The current situation
A global manufacturer wanted to increase their market penetration in France. Their main competitor was a market leader with four times more revenue. In addition, the competitor was recognised for high quality service delivery and a good service network coverage enabling them to have a short on-site response time. Immediate action was required.
Noventum assisted the manufacturer to improve their customer experience. Following an assessment, evaluation and redesign of the customer journey, the company has become well respected for being easy to do business with and showing flexibility in delivering services that suits the needs of the customer at the moment of delivery, going beyond just delivering high quality service.
Many studies have shown that improving Customer Experience generates higher growth rates and increases loyalty among customers. The renewed brand reputation helped this company to:
- Secure revenue by retaining existing customers and enhancing the contract renewal rate from 60% to 85%
- Increase revenue per customer by selling additional value-added services
- Create a pull-through effect in generating more product sales, due to customers wanting to stay with the company due to their appreciation of the service organisation.
The challenge
Various stakeholders were concerned about poor customer engagement, customer relationships and the customer experience. They acknowledged that the company needed to act immediately. However, there was insufficient understanding about the current delivery of customer experience and what the key drivers for excellence in the customer experience were.
This lack of insight was a significant challenge as it reduced the understanding of how to improve the customer experience and made it difficult to take important decisions on how service should be organised and delivered. This resulted in managers that gave input on improvement opportunities based on gut feeling rather than on understanding what customers really expect.
The strategy
The first step was to assess the current customer journeys to understand how customers perceive doing business with the company at different touch points. This took place through customer research using multiple methods such as:
- Customer satisfaction surveys
- Using insight from customer facing employees
- Observing how customers act and interact during a customer journey
- In-depth interviews with customers that represent a significant segment
This analysis enabled the team to discover the improvement potential. This was done by analysing the data and evaluating how each touch point is perceived through the eyes of the customer. Based on this we labelled each touch point as ‘positive’, ‘neutral’ and ‘negative’.
The third step was to identify improvement opportunities:
- How could we reduce the pains at negatively perceived customer touch points?
- How could we add a ‘wow’ element to neutral perceived customer touch points?
- How could we identify the critical factors for positively perceived customer touch points to ensure a similar experience in the future?
By asking ourselves these questions we soon figured out that customers did not want short response times per se, only in situations of crisis (production stop). In other situations, they didn’t mind waiting longer.
Interestingly, customers found it more annoying that their information was not stored correctly in a system nor maintained efficiently, resulting in situations where they had to report the same issues repeatedly rather than just once.
Another example was that customers always had to wait several days to receive a parts quote. In the mind of the customer however, if a company sells something, they should be able to act quickly and know their prices
instantly. Customers were also made to call different numbers for ordering parts and for service which complicated things further.
The fourth step was defining a vision and roadmap to improve the customer experience. This first started with evaluating all improvement opportunities and how they would contribute to the envisioned brand, as well as how important they were for the customer:
By assessing the customer experience and evaluating all improvement opportunities, it quickly became clear what needed to be focused on. Based on how easy it was to implement the opportunities, we then created a roadmap focusing on the quick wins first e.g. have one phone number for service and parts. In parallel, it was also important to identify the opportunities that have a high customer impact even though they may take longer to implement e.g create and implement different experience designs for different types of customers
The last step was to redesign the customer experience at a particular touch point and then to implement the improvement opportunity.
The results
Redesigning and actively implementing the customer experience helped the company to become known as one that is easy to do business with and one that shows flexibility in delivering service. In addition:
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By using the customer insight as a starting point, rather than gut feeling, the decision process to implement operational improvements became quicker and less political
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The company identified some ‘low cost, high value’ improvement opportunities e.g. they always thought that customers wanted personal contact whereas in certain instances, customers preferred to submit an initial request online. This change was easy to act on and came at lower cost
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The company is now able to clearly articulate why changes are needed - using the impact it will have on the customer experience seems to be a strong motivator for employees to modify their behaviour too
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By having a clear customer experience vision and roadmap, employees are now able to better respond to customer complaints. They can show the customer appreciation, for their feedback and ensure that their problem will be resolved quickly
How can your company use the Service Transformation Centre to design a successful Customer Experience?
Find the steps enabled by methodologies, tools and coaching available through our Service Transformation Centre here:
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