Few companies will argue against the idea that the customer experience is paramount in this day and age. What companies will argue about is just how they can be customer centric in a way that makes sense on both a customer service level and a business level. There is an argument over just how a company can bridge the gap between desirability and capability in order to do so in a sustainable way.
The NAB’s head of customer experience design, Louise Long, recently talked at the Forrester (News - Alert) Summit for Marketing and Strategy Professionals in Sydney. During her presentation there, Long talked about how her bank is making customer satisfaction ratings that are higher than ever before a reality through her team’s efforts.
Long believes that the real tipping point for a company, when it wants to move from wanting to be customer-centric to actually being customer-centric is when it moves from intent to ability to achieve. “The evolution is the intent for everyone to be customer centric, to knowing what that means - that is the leap for organizations,” she told the website CMO. “Nobody goes to work to do a bad job, and no one goes to work saying they don’t care about the customer.
Long said her focus has been and will continue to be making sure the people she works with and the people that work for her have the ability to understand what is expected of them when it comes to the customer service experience.
Long says she has made a kind of model, built off real customer personas as a starting point for her team. She then plots the journey the customer and the company might take. Long also uses service blueprinting, which looks at what the customer is able to witness as well as what is going on in the back-end. By doing this, Long says she can better see how products are going to solve customer problems.