How to Keep Your Customer Experience Efforts on Track

There's a good chance your company has responded to the recession with an increased commitment to providing an exceptional customer experience. Such efforts might address systemic issues like "poorly designed interactions, broken processes, outdated business rules, insufficient customer insight and cultures that are far from customer-centric," notes Bruce Temkin in a post at the Retail Customer Experience blog. And while some companies will succeed in this process in 2010, Temkin says, others may falter.

So he offers a few tips for keeping your team's customer-experience efforts on track. Among them:

Back up your stated goals with action. "[E]xecutives should either get actively involved in customer experience transformation or drop it from their agendas," he argues. His suggestion for the C-suite: "Develop a customer-experience dashboard and manage the results with the same energy that you manage financial results."

Don't give social-media insights more credit than they deserve. You can certainly learn about your customers—and address immediate concerns—with Twitter and Facebook, but that won't give you the entire story, he notes. "Other channels—like comments on surveys and calls into the call center—can often provide even richer insight."

View customer service as a strategic asset. Temkin reports that his research has found that customers actually want good customer service more than they want low prices. "But companies often treat customer service as an unwanted stepchild," he adds.

Don't take employee buy-in for granted. Your staff might embrace a change initiative without resistance, but you can't assume that will be the case, Temkin cautions. Make every staff member a part of the planning process, he advises.