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Commercial awareness is a broad, yet critical skillset, with the customer experience at its heart
In
our last article, we discovered that engineers of the future will need to be multi-faceted; understanding the engineering imperative whilst fully embracing and helping manage their customers and the internal commercial proposition. Many of the engineers we speak to fail to see this at first, assuming that ‘customer service’ is something only client-facing operators engage in. They forget that their projects, and ultimately every decision they make will eventually impact the customer and ultimately the bottom line.
Knowing, then keeping your customer front of mind gives meaning to work, ensures that you satisfy a validated consumer need and keeps businesses profitable and on track
“Customer experience encompasses the quality of customer care (obviously), advertising, packaging, product and service features, ease of use and reliability. Yet few of those responsible give sustained thought to how their separate decisions shape customer experience (and the impact of these decisions in today’s highly competitive global market).
This problem has been documented in Bain & Company’s recent survey of 362 companies customers. Only 8% of them described their experience as “superior,” yet 80% of the companies surveyed believe that the experience they have been providing is indeed superior”, says Harvard Business Review, echoed by the 2019 PEGA research carried out in their global customer service insights paper:
The gaps here highlight that businesses in general are overconfident about the service they provide. The further from the customer, the more this confidence increases.
Customer retention and engagement essentially determine whether a company lives or dies.
Enter the corridor!
The ‘customer corridor’ sets out the various touch points your customer experiences, across their lifetime and through various time-frames, delivering a strategic approach to understanding customer expectations and optimising experience.
Benefits of outlining the customer corridor:
• Reduced costs and increased growth, sometimes up to 21% year on year
• Increased sales and a 54% greater return on marketing investment
• Greater customer and employee satisfaction and a 24% increase in positive social media comments (Aberdeen Group Research).
Meeting expectations and looking for gaps
Customers are more discerning than ever. They instinctively compare each new experience, positive or otherwise, to previous ones and judge it accordingly.
Actionable Tips
- Access your free customer journey templates and fill them in!
- Write down 3 of your best and worst customer experiences. Are you or is your organisation making any of the same mistakes? How could you improve? Create action points around these.
- Implement customer satisfaction surveys, conduct focus groups, analyse support tickets and measure experience with verbal feedback and a Net Promoter Score® or NPS.
- Map out questions for each stage of your customer journey or corridor. This helps ignite creative thinking and lateral problem solving. It can also help you to spot gaps in your processes, products or services.
Recommended reading
Visit the IMechE library for a range of helpful, leading-edge business books and journals, included in your membership. They currently have an excellent selection of books on these topics.
- Read the Netflix tips and the full story. It’s inspiring and Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings still takes customer calls — we can learn a lot from his approach.
- The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs by Bill Price. A ground-breaking approach to customer service.
Learn how you can improve your business and commercial skills and develop a higher degree of customer service awareness. Our courses are available face to face and virtually, by following the links.
Combine customer service excellence with CMI level 3 in principles of management and leadership – Did you know that if you’re a professionally registered engineer (CEngF, IEng or EngTech), you will only need to complete 50% of the required points for each CMI qualification.
To find out more about how you can improve your business and commercial skills, visit: imeche.org/training/business-and-commercial.