One-to-One Podcast gives listeners a glimpse into the world of customer experience. In the first season of this podcast, our host Scott McArthur caught up with CX leaders to discuss changing customer expectations and solutions to the uncertainties brought about by the pandemic.
Here’s a recap of the top lessons from these conversations:
1. Migrate your focus from rewards to relevance
Why Customer Loyalty Starts with Data with Bryan Pearson, Former CEO, LoyaltyOne
Just offering rewards doesn’t tug at the emotional heartstrings of customers and it surely doesn’t generate loyalty. Price-specific benefits help you appease only a small proportion of your customers who fall into the category of “financial optimizers”. For rest of your customer base, brand loyalty is influenced by numerous factors in addition to monetary rewards. Successful brands usually sell their products and services at normal prices and find other ways to generate value for their customers.
2. Humanize the adoption of new tech and systems
Fast tracking digital transformation with Adam Baggs, CEO, Maplewave
It’s critical to keep customers in mind while undergoing a digital transformation. To not lose sight of customer experience when moving towards an omnichannel strategy, it’s imperative to put sufficient focus on soft skills. The cornerstone of maintaining this balance lies in your frontline staff staying focussed on the customer journey irrespective of the channel. It’s crucial to humanize the adoption of new tech and make your team understand the need for it from the point-of-view of customers.
3. Empathy is the driving force behind creating a great customer experience
Why Experience is the New Brand with David Kain, President, Kain Automotive
An empathetic sales culture is the cornerstone of a memorable customer experience. That in turn leads to greater customer satisfaction. To be able to relate to how the customer feels and thinks, sales folks should go through a similar research and prospecting process as a customer would. This can include online research, exploration by going into physical stores, or even discussion on that purchase topic with other people who are knowledgeable in that field. After gathering all this data by the same progression as a consumer would, sales teams can truly relate to the customer’s thought process and interact with them empathetically.
4. Reward behaviors along with outcomes
How employee engagement impacts customer experiences with Andre Riley, CRO, Arcade
The first step to create a customer-focussed employee culture is having an understanding of your goals and reinforcing those goals through your behaviour. Putting micro-incentives in place not only makes working on the frontline fun but also ensures that employees focus on quantity as well as quality. A reward-based culture that compensates frontline teams not just for sales but also for certain actions and behaviors helps drive the importance of creating great customer experiences. Doing this will also ensure that the frontline doesn’t perceive customer engagement as a chore but rather as a sales enablement exercise.
5. Customers interact with brands, not with a particular channel of the brand
Customer-Focused Product Management with Gerd Eberhardt
Tools that help you minimize direct contact between your teams and customers and make one-to-one interactions safer are going to be key moving forward. The strategy should not be to substitute human interactions with technology but to use technology in a way that lets you automate the process to make customer-brand interactions easier and streamlined. Customers expect the same seamless customer service across all channels, irrespective of the first point of contact between them and the brand. Businesses need to invest in unifying customer interactions without differentiating between channels.
6. Get rid of the "ivory tower mindset" to improve CX
Simplicity in Customer Experience with Brice Scheschuk, Managing Partner, Globalive Capital
Ironically, it’s your frontline employees who leave a lasting impression on your customer base even when corporate is classically at odds with the front-line. The front-line interacts with your customers day-in and day-out; it's important they are heard, recognized, and acknowledged. So all corporate employees need to be in their shoes before making any decisions.
7. Invest in the right tech
Modernizing the customer journey with Michelle Denogean, CMO, Roadster
Embrace technology to empower your sales processes, which will in turn streamline and modernize your customer experience. Additionally, empowering your workforce with the right tech will ensure that your millennial employees are happy working for you and happy selling to your customers. Mapping out what your core objectives and goals are and training your team to use the technology in a way that gets you closer to those goals is highly critical.
8. Shift focus from transactional customer relationships to meaningful customer relationships
Managing uncertainty as a sales leader with David Snyder, President, PONO Learning
If you want to stay connected to your customers in these uncertain times, you need to start exploring interactive ideas and avenues to create a synergy between your employees and your customers. In times of unpredictability, there's a natural tendency is to panic, make short-sighted decisions, and ultimately sacrifice the end customer experience. The outbreak makes everything a moving target, so it's inherently hard to plan for the long term. Nevertheless, a fail-proof strategy is to empathize with your end customers and do what's ultimately best for them.
