Customer Experiences Managing Director Chris Bell has listed 12 areas that business will need to gain a greater understanding of if business performance is to improve.

Businesses over the last ten years have struggled to get to grips with the need for a genuine customer focus, a focus that will add greater value from the customer’s perspective. Most businesses are still focused on price as their only competitive advantage with the resulting pressure on margins.

1) 80% of businesses think they are performing better than their customer’s think they are.

Businesses must start listening to their customers and adopt an “outside in” focus rather than a “we think we know it all” attitude.

2) 57% of the NZ workforce is disengaged at work.

If business is to grow productivity then this statistic must improve. Employee engagement equals increased productivity.

3) Businesses confuse repeat custom with customer loyalty.

In most cases repeat customers are not coming back because they are loyal. There will be another reason like “convenience or price”. Anything other than real loyalty leaves a business wide open to losing customers to a competitor.

4) Business continues to think that a “satisfied customer” is the goal.

A satisfied customer is one who has had their expectations met. In today’s competitive economy, nobody raves about a business that has just met their expectations.

5) Most businesses lack a long-term strategic approach to improving their customer experience.

In most cases any improvement in a business’s customer experience will be a short-term reactive response and nothing to do with a proactive long-term strategic approach.

6) 80% of businesses lack the knowledge of how to develop and implement a customer experience strategy.

Business still thinks that providing their front-line people with some customer service training will do the trick. Not in 2010 it won’t.

7) 95% of businesses fail to capitalise on the creativity of their people.

Everyday your people come to work with ideas that will grow your business, and everyday they go home having received no encouragement, to share those ideas.

Most businesses are using gimmicks (reward points & coffee cards) to try and grow customer loyalty.

Real customer loyalty is about building relationships not dangling carrots.

9) Most products and services are commodities, leaving price as the only point of difference.

Today’s point of difference will not come from a business’s products and services. It will be the value a business can add over and above just providing products and services.

10) 95% of customers can’t remember the last time they had a great customer experience.

Most of the experiences we have as customers are less than memorable. That alone is reason enough to develop a strategy that will deliver a consistently high quality experience.

11) Most businesses fail to act on workplace & customer survey results.

Gaining feedback from customers is pointless, costly and annoying to customers unless improvement is the result

12) The majority of businesses either don’t have a sustainable competitive advantage or are not actively promoting one.

Continually thinking about and developing competitive advantages must be a business priority in 2010.

The key, Chris Bell suggests, is to realise that in a world of excess, uniformity and repetition, people buy experiences, not products or services. When people feel good about their experience they will not only return, they will tell their friends too.

To turn a financial exchange into a rewarding experience, businesses have to be creative and they have to be fully committed to seeing the world through their customers’ eyes.

- Chris Bell is managing director of Customer Experiences; a company that specialises in helping businesses improve the way in which they interact with customers and clients.

- www.customerexperiences.co.nz

If you are one of these Gentle Leaders, I will admit that you have likely faced formidable opposition throughout your career. Your stellar people skills have been patronized and your collegial nature has been seen as weakness. Your superiors have encouraged you to sharpen your strategic leadership skills (usually code for “please do my job because I can’t do it”) and become more forceful in driving high performance (even though they would never admit to having their performance driven by others). Your teams have always quietly achieved extraordinary results but you have been unable to build any career momentum because you just don’t fit the mold of the upwardly-mobile executive. You have been kept around because you are great at getting important stuff done but are not seen as tough enough to take on a real organization leadership role. I have good news for you….your time has come!

Why now? Simply because many of our organizations have been beaten up to the point of collapse and need the revitalization that can only come from a new kind of leadership. Your kind of leadership. A leadership that graciously sees the best in others, heals festering wounds and crafts a new, exciting story for the organization. And this is not just about being nice to people. This is a business imperative. The bonds of loyalty and commitment have been so weakened that many of our organizations are unable to take advantage of any economic upswing and will be left behind, irrelevant in the next economic chapter. A look inside these organizations reveals talented people who are now living out their careers in quiet desperation. These people are merely going through the motions each day and putting in their time. There is no shortage of advice for today’s leaders. As engagement scores tumble, consultants and writers from previous eras are still imploring our leaders to “drive new behaviors”, ” hold people more accountable”, and “get the wrong people off the bus”. It’s not working, and it’s time for leadership that can inject fresh energy and enthusiasm into our organizations. It’s time for The Gentle Leader.

Other leaders have had their time. During the past century we have been on a relentless journey to create commercial organizations that can survive and thrive in demanding and ever-changing marketplaces. Uniquely-gifted men and women have emerged to lead these organizations. From the early 1900’s until the 80’s our companies were dominated by The Production Systems Leader who organized us around machines and repetitive processes. This leader was needed to bring order and predictability to the horde of individual craftsmen who were trying to serve the emerging markets created by industrialization. This leader was followed by The Quality Performance Leader whose obsession with improvement in work systems and processes resulted in previously unimaginable levels of productivity. The year 2000 birthed today’s Opportunistic Enterprisers, the “wolves” whose mission was to extract maximum value from the convergence of technology, globalization and fast-changing markets. They were asked to build lean, mean organizations, set big, audacious goals, exploit every market opportunity and be satisfied with nothing less than exceptional performance. And they have done this remarkably well. Maybe too well. We seem to have lost something important along the way. We have lost our organizational soul!

Many organizations have become cold and heartless entities that no longer nourish the human spirit and are now incapable of moving forward. In our pursuit of excellence and opportunity, we have somehow lost touch with the very purpose of organizations and have created entities that no longer satisfy our most basic human needs to be appreciated, to learn and to do work that really matters. When is the last time you saw a leader put community-building at the top of their priority list? When is the last time you have heard a leader speak about compassion and caring as if they really meant it? When have you seen an executive truly make a large personal sacrifice for the good of the lowest paid member of the company?

Can one become a Gentle Leader you ask? Yes, but it is not easy and certainly not for the faint of heart. It may very well be the most challenging transition of your leadership career. It requires exceptional courage, boldness and daring: the courage to confront your needs for accolades and recognition, the boldness to invite each and every member of the organization to put a hand on the organization’s steering wheel, and the daring necessary to commit to a leadership agenda based only on duty and service to others. But the rewards are worth the effort. As a new decade dawns, you will be the leader who forges new pathways into the future. Now is your time to step up to real organization leadership. But watch out for the wolves. They will not go quietly into the night.

Gregg Thompson is the President of Bluepoint Leadership Development

How engaged is your team going into 2010? Do you have what you need in place to grow your productivity next year?

Both serious questions being asked by Customer Experiences Managing Director, Chris Bell. “We know our productivity performance has been lagging behind the OECD and we know, from a recent survey, that 57 percent of Kiwi employees are disengaged at work.”

Bell believes businesses are trying to compete in a “world of sameness”. Every product is a commodity which is becoming increasingly bland and boring to consumers. “This is having a huge impact on customer loyalty and because, via e-commerce, almost everything is available at anytime to any person, resulting in price and margin pressures. It is becoming increasingly costly and difficult to be heard in a market place which has an ever increasing number of options. Rising business costs are further eroding profitability.

“And yet we still continue to try and conduct “business as usual” in a world where business as usual doesn’t cut it anymore.”

The answer, according to Bell is to take a strategic approach which focuses on both employees and customers in a way which delivers increasing value, in return for greater involvement and loyalty.

“This new approach necessitates change in your business focus, both from a leadership perspective and in the way employees and customers are prioritised. Let’s be very clear – employees will never deliver a consistently great customer experience unless they are having the same, so putting your people first must be a priority. From here you can improve employee engagement and create the magic customers are looking for at the front counter.”

The Customer Experience Formula

Involvement = Engagement

The more involved your people are in the development and delivery of your customer experience, the more engaged they will be in the role they play in that experience. Involve everyone because everyone ultimately plays a part.

Engagement = Commitment

The more engaged your people are in delivering the very best experiences to your customers the greater their commitment to the on-going development of that experience. Total commitment is vital to your success.

Commitment = Loyalty

A committed team creates customer loyalty. Real customer loyalty is about building strong relationships. Trying to do it with gimmicks doesn’t work. From loyalty comes word of mouth – the most powerful form of advertising.

Loyalty = Productivity

A loyal team does things more effectively and efficiently without compromising the quality of the customer experience. Capitalising on the creativity of your team is today’s most powerful competitive advantage.

Increased productivity = Growth, profitability and cost reductions.

Bell advocates we all benefit from increased productivity “The RIGHT people want to work with organisations that motivate and provide opportunities to be the very best they can be. The RIGHT people want to work for organisations that have the right focus. The RIGHT people want to enjoy what they do, because they want their customers to enjoy the experience.

“Emerging from this recession is a great time to take a serious look at your business, talk to your people, suppliers and customers and step back and take a good hard look from the ‘outside in’, remembering there is only one perspective which really matters, and that’s your customers.

>>>ends

For More Information Contact

Chris Bell

Customer Experiences Managing Director

A business committed to building successful businesses through the development of high quality customer experiences.

www.customerexperiences.co.nz

027 2792360

Early 2008 we started a programme evaluating the customer experience performance of organisations within the visitor industry.

We started this process by asking those close to the industry to suggest businesses they thought were delivering a consistently high quality experience, so we could start our evaluation programme on a positive note. One organisation that that was mentioned more often that any other, was a South Island tourist operator, Real Journeys. We knew very little of this company, so we started our evaluation programme with Real Journeys.

Back Ground

Real Journeys is a Te Anau based business that was founded back in the early fifties by Les & Olive Hutchins. A couple that were passionate about the Fiordland area, its conservation and the opportunity to share this with visitors to the area. Their passion lives on today through the leadership, culture and the team involved in Real Journeys.

I could write pages on our experiences during our evaluation of Real Journeys. Our trip across Lake Wakatipu on the 100 year old TSS Earnslaw to the magnificent Walter Peak station and the high country farm excursion that followed and our overnight trip onboard the Fiordland Navigator. I will be writing and talking about this organisation more as it’s the first company to join our exclusive 1% Club. It’s also the only company in the visitor industry that we have scored a perfect 10 in our evaluation process.

For more info visit www.realjourneys.co.nz/aboutus

This is as powerful as it gets…….
The team at Customer Experiences highly recommend Real Journeys and their trips. Please don’t go to this incredible part of the planet without experiencing it with the Real Journeys “super stars” they will not only look after you incredibly well, they’ll bring the area alive for you through their extensive knowledge and passion.

Customer Experiences is proud to welcome Computer Food to the exclusive 1% Club. Click here to find out about more 1% Club members.

 Answer – We will be able to give an accurate answer once we have completed our evaluation.

2)     Why don’t we just provide training for our front-line people

 Answer – We launched Customer Experiences after our research found that when customer service training is carried out without a proper Customer Experience foundation, the training itself has very little impact on changing employee behaviour and ultimately little impact on improving customer service.

 3)     How do we gain total commitment from our people to ensure the success of a Customer Experience Strategy?

  Answer – Commitment comes from engagement. The Customer Experience approach must involve everyone. The fact is that everyone plays a role in your Customer Experience, not just those people directly interacting with your customers.

 4)     Why is a Customer Experience strategy difficult for your competitors to copy?

Answer – Leadership, culture and your people are vital parts of your Customer Experience strategy and the great news is, they are all difficult to copy. Everything else you do is relevantly easy to copy.

 5)     Why is creativity such an important part of a Customer Experience strategy.

Answer – The key to on-going customer loyalty is the ability to continually “add value” to what you provide your customers other than reduced prices. This requires a steady flow of ideas from your people, the more creative the ideas the greater the impact on your Customer Experience

6)     How does a Customer Experience strategy help us to attract the right people.

.Answer – Great people want to work with organisations that are totally focused on their customers. They know that these businesses take time to build real relationships with their customers and it’s these relationships that lead to loyalty. The fact is that your working life is so much more enjoyable when your customers are smiling.

 7)     Why is a vision sooo important to a Customer Experience Strategy?

   Answer – A good vision keeps everyone focused, on track, inspired and motivated and that vital to a long-term strategic business approach.

8)     Why is word of mouth so much more powerful today? Answer – Word of mouth has always been powerful. Today its even more powerful due to the fact that customers have been let down so many times by organisations not delivering on their marketing promise.

9)     How does a Customer Experience strategy take away the focus on price?

 Answer – We do business today in a world we call “the world of sameness” the only way most businesses can come up with to get customers in the door is to reduce prices. The result is reduced margins and a struggling business. Customer focused businesses look for ways to add value, this is why it’s so important to understand your business from the customer’s perspective and foster creative thinking.

 10)                        Why does business have difficulty relating to customers    emotions

   Answer – I’m not sure, we are all human and emotions drive our lives. Thankfully understanding customer’s emotions is a major part of a Customer Experience strategy.

1) It costs more time, energy and money to gain a new customer—look after the ones you have

2) Your best customers are your competitor’s best prospects – look after them otherwise your competitors will.

3) They are your best source of referrals

4) You understand their expectations

5) They bring you steady revenue

6) They give you valuable feedback

7) They save you marketing dollars

They give you opportunities to strengthen the relationship

9) They trust you

10) They give you chances to sort out problems

11) They keep raising the bar

12) The sale cycle is sped up

13) They provide powerful testimonials

14) They allow you to be more selective

15) They are more profitable

16) Your people enjoy doing business with them

“Wow” that’s got to be worth the effort.

Contact Chris to find out how you can reap these rewards

027 2792360

The public sector should be our business role model, leading the way and implementing more effective process, increasing productivity and saving money whilst maintaining superior service at the front counter, a leading skill development provider

Chris Bell says.

Bells heads Customer Experience, a company focused on leadership coaching and he agrees with Treasury Secretary John Whitehead, ‘it isn’t just about lifting the game, it’s about changing it.’

“We cannot deal with a new environment – a completely new and challenging economic environment and the demands of 21st century consumers – with old tools, approaches and mindsets,” Whitehead said recently.

Bell, from discussions with many inside the public sector believes it is a culture where people are not prepared to stand up and take innovative, effective leadership roles.

“I am told there is no kudos in being a team leader within the public sector. People are too scared of being in the firing line. Nobody with any decent leadership skills is putting their hand up,so we are not necessarily getting the very best people running these departments and this is contributing to the culture and lack of performance.

Bell believes it is only this culture change which will help lift New Zealand higher up the OECD productivity ranks. “We agree that the game must change. So called experts have been going on about our productivity performance for ever and nothing has changed. What we are advocating is simple, different and fundamental. Nothing will change unless you get leadership and culture right.

“Our twist on this is that instead of trying to get the public service to look at the private sector (as suggested by Whitehead) why not put down the challenge to the public sector that they could be the ones that lead the way and become the example.

For the private sector it’s about making a greater return on hours worked and money paid, it’s about growth and productivity and working smarter. For the public sector it’s about increased efficiency and less waste resulting in cost savings without affecting the service. It’s also about having the right people in the right places, he adds.

Better performance requires innovation, it requires a culture where people feel empowered and valued. “Once a leader has a culture of involvement in place, a number of key things happen inside the team that benefit the organisation and play a major role in increasing productivity.

“As New Zealanders we expect good service, so taking the customers’ perspective is critical in providing the right public sector services.

“There is no quick fix when it comes to delivering great customer experiences. Both the private and public sectors traditionally look for the quick fix but you can’t change anything quickly. You have to focus on the leadership, the culture, the systems and processes.

In the past many dollars have been spent on leadership training and productivity has not changed. What ever we are doing right now is not working. “It’s time to stop talking about it and create change. We must take this opportunity to build a leaner more productive public service.

“It is our firm believe that if both the private and public sectors want to make significant productivity gains, targeting leadership and organisational culture need to be at the top of the list.” Bell believes the Customer Experience philosophy would be very effective in the public sector.

>>> ENDS>>>

Chris Bell is available for further comment

027 2792360

Late last year I was lucky enough to visit Walter Peak Station at the head of Lake Wakatipu and join about thirty other tourists on the farm excursion.

We arrived at Walter Peak on board the 100 year old steam boat TSS Earnslaw and on disembarking were directed over to a gentleman looking every bit the South Island high country farmer with his well worn walking stick and two beautiful farm dogs. The performance that was to follow made me proud to be a Kiwi. The reason for that pride was a guy named Duncan.

In my work I get to visit many businesses across many industries around New Zealand and one of the areas that disappoints me is the number of people that are just turning up to work to do a job only because they need a pay cheque at the end of the week.

This situation is one of the main reasons we rank so low in the OECD productivity list and the key reason you and I rate very few of the experiences we have as a customer as great.

So when I do come across someone that is really passionate about what they do, I get excited and that morning at Walter Peak station with Duncan, our farm excursion guide, was one of those times.

Not only was Duncan clearly excited by the opportunity to share his passion with us that morning, he had all of us just as excited 2 minutes after he introduced himself and that excitement carried on for the next three hours.

After much difficulty, towards the end of show, I got 2 minutes with Duncan alone and asked him how long he had been doing these tours, Duncan in true Duncan style came straight back at me with “How long do you think?” I said based on his performance, about 10 years, Duncan smiled and said more like 10 months! He then moved in closer and putting is hand to the side of his mouth said “And you know what, I still can’t believe they pay me to do it”

Duncan can’t wait for the next boat load of visitors to arrive at Walter Peak Station and yet another opportunity along with his dogs to share this amazing place and high country farming in this unique part of the world.

As we steamed away from Walter Peak, I couldn’t help thinking as we all waved to Duncan standing on the wharf, what New Zealand business would be like if we had more Duncan’s.

The reason given is that many of their customers want to do business face to face.

I believe many of us would like to have more face to face contact with organisations we do business with. The main driver away from face to face contact has been to reduce costs.

In many cases the customer has not missed face to face contact with businesses especially as the face to face contact was not that memorable.

Business is starting to realise in a highly competitive market where its becoming much easier to change from one business to another, just how difficult it is to build real and lasting relationships with customers without that important face to face contact and just how powerful that loyalty can be for a business.

I would encourage Tower to ensure that when customers visit their reopened branches, the experience will live up to and if they are really smart, exceed customers expectations otherwise it will be a very costly exercise.