Differentiating your Organisation by Exceeding Customers’ Expectations

Many organisations fail when it comes to understanding their customers and use their intuition for their customers’ needs and experiences. In addition today’s consumers are more sophisticated and more willing to explore alternatives to products and services and how they are delivered. Getting closer to customers and effectively responding to their needs is a great way to boost loyalty and encourage deeper business relationships. Traditionally organisations created or improved long-term relationships and loyalty through Customer Relationship Management (CRM). However CRM tends to analyse and use (historical) quantitative data whereas Customer Experience Management (CEM) focuses on delivering distinctive experiences that delight customers across all contact moments during the customer lifecycle in a consistent way.

It is already well known that it costs more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. Organisations therefore need to accumulate touch-points that affect customer behaviour, customer retention and indirect their profitability. Organisations also need to identify moments or areas where they might be losing customers, keep ‘at-risk’ customers from defection and understand how to continuously close the gap between their customer promise and the actual customer experiences being delivered.

Customer Experience Management has become the new critical differentiator that organisations apply in order to create a sustainable competitive advantage. According to Hamel and Prahalad (1994), the objective is to amaze customers by anticipating and fulfilling their unarticulated needs and wants. In other words, organisations have to wow their customers; they have to exceed their expectations in order to differentiate from the competition.

But how do they do this; for example how is ABN AMRO transforming from “The Bank” into “Your Bank”? How are organisations like IKEA and KLM measuring their customers’ experiences? Does NS HiSpeed have a process in place to manage those experiences? How should such a positive experience look like for public organisations like World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and The Ministry of Justice?
 

Accenture together with the CRM Association and Business News Radio (BNR) dive into the world of customer centricity. Tuesdays from 19:00 to 19:30: BNR’s “Grote Klantenshow”! http://www.bnr.nl/radio/programmas/klantenshow/12027653 
 

Putting the customer first is the key success factor in doing business today!
 

I am curious; have you ever had a customer experience that went far beyond your expectations? Did a business or government provide you with a service that took you by a positive surprise?