We are living in an era of rapid change- with newer technologies emerging continuously & disrupting business models, driving change & innovation in organisations.
Across sectors - most organisations are going digital & working hard to become tech driven or at least a tech enabled company.
The digital tsunami is so strong that an “app“is seen as the ticket to success by every organisation?
Embracing new technology is important - but is just technology enough?
If seen from the end customer stand point, a digital organisation makes access easy and going digital is critically important today - given that smart phone population, is more than the human population.
While “apps” and digital technology help, it does not guarantee a good customer experience, as it’s often just the beginning of customer journey.
actual delivery & customer experience(CX) across various touch points and stages of customer life cycle needs to be mapped & made frictionless and customer experience measured at various customer moments, to ensure its smooth consistently – all easier said than done.
ensuring superior customer experience consistently, requires tremendous operating rigor in integrating org structure, operations, people, processes and technology with product fulfillment & service channels, into a well-oiled smooth operation without siloes, which not just delivers a good customer experience consistently, but simultaneously welcomes, solicits customer feedback/complaints, and leverages the same to continuously drive product, process improvements & innovation.
organisations including our newly minted digital avatars, need to not just measure customer satisfaction and solicit feedback as a strategic imperative, but recognise the same to be as important as sales or bottom line performance. While sales/profits indicate, what has already been done in the last year/quarter (i.e. is a lag indicator), customer satisfaction measures & scores can be an important lead indicator of future (i.e. if customers are satisfied – there is high probability that sales will be good in future. Below par satisfaction measures if tapped on a real time basis, can also be an opportunity for management to intervene, before things get worse and sales deteriorate).
Therefore, in the performance dashboard of the organisation – customer satisfaction needs to be recognized as the #1 effectiveness measure – as all other measures are lag indicators.
We are seeing enough evidence today of so many tech/app driven start-ups starting with a bang- thanks to a great idea, entrepreneurial drive, strong funding, etc - but not able to sustain or scale up, owing to such gaps. Most use digital technology and cutting edge online marketing techniques, tracking the number of eye balls/prospects who are browsing their sites or buying - but many do not objectively measure customer satisfaction, nor seriously analyse/leveraging feedback to improve. Some operations start declining, bleed profusely for protracted periods, lay off staff in panic and at times exit operations/businesses - and then we hear about another rising star who fell by the wayside.
I’m often amazed to see how few organisations actually do customer journey mapping and/or objectively measure customer satisfaction(CX)? And while they do bench mark themselves (with peers), on traditional metrics like revenues, sales & market share, profitability, shouldn’t they first map the customer journeys’ & measure, benchmark & ensure that customer / user satisfaction is delivered?
thoughts/views ?