FEATURE


GROWING YOUR BUSINESS


Customer


experience and the route to business success


By Gary Frith, Director of Nottingham-based Business Development Consultant, Alchemy 7


Customer experience development is probably the single biggest opportunity to increase sales and reduce costs across most industries in the UK. That’s a bold statement, but it is backed up by the actions


of many corporate CEOs across the country who, in recent years, have invested large sums in customer insight and experience teams as the link between customer experience and profitability has become more widely understood. But what is ‘customer experience’ exactly and how does


it apply to an SME business? There are a number of definitions for customer


experience, but broadly speaking it is the way that a customer feels about a company after passing through various touchpoints on the journey from prospect through to purchase, product or service delivery, and after-sales support. All touchpoints provide an opportunity to delight the customer as well as to switch the customer off from the purchase or a repeat sale. Customer experience covers a broad spectrum of


business disciplines from sales and marketing to product/service design, operations, HR, and finance.


INCREASING SALES AND REDUCING COSTS Below are just some of the potential benefits of delivering a quality customer experience, and generating a highly satisfied and loyal customer base: • More orders/more frequent orders • Longer customer lifetime • More referrals • Higher average order value • Lower costs to service (less complaints, support requirements)


• Higher margins (less focus on price) 42 business network May 2017


• Lower sales and marketing costs to bring in new customers


• Wallet share opportunities (additional products/services)


Some of the less tangible benefits include: • Customer experience focus can provide a focal point for management and staff to drive the business forward


• Can help to remove narrow silo mentality across departments


• Less complaints, firefighting, and general stress in the business


• Higher staff morale and retention


If you look at some of the items above you’ll realise that customer experience development isn’t some wishy washy customer service concept, it’s about adding genuine long-term value to a business and represents a massive untapped development and growth opportunity for many SMEs. Ask yourself whether your business is providing enough reasons for your customers to remain loyal to you.


WHERE DO WE START? It’s important to start at the top with any customer experience project, with the whole management team buying in to customer experience principles. Some number crunching of the loyalty economics at the early stages of a project can help the team understand the rationale for the business. Realigning performance measurement and incentives around the customer experience also helps to get all team members pulling in the same direction. Any successful customer experience programme will require you to have a full understanding of customer


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64