direction the beliefs are passed, the culture has an impact on how the customer sees the organization.