Gartner’s Seven Initiatives to Improve Customer Experience

According to a recent worldwide survey by Gartner Executive Programmes (EXP), Targeting, attracting, and retaining new customers remains a top priority for chief information officers (CIOs) in 2008.

To this cause, Gartner outlines seven types of organizational initiatives to boost customer loyalty and satisfaction:

1. Act on feedback, deploy changes and communicate actions to employees and customers - View every customer interaction as an opportunity to deliver brand values.  Standardize on one business feedback management tool across the organization, for all communication channels.
2. Design processes from the outside in - Most process redesign focuses on improving operational efficiencies rather than to improve the customer experience. Yet with every customer interaction, there is at least one "moment of truth" that can disproportionately positively or negatively affect the customer experience.  "Organizations must fix one problem at a time and shouldn’t try to fix all broken processes simultaneously. The best organizations just focus on the worst two or three," says Ed Thompson, research vice-president at Gartner.
3. Act as one organization to ensure consistency – Since customers often interact with many individuals throughout your company, it’s important to ensure that information captured in one interaction is not forgotten in the next channel.
4. Be open - Organizations that want to improve the customer experience often become more open. This could mean offering more channels or extending hours but it can mean much more.  For example, establishing an online community can be one of the most powerful and influential tools for marketing.  Gartner recommends that open organization should follow three tenets:
   • be transparent and clear
   • be open-minded
   • be inclusive
5. Personalize products and experiences - Some personalization options are simple, such as a web site that enables customers to monogram products, while others are more complex, such as tailoring and personal pricing.  However, companies need to consider additional complexity and costs when considering personalization.  Makes sure you evaluate these costs against the sales benefits and longer-term customer experience.
6. Alter attitudes and employee behavior - Employees’ actions are often the most powerful improvements in a customer’s experience. Executive mystery-shopper programs and hands-on manager involvement during peak-demand periods help to educate company leaders about what the average customer and employee are experiencing.  Gartner outlines three primary ways to alter employee behavior:
   • recruit the right types of employees
   • ensure standards such as policies, procedures and governance structures
   • create training programs and incentives that can modify employee behavior patterns
7. Design the complete customer experience - Many organizations have no plan or design for the customer experience.  The experience is experience is unplanned and accidental in its execution -- it “just happens”.  Companies with a focus on selling experiences, such as in the entertainment, education and travel industries, focus on designing experiences ... the brand is an expression of a product or company’s reputation built up over many years. Today, brands increasingly are used as part of marketing communications to create a high-level expectation or promise of a particular quality or customer experience.

By Randy Saunders, Perfect CEM