Interested to work on customer experience improvements through customer insights?

Topic of interest

This past week I’ve been thinking about what might be a good topic to talk about and further investigate that is related to Customer Insights; and what I’ve found is that, due to my past experiences working on developing a new Customer Experience program for telecommunication companies, I am very interested to see how we can use customer insights to help develop stronger relationships with customers through improving the overall customer experience.

When I was working on the Customer Experience project, everything was about streamlining communications with customers, standardizing methods of attention and information across channels, and basically providing the same experience to our customers no matter through which channel they/we contacted us/them. There were several studies we used to move the company operations (related to customer experience) toward best practices, but we never thought of what the customer really wants. In my opinion it would have proven extremely difficult to ask them, but we never even care about it; we were only thinking about what the best telecommunications companies in the world were doing, but we forgot to take into account that not every customer is the same. Not even with globalization we can have two companies doing the same things in separate parts of the world and have the same success rate.

Now that some time has passed, I keep wondering what best-in-class practices wouldn’t have made the cut if we asked the customers. Of course, having a couple new products in the company (that customers never even heard about before our program) gave us more “space” to introduce best-in-class customer experience practices. But, what if we are in a company that already has a best-in-class customer experience? Can we improve it without considering the customer? My guess is that we can’t, thus, how can we use information about our customers to develop a better customer experience?

In order to find what others are thinking out there, I took a quick look and found that Accenture’s CRM-Customer Insights practice has a couple of articles about it. In their view, driving sustainable revenue and bottom-line growth requires managing the customer agenda like never before (“Customer Insight: Mastering the Customer Agenda”, Accenture CRM, 2004). They mention that, in order to help companies better understand their customers, a company has to develop more targeted campaigns efficiently and effectively at the same time they work on customer loyalty and retention. Then, the overall focus moves into creating a unique customer experience that differentiates them from competitors, generates a higher customer lifetime value and improves the overall return on customer investment. To do so, it is vital to excel at developing, sustaining and growing customer relationships; and, it’s not enough to focus only on your capabilities or services, you also have to find what their (customer) agenda is. According to Accenture’s approach, technology (data management), analytics and marketing are all part of earning customer insights and using them for a greater customer experience.

In another Accenture’s article (“Find and Keep the customers you want: The Customer Insight Mandate”, by Alton L. Adams, Partner of Accenture’s Customer Insight practice, 2005) the author mentions that customer insights can “dramatically improve both the quality of sales and marketing campaigns, as well as customer loyalty and lifetime value” but, even when companies have invested tons of cash in CRM technologies, the use of diverse technologies alone cannot build a truly valuable relation with customers. The lack of capability by CRM technologies/software to build customer relations can be overcome by the use of a unique and engaging customer experience; an experience that increases customer satisfaction also keeps a high brand loyalty and lowers the churn possibilities. This takes us back to all the hype my project had about streamlining communications, integrating attention channels and composing a single view of customers’ interactions; but clearly, companies can do a much better job if they understand what motivates their customers’ interactions instead of only focusing on streamlining such interactions.

With a single and complete view of the customer (and with an in-depth analysis) a company can use CRM tools to gain customer insights and then apply them through the company’s customer experience to build stronger customer relationships. But actually doing it is far from easy; I think it will require a sort of “framework” or guide to implement the tools, capabilities, technologies and even the culture that are required to achieve a deep understanding of any company’s customers and use it to make a “connection” with them.

In the future, I plan to work on finding if the framework that will help companies reach such “connection” with their customers already exists. And if it turns out not to exist, maybe I can put together a rough idea to build such framework. Maybe it’s an aggressive and ambitious goal, but as Henry Ford said once “One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn’t do”.