Customer Champions "Annual Review" 2011
As Customer Champions celebrated its twelfth year the importance to our clients of providing an outstanding customer experience has grown throughout that period with 2011 proving no exception. With the continuing gloomy forecast for the economy in 2012 and beyond we can only see this focus for our clients increasing.
The combination of Colin’s client side experience and Juliet’s market research expertise gathered over the last 25+ years, has continued to allow Customer Champions to deliver a series of practical solutions to our clients’ customer experience challenges throughout 2011.
Some of what we achieved in 2011 – 6 snapshots
Designing a corporate framework in which to collect and action feedback
Customer Champions led a number of workshops across this client’s business to help them to define their corporate strategy for gathering and acting upon customer feedback. With our clear and supportive guidance our client has moved to developing Customer Journey Maps to provide a clearer direction for their Customer Strategy. This has provided the direction required to help them review and update previous corporate surveys, the outputs from which will help them to create an even clearer understanding of their customers’ needs and how they are meeting these ranging from a very high level corporate view, down to individual markets and key customers.
Understanding the views of senior key decision makers
A series of face to face interviews were conducted with senior executives and individual customer approved reports were produced. These supported both the development of action plans at an account specific level and, alongside the findings from quantitative telephone interviews, the development of corporate wide actions.
Mapping out the customers’ journey
A number of clients benefited from Customer Champions’ facilitation skills in developing Customer Journey Maps. This allowed clients to understand not only the key customer touchpoints but what the customer experience currently was, and how this could be enhanced to bring value to all parties.
Benchmark for customer service in retail
On behalf of a retail industry body Customer Champions conducted a series of in-depth interviews with retailers and in-street interviews with consumers on what good customer service in retail looked like. Customer Champions developed an overall framework model on how retailers can deliver excellent customer service. This supported through a series of case studies on exemplar retailers and is now available through a published report.
Understanding your Internal customer
Customer Champions were approached by an outsourcing supplier to provide an independent evaluation of the service being provided to internal customers of this global organisation. This online survey, delivered in multiple languages, was expanded to include coverage of all IT services rather than those just being outsourced. This benchmarking information has now been used to establish a plan of action for the coming year before customers are recontacted in order to gauge progress.
Customer Charter review
Desk based research combined with conducting key customer focus groups supported the review of this organisation’s Customer Charter. It highlighted the need to be very clear about the role of the charter and who the key audience was. It has also highlighted the need for the organisation to realign itself with the constantly changing needs of its customers.
After a successful 2011 we look forward to 2012 and the customer experience challenges that both our current and future clients look for our support on. Perhaps some of them will be reflected in our 2012 predictions!