A Customer-Focused Culture

So you want to instill a customer-focused culture throughout your organization? First thing you should know is there are a few different phases of doing this and honestly it is not an overnight project. In fact it could take years to accomplish this depending on your company's commitment level and the types of employees you have been hiring. The first phase is to communicate the company goal of company focus throughout your company. At my present employer, customer focus was one of our top three objectives for 2008 and we had a communication plan in place ready for January 1st. And months before this our customer care tea had been meeting and evaluating which projects we wanted to do in Q1 2008. Based on our experience, here are some things you can do at your company to ensure a truly customer-focused culture:
1. Support at the Senior Levels - Ensure that this is an initiative that starts from the top and rolls down. If your CEO and executive management team don't support this, then it will be really difficult to role out any changes to support this initiative. A company with a CEO that personally exemplifies strong customer commitments and rewards those in the company who also do this, will notice the rest of the employees will begin to do this as well
2. Appoint a senior marketing officer to drive this initiative. Make someone responsible to drive this and then make sure to give them resources, both in headcount and budget to accomplish this goal.
3. Get outside help if you need it. There are consulting firms and survey companies who specialize in this type of work.
4. Review your company's employee reward system Are you rewarding employees for helping to drive customer-focused culture? If not, think about doing this. Reward customer's who support your company's initiative and go the extra mile to help customers.
5. Consider an in-house training program - This is a great opportunity to provide a consistent message and training to your employees who work with customers. It's not just about customer service, it's about customer delight, it's about caring for your customers so they want to buy from you again, and again, and again. As part of this program, you can train them on one consistent way to answer the phone, how to handle escalations, how to follow-up on concerns etc. Truly teach them how to be customer-focused, don't just tell them.
6. Hiring the Right People - I mentioned this earlier, but honestly if you want a customer-focused culture, you need to hire the right people. I was a manager in call centers for eight years and I learned a ton about people and what makes them tick. I learned a lot about who makes good employees. For example, you need to hire team-players, individuals who are passionate about customer delight, employees that are willing to go above and beyond to ensure your customers are taken care of. I am just realizing that I could devote a whole blog article to this topic, so I'll stop for now. I also suggest this could be the most important of all steps because if you hire the right people, anything is possible!
7. Ask, Listen and Respond - Survey your customers, analyze the results and then follow-up on every single concern. As someone who has worked with surveys for many years, I have found the best comments to be the open-ended comments. On every survey, I will ask "What suggestions or feedback do you have to help us serve you better?" The answers are a great insight into what your customers are thinking and how you can help them be happier.

Few more articles on this topic for those of you who want to learn more:
Sustaining a Customer-Focused Culture
Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, provides his 10 tips for building a customer service focused culture.

Customer Touchpoints

One important exercise to do in your company is identify customer touchpoints. A customer touchpoint is defined as the communication and interactions your customers experience during their relationship lifecycle with your company. Customer touchpoints can include: talking to someone at your company, going on your Web site and going in to a store or office. How I look at it is that every customer touchpoint is an opportunity for you to strengthen your relationship with your customer.

Last fall, we did an exercise at our company where a team of us mapped out all the customer touchpoints we could think of and we came up with about 70 touchpoints! I don't think any of us had an idea how many touchpoints there are and therefore how many opportunities we have to build the relationship with customers. It was an incredible experience and it helped us figure out which ones we wanted to work on first in 2008.

Here's some good articles on customer touchpoints, if you want to learn more about this topic
"Defining Customer Touchpoints"
The 6 Most Overlooked Customer Touch Points
Customer Touch-Points in Strategic Marketing

Go through an exercise with your company and representatives from other departments. I think you'll be surprised how many touchpoints your company actually has!

A Company's Commitment to Customers

Over the years, I have spent a lot of time thinking about how companies can truly show they are committed to customers. As we all know, a lot of companies say their customers are #1 but do they back that up with the money, resources and empowerment to make that happen?

At the company I work at now in high-tech software, we have a Customer Care Team which includes representatives from various departments. But this is only a part-time responsibility which we do in addition to our day job.

I think companies should assign a person or team to own this responsibility which would report right to the CEO. This person/team would have many responsibilities including customer surveys, customer welcome programs and other initiatives that ensure that customers are TRULY taken care of. Lately I have noticed that there are more companies who have departments like "Customer Experience", "Customer Advocacy" and NetApp even had a job opening recently for "Customer Listening Program Manager". That is exciting to watch and I predict that over the next 10 years we will see a lot more companies doing this. Stay tuned!

Netsuite has a Chief Customer officer and I found some others that have similar type jobs at CyberSports and Kana Software. I'm sure there are others but those are a some I've seen recently.

Here are some samples of companies who have launched such programs and some good articles on the topic:
- Pegasystems
- Vantos hires Chief Customer Officer
- Chief customer officers need patience, energy
- Forrestor Research titled "The Customer Experience Journey"

Who Are Your Customers?

Who are your customers? A customer is someone who buys or uses your products. Before you can sell or market to them effectively you need to understand them. Do you know who your customers are? Do you know how old they are, what problems they are facing etc. There are different types of surveys demographic, psychographic, new customer and ongoing surveys.

Here are some things I have asked in previous customer profile surveys to help me get to know them better. Here is the list:

• Age*
• Gender
• Income*
• Job Title
• Education
• Company size
• Dept/Company Budget*
• Industry
• Favorite job-related magazine
• Favorite job-related websites
• Biggest challenges
• Preference to receive email
• Biggest challenges

* Please note that some of these are sensitive but I don't make those questions required and I tell them in email invite and survey welcome they should only complete what feels right.

I will talk more about customer surveys in later blogs but one good thing to know is that there are a ton of resources to help you survey your customers. You can go all out and get a survey company like NFO who I have used in the past and I was very pleased with or do your surveys yourself with some amazing tools out there. I have used Zoomerang for years and I have been very pleased with it. It's also affordable for smaller companies and has great reporting abilities.

Great resources for customer surveying include:
- Zoomerang Survey Tool
- Quantitative marketing research
- Demographics and Psychographics customer research
- Psychographic segmentation: how to increase communication ROI by examining values, beliefs...

Why Customers, Why Now?

It's been almost 30 years since I worked with my first customer. I lived in Fremont, Utah and sold night crawlers one summer and learned more about customers and marketing than in probably most jobs. I was 11 at the time and wanted to earn some money for school clothes. Fremont just happens to be located by a reservoir where many people go fishing in the summer. As many of you know, one of the first rules of business is location, location and location. Since I already had place figured out next I worked on product, pricing and promotion to make my business successful.

But early on I discovered it wasn't just about sales and marketing, a business's success depended on customers. I made many friends that summer that came back time and time again because I built relationships with them. In fact, I think there were some that didn't even need worms for fishing, but wanted to check in to see how I was doing!

Since that time, I have done some exciting projects ran a very successful business selling books online where I made over $100k in two years working part-time, worked in call centers for 12 years as a front-line employee and as a manager, and now worked in sales and marketing for the past 8 years for various high-tech companies. I am currently working as a Customer Programs Manager for a hardware/software company.

And after all these years, I still believe that customers are the most important part of every company! In this blog, I plan to address various parts about how to appreciate, understand and communicate to your customers. Some of my upcoming topics will include:
- Customer touch points
- Customer satisfaction surveys (new and ongoing)
- Customer welcome programs
- Customer communication including newsletters, direct mail etc
- Customer advocacy departments
- Customer reference program
- Customer advisory boards

I also plan to include some research and links to my favorite blogs, books and company sites. Stay tuned for more blogs from a person who is very passionate about customers and is lucky enough to do this for her job.