Companies have been paying lip service to the idea of customer engagement for years. However, in this new era of the empowered customer, fast-tracked by the emergence of cloud, social and mobile technologies, companies recognise it’s now time to “walk the talk”. Making this shift means shaking up the status quo and creating a culture of customer obsession—a whole-of-company commitment to knowing what customers want, before they know they want it. Employee engagement is fundamental to this shift, to nurture ideas for innovation that drive customer engagement. In turn, leaders must learn to embrace a little chaos and to distil those ideas that maximise differentiation and competitive advantage.

 

Cultivating innovation

Information is the foundation of innovation. A free flow of information mobilises every department and touch point to better understand customer needs and cultivate innovation. That’s why it must be a top priority for companies to unify disparate information sources to enable their employees to collaborate in real-time and to easily access the knowledge they need to engage customers. Technology upgrades alone are not the answer. Instead, companies must completely recast all of their business processes and technologies through the lens of customer obsession. Veolia Environmental Services is an example of a local company that has done just that. Taking advantage of Bluewolf’s Maturity Assessment & Plan service, Veolia has undertaken a holistic evaluation of its operations to benchmark employee and customer engagement and identify opportunities for aligning processes and technologies more closely with the company’s core business objectives.

 

A new KPI model

To embed customer obsession for the long-term, companies should establish customer engagement benchmarks and track those key performance indicators (KPIs) as closely as traditional productivity and efficiency metrics on an ongoing basis. To effectively track customer engagement, organisations need to capture and analyse four types of metrics: customer experience (e.g., customer satisfaction surveys, call resolution rates, etc.); customer interaction (e.g., website visits, email click-through rates, etc.); customer advocacy (e.g., Net Promoter Score, social media mentions, etc.); and customer outcomes (e.g., closed/won deals, repeat business, etc.).

 

To learn more about this new customer engagement KPI model and how to translate the metrics into actionable insights, talk to Bluewolf today.

 

To read real-world examples of customer obsession, download The Essential Guide to Customer Obsession.