As technology and social media evolves so does the customer’s expectations. As customers have the luxury of finding a variety of quality products with simply a mouse click, competing companies are required to go beyond quality and price, creating an experience based in the customer’s reality.
To successfully create an experience for your external customers you must examine your internal team’s current capabilities and practices.
Ideally, building a strong team begins at the hiring process, screening candidates to ensure they meet not only the technical aspects but that they possess the soft skills required to deliver an exceptional experience. Although new hire screening is key to building a solid team you must understand what is happening now through an evaluation of your existing team. Taking a hard look at your team and determining how they interact with one another will tell if your company has the ability to deliver an exceptional experience.
If your internal team works in silos, struggles to show respect for one another or fails to understand that caring for one another is fundamentally caring for your external customers – then your team most likely struggles to provide a consistent exceptional experience to your external customers. Negative internal relationships severely impact how well you perform and determines how your external customers are treated.
To better understand your team’s success see the experience through the only eyes that matter your customers by simply asking for their opinions. Gain an understanding of your business through a year-over-year comparison of your current customer base determining decreases or loss. Develop a task force responsible for contacting those customers, using the data to implement change where needed. New customers are an opportunity for your team and company to stand out amongst your competitors. Develop a program which identifies new customer life cycles, preferred channels of communications and a method to successfully “hand-off” a customer from one department to another. Implement a process which periodically contacts new customers obtaining their perspective of the relationship. Share the data from lost business and new customer perspectives with ALL members of your internal team to heighten awareness and elicit growth amongst the team.
The internal transformation will take time, a tremendous effort and commitment by everyone in the organization. However, at the end of the day, hiring the right people and successfully transforming your team moves you one step closer to the coveted brand loyalty sought by every organization.
