Sharing customer experience successes
Gaining customer experience successes can be hard work, so sharing them with both your colleagues and your customers will maximise their value to all stakeholders.
When to share customer experience successes
Although organisations recognise the need to share the results of customer feedback or structured surveys, few provide it in relevant detail, and even fewer proactively communicate customer experience succeses, whether they are small or large achievements. In the Customer Champions’ cycle below you can see there are two crucial communication segments; firstly when sharing the results, primarily internally, and then secondly communicating the findings, planned actions and success both internally and externally.
Understand the barriers to sharing customer experience successes
Taking the internal audience initially this will naturally segment into two key overall groups:
1. Senior management. The number one issue that we experience as causing a barrier to listening to customer experience successes is the lack of a link between the corporate strategy and the customer. Without this there is no priority placed on customer feedback and the associated successes. Without that you simply won’t get the exposure and their commitment that is needed in order to successfully communicate to them, and without that there won’t be the resources made available to deliver customer experience successes.
2. Employees. This is frequently down to a lack of perceived ownership of either the customer feedback or the successes. To overcome this we have found that linking customer survey questions to specific functions / individuals will ensure the data is acted upon. It also means that they have a vested interest in communicating their successes. The other primary action would be to conduct an independent survey of employees and what they see as the barriers to the organisation being more customer focused and successfully delivering improved customer experiences.
With customers as the audience the key barrier to overcome is to translate the action into what benefit they will derive from the positive work that has been done to improve the customer experience. Describing what has been done will not be enough for customers, they want to understand the benefit they should experience, and even better if it can be quantified such as time or money saved.
Having a marketing plan for sharing customer experience successes
To maximise the benefit of sharing customer experience successes the development of a marketing plan will help identify aspects such as:
- Key audiences and their information needs. How does the message need modifying for each of these audiences? It may not just be customers and employees, what other stakeholders should be considered such as industry analysts, journalists, shareholders, and governing bodies?
- The tone of the message in that it needs to reflect the company culture, and the role of the customer within both that culture and the overall corporate strategy
- Availability and appropriateness of communication channels
- Blend of one-off events such as the National Customer Service Week with regular channels such as the in-house management reporting
- Frequency with which messages are shared, vitally including them being updated
- Use of different media, such as video, infographics, presentations, live customer feedback.
- Third party recognition such as industry awards can have positive benefits for both employees and corporate PR.
Sharing customer experience successes through Reward & Recognition
Linking customer feedback, and improvements achieved through that feedback, lend themselves very well to linking to employee reward and recognition programmes. If one already exists within the organisation look to enhance it by having a customer focus element which naturally both generates and rewards employee engagement in this area. If there is no reward and recognition programme in place, look to understand why, but consider the launch of a customer focussed recognition programme that would be linked to the overall marketing plan.
Organisations are unique as are customer experience successes
There is no one approach that will solve this challenge for everyone, but the above is designed to give a foundation.
Take the next step
To get support in sharing your customer experience successes contact Customer Champions.