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Niels van der Putten | 07-08-2009 | 02:37 Link | High Performance Marketing, Sales Transformation |
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Customer experience is often related to the emotional engagement with a brand, product or service. An important factor in delivering customer experiences are the employees of the providing company. It is the personal contact between an employee and a customer that has a profound impact on the emotional engagement in either a positive or negative way. So how do you enable an employee to positively engage a customer? How can employees understand the needs and expectations and what can they do to meet and even try to exceed them? B2C In a B2C environment the numbers of customers are often so great that it is difficult to build up a mea B2BB2B companies have different challenges. Here the customer base is often much smaller and Question So here are my questions to you:
What do you think? Which possibilities do you see? |
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ningful relationship between an employee and a customer. One solution here is to transform the huge amounts of collected customer data into personas. These personas represent a segment in the customer base and create a profile of the typical needs and behaviors of that segment. Think about the persona of the ambitious, traveling business woman or the part-time working, soccer mom. These personas give insight into the customer needs to the employees when dealing with such a type of person. Orchestrated empathy if you will. 
one-on-one relationships are easier to maintain, especially for the larger accounts. But the challenge to meet the customer needs to improve a profitable relationship remains the same. The customer experience can have a much greater impact in a B2B environment as a lost account or contract can have a bigger impact on the revenue and margin contribution. And acquiring new customers is, just like in a B2C context, very expensive if not more so.3 Reacties to “How to enable your employees to deliver the customer experience?”
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Hi Niels,
Interesting questions which you are asking. According to my experience in B2B I really believe you have to start to learn thinking Outside-In about your customers as an organisation.
Thinking ouside-in tells you what your customers value most, this identifies how the organisation and its employees should behave at every point of contact and deliver on the company’s brand promise.
By viewing the customer experience from the ‘outside-in’, you are placing yourself in your customers’ shoes rather than focusing merely on sales and returns. B2B companies can follow their customers, from the setting of expectations – via brand image and word of mouth – to point of sale interaction and finally post-experience review.
By implementing Outside-in thinking at both strategic and actionable levels companies can build and most important improve customer relationships.
Hi Robert,
Thanks for your reply and I totally agree with you: these are the principles of customer experience. It is all about the perspective of the customer.
But what I would like to know is what you think will be the way how outside-in thinking can be implemented? How can you make sure that your account managers will actually think outside-in? Just like B2C companies enable their employees with personas.
What are your ideas?
Thanks in advance,
Niels
I have several ideas about how this works. Once I read an article about some basic principles (sated below) about how you can start to think Outside-In:
- Account managers must live in the customer’s world. Talk to them about their dreams and priorities, rather than products and prices.
- Treat customers as individuals not averages. We often seek to create average solutions for average customers. Think about your customer as a real person. Learn about what drives him or her deeply.
- Don’t sell products, deliver experiences! We see the sales transaction as the culmination of our efforts; for the customer it’s just the beginning. Go beyond that little bit of after-sales support to deliver experiences that will endure over time.
- Do business on their terms, not yours. Why should I want to read a random piece of irrelevant mail from you? Why should I come to you? Learn to engage and interact on customers’ terms.
- Enable customers to achieve their dreams. Customers have ambitions, or at least problems to solve. Your products and even your services are just a means to address these. Enable them to do things faster, better and bigger than they ever thought possible.
- Embrace networks and partners.Physical and virtual networks are prime opportunities to connect with customers, embrace and build communities, connect with partners who have difference capabilities and relationships, and reach new places.
- Be more emotional and energising. Business is about people engaging with others. People are inspired by those who have a vision, those who can make sense of complexity and those who understand them best.
- Don’t be the biggest — be the best. In a changing business world, the emphasis has shifted from scale and volume to relevance and difference. The profits are to be found in niches. Loyalty lies in personalisation.
I try to implement these basic principles in my daily work as a customer representative and it costs a lot of effort, but most important it works!!