You dont have to boil the ocean to pay for a better customer experience. You dont even have to heat up the pond. Everyone agrees that a better customer experience should be good for a company, but a lot of us worry about how to pay for it. Customer service does cost money, so the question is whether the cost of delivering a better experience is worth it or not. Will a better customer experience pay for itself? Seeking out and eliminating the sources of friction should pay for your customer experience improvement just by reducing the costs involved in handling these unresolved problems, one problem at a time. Want an example? Consider how Fidelitys SVP of Customer Experience, Parrish Arturi, approached the problem. As recounted by Forresters Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine in their book Outside In, Arturi focused his efforts on one small process improvement at a time. Importantly, he set up a customer experience improvement budget and allowed people to tap it for small amounts of funds to fix these individual problems without having to do fully fleshed out proposals. One of these small projects began when a service rep noticed that a large number of people were having trouble logging in to their accounts through an automated phone system. The rep started a thread about the situation on a Fidelity discussion board dedicated to generating ideas for experience improvements. [Arturis] team, the owners of the board, saw the thread and flagged it for attention, [and]... then worked with the people who manage the phone system to identify the root cause of the login issue and quickly launch a solution. Although the total cost of that fix was less than twenty thousand dollars, it saves Fidelity $4 million a year by averting calls to customer service. It was just one of over one hundred and sixty projects that came through Fidelitys experience improvement system in 2011. Together those projects accounted for over $24 million in annual savings. You could do this for your own company, couldnt you? Establish a small budget of funds for the specific purpose of removing the points of friction in your customer experience. Then let your employees - even rank-and-file workers - tap this fund for small amounts without having to submit comprehensive proposals to senior people. And watch your customer experience get better, one resolved problem at a time.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 16:21:42 +0000
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