Five proven results for increasing your customer asset

Customer asset measurement is about knowing what customers actually did to impact business growth versus what they say they might do via survey results.

The role of the Chief Customer Officer is not to build and ‘pitch’ to the leadership team what these metrics are. It’s to bring them together to establish their version of customer asset metrics and customer growth behaviors that they will stand behind as a united leadership team. And it’s to work to build the growth engine to provide critical metrics and timely information to drive business decisions.

Leadership must know and care about the shifting behavior within your customer base, which indicates if their bond with you is growing or shrinking. And importantly, it’s about engaging your leadership team in caring about the “WHY?” Why did customers stay or leave, buy more or less, actively use your products or services more or less?

Here’ s how you knit together the five competencies, customized to your organization, to tell the story of your customers’ lives.

Competency 1: Honor and Manage Your Customer Assets

The story begins with the outcome of the experience, which is how your customer asset grew or diminished.

“As a result of the experience we delivered to customers this past month, what is the outcome of the growth or loss of the customer asset we earned?

Here is the volume and value of incoming customers, and the volume and value of lost customers, and other patterns of customer behavior that show more engagement or a diminishment of the relationship.”

Competency 2: Align Around Experience

Create your customer journey framework map for leadership accountability and one-company collaboration. This framework aligns to the stages of the customer journey not down the silos.

“Now let’s traverse across the customer journey so we can understand where we impacted growth or loss of the customer asset. In each stage of the customer journey, where did we earn or lose the right to customer growth? Did we deliver at the priority moments along the journey?”

Competency 3: Build a Customer Listening Path

Establish your one-company approach for listening and collecting customer feedback so you can tell the story of your customers’ lives and engage the organization in the customer experience.

“Stage by stage of the customer journey, we will now experience what our customer has experienced in real time this past month.

In stage one, here are the issues emerging from the ‘unaided’ or voluntary feedback customers gave us as they were interacting with us through our call centers, website, stores, etc.

In stage two…let’s bring up the screen that customer complaints are trending about. Here is a call center call with a customer speaking that issue. In stage three, here is the contract related to the trending issues of customer confusion…” Now here are the survey results that validate the real time issues we are seeing as trends.

Competency 4: Proactive Experience Reliability and Innovation

Create experience reliability that’s supported by operational metrics and provides a “Revenue Erosion Early Warning System.” Leaders care about how the company is performing in the processes that impact moments in your customer’s journey with you. These moments are the intersection points which impact a customer’s decision to stay, leave, buy more and recommend you to others.

“As customers are reaching out to get information about our products as they do their research, the three operational metrics most critical to the customer experience are not meeting our minimum acceptable performance standard. It’s no wonder complaints are spiking.   Here is where we are interrupting customers’ ability to get value from our experience.

We also see in stage three that we are below our standard performance for the cycle of getting a proposal to the customer. Before this turns into an issue for our clients, let’s get a team on this situation.”

Competency 5: One-Company Leadership, Accountability, Culture

Embed the competencies into the work of the business and create a customer room that enables people to act with accountability and engages leadership.

Customers walking into our bank are encountering three legacy rules, which are causing the majority of the complaints and causing more than fifty percent of transactions to require a manager’s involvement. We need to remove these inhibiting rules and let our employees and customers know.”
We’ve stepped through our customers’ experience with us as part of annual planning, and we now have the top five company wide priorities for next year to focus on to earn greater growth of our customer asset.”

Four Tips for Customer Experience Success

1. Understand the five competencies, but stair step actions.

You will not be able to embed them as competencies if you try to take on too much too fast.

2. Break the five competencies down into crawl-walk-run action steps.

For example, in Competency One, Honoring and Managing Customers as Assets, don’t wait until you have all the data perfectly aligned and automated until you roll this out. Start with the data you have now, even if it means manually building spreadsheets.

3. Improve priority experiences while building out the five competencies.

Unite leaders on the identification of the priority touch points. Pick customer experiences to learn how to work as one-company to solve and improve them.

4. Learn and prove before expanding.

I had a client who wanted to embed the five competencies in three countries simultaneously. My recommendation was to show how they worked in one country, working out the kinks and proving how it worked with relevant examples to their business. There was pressure to go broad and go fast. You can predict how that ended.

Conclusion

The power of the five competencies is how they connect to drive clarity for the customer experience.

• The five competencies establish an engine for driving customer growth.
• The Chief Customer Officer facilitates the construct of the engine, engaging leaders and employees throughout the company.
• The engine enables one-company customer growth behavior and actions.
• Without this united engine, activities go back to being ruled by squeaky wheel issues, executive visit one-off action items and silo-by-silo priorities.