One can support your company worth, the other will increase it
Too often company owners/CEOs think in terms of providing great customer service to their customers. But Customer Service is reactive – it’s awaiting a customer to articulate a need and your company tries to address it. And great customer service these days is the ante into the game. But elevating your thinking to Customer Experience now elevates to anticipating customer needs and separating yourself from the competition – building this muscle can create entirely new company worth. If your team are subject matter experts in your field, you should be able to provide a Customer Experience that goes well above and beyond that of mere Customer Service.
Customer Experience is thinking about every touch point your potential and existing customer has with your company. From finding you, to contacting you, to learning about your products/services, to getting pricing, to supplying/fulfilling your products/services, to billing and for the customer using and even maintaining or disposing of your product or service. The companies that build long term, sustainable company worth and unique differentiation from their competition are those that think in terms of where they can excel in each of these touch points, not just some.
Sit with your team and use some of these questions to facilitate a productive, and potentially company worth building dialog:
- What are all the touchpoints a customer has with our company?
- Which of these touchpoints are we providing a great experience, a not so great one?
- Is there a specific customer touchpoint that is underserved today in our market – meaning our competition nor our company excels so this could be a differentiation opportunity for us?
- Where and how could we do a better job of anticipating our customers’ needs?
- Do we leverage our customer data to truly understand when and why we have to issue customer credits and could we take steps to reduce the occurrence and cost?
- Do we identify why customers call our customer service lines and is this a point of frustration for customers that we could eliminate or reduce? When they do call, are we turning what could be a negative in to a positive experience for them during their call with us?
- Do we identify the most common areas of frustration that our customers experience in working with us (and our competitors) and could we take steps to reduce or eliminate the source reason?
- Could we enhance an aspect of the customer experience we provide and generate new revenue or command higher prices as a result?
Elevate from thinking about responding to customer requests to anticipating customer needs. There is a meaningful difference between these and the latter can absolutely contribute more to building your company worth as you separate your company from the competition.
