By M. Isi Eromosele

In today’s highly competitive global market environment, a company needs a clear and sustainable competitive advantage. An organization can gain strategic differentiation by focusing on the single most important of business success – the customers. A business can ensure its success by managing the customer relationship and providing excellent customer care.

Several critical success factors have a crucial impact on a company’s ability to provide great customer service. These include strategic value of customer care, an enterprise approach to customer relationship management, operational innovation, technological advancements and customer expectations.

Critical Success Factors In Customer Experience

Success is based on viewing the customer experience horizontally across the entire organization, identifying at the functional level how each activity across the organization impacts the success of providing excellent customer experience to the customer.

An organization must understand its customers, anticipate their needs and expectations and ensure that all services, processes and organizational structures support its ability to deliver the high quality customer services their customers expect.

Strategy

An organization must articulate the strategic importance of customer experience. In developing its customer care program, strategic drivers that will influence the resulting vision and scope needs to be thoroughly examined. Key business strategy objectives should include:

• Increase customer responsiveness and satisfaction
• Create customer loyalty and increase retention
• Lower marketing and account acquisition costs
• Enhance corporate image and competitive advantage

In striving for the above goals, the customer perspective should be integrated into the vision with focus on the following key areas:

Speed of Service – ensuring that when a customer contacts the organization, the inquiry or problem is handled timely, efficiently and on first contact. There should be responsiveness to all contact channel methods, utilizing an efficient workflow with minimal handoffs. The company should provide an intuitive customer self-help system with immediate access to information and people. There should be minimal wait times for calls and super fast response to e-mail and other contact methods.

Quality and Accuracy of Service – personalized service based on customer profiles and customer segmentation rules. This could include knowledgeable personnel performing value-added activities in support of the customer; accurate transaction processing and validation through knowledge-based infrastructure; knowledge of the customers, their activity histories and preferences; tailoring services based on market/service segmentation and providing service based on the needs of the customer.

Ease of Service – enabling customers to make their choice of media option for doing business and creating cross-channel customer service. This would include providing integrated access points (channels) for customer service (phone, e-mal, fax and Internet), allowing anytime customer service, consistent up-to-date information and service across all information channels and flow-through of service as customers cross  communication channels for a given inquiry or request.

Range of Service – flexible business processes that respond to customer demands and range of requests. This could include service based on customer segmentation; providing the perception of dedicated support and 24 hours a day, 7 days a week customer service availability.

The underlying goal of all business investments is to ensure that they benefit both the organization’s customers and achieve the strategic goals of the firm. Organizations should view customer service as a corporate responsibility. Ownership belongs to all employees and success is realized within a team-based and empowered organizational structure that supports employees in meeting customer needs.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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