As a business owner or manager, you know that your blood and sweat have gone into designing and building that perfect product or service. Keeping your business alive and running has been challenging and ever-demanding. Acquiring new customers has been expensive and so time-consuming that It becomes even more critical to maintain hawk-eyed attention to existing customers. It is so crucial to converting our buyers into loyal brand advocates.

So here are five proven strategies you should NOT do to keep your customers loyal to you and also be your flagbearers and refer you:

1.    Be COMPLACENT in customer service

A brand could just crash if the customers are not feeling valued and appreciated. Providing the consumer with just the product or service and not going above and beyond their expectations is an easy recipe for losing their trust and association with the brand.

As a business owner, what you can’t afford is to be complacent in issue handling, responding to inquiries, being empathetic, and offering personalized treatment.

2.    NEGLECT your loyal customers

Every relationship needs acknowledgment or appreciation for it to work. Not rewarding your customers, who are appreciative of your offerings and go the extra mile to refer you further, is a subtle way of pushing them away. Little encouragement goes a long way in making their return to your business and referring to their friends and families.

Don’t let your proactive, engaged customers’ effort go neglected, and find creative ways to thank them for their advocacy. Some of the most common ways are rewarding them with exclusive discounts, referral bonuses, or special perks.

3. DON’T SEEK just TELL your customer

Being reactive to your customer, defending your mistakes, always telling how your product or service is the best in the market, and not giving appropriate time and space to let your customer talk or tell their side of the story is undoubtedly the easiest way possible to make them feel unwanted and experience negative emotions in their interactions with your brand.

Customer centricity is a culture every business needs to adopt! All it takes is to make it easy and relevant for your customers to share their thoughts, experiences, and opinions on your brand. Use the insights from their inputs to make improvements in your business and loop it back with them to ascertain they are heard and that they matter!

4. NO HUMAN connection

The biggest myth in customer handling is to treat them like Gods or kings. This is a simple way to distance them and dehumanize your relationship. It becomes more of doing what they demand and being a yes man rather than being transparent and authentic in your communications.

When you connect with your target audience emotionally, at a deeper level, you create an environment of open communication and understand their emotional needs, expectations, or behaviors. Don’t shy away from sharing your company story, values, and culture and reflecting on your human side. 

4. Ghost your customers

Only focusing on the primary offering and making it look good enough at the surface to attract a buyer without any underlying work on post-sales engagement is a great beginning to a quick end of any enterprise. Not keeping in touch with your customers and missing out on opportunities to engage is only going to make it so easy for customers to forget the brand and in some cases make them share their frustrations or problems in public domains. This could be so detrimental to business growth and calls for efforts on rebranding.

It is so easy to stay top of mind with your customers by connecting with them on social media, emails, and calls and not ghosting.  Omni channel presence and offering them relevant content, promotions, or updates are key to making them engage with your brand effortlessly and keep coming back to you for more.

Building strong relationships with your customers is key to converting them into your advocates and having them spread the word about your business. Remember, it's not just about selling products or services – it's about creating meaningful experiences.

5 Guiding Principles of Innovative CX Management

Customer Experience is a relentless effort in pursuit of achieving customer loyalty. Considering the uniqueness in offerings, customer behavior, or culture within the organization, customer experience is also very distinctive to it. A successful customer experience program demands consistent efforts in identifying new solutions, being creative, having holistic views, subject matter expertise, and value creation.

Over the next few weeks, we will address different guiding principles that help drive innovation in customer experience management.

Solution Centric Mindset

Have you ever noticed when you desire or want something deeply, you end up seeing more of it around you? For e.g, if you want to buy a house, everywhere you look you find these sales banners, advertisements for exciting deals, and newspaper articles on tips to buy houses. Before you set your mind on buying a house you probably overlooked it. This is how mindset functions to direct us towards our true desires.

Now there are many definitions of the term Mindset. In generic terms, it means a set of beliefs that shape how you make sense of the world and yourself. It influences how you think, feel, and behave in any given situation.

When we set our wants clearly and more specifically, it helps define our sense of purpose which in turn opens door to our perceptions or visions. Basis these perceptions we take actions that lead to certain results in our effort.

What supports purpose is a strong belief in it, the focus, and optimism. In other words, pursuing your purpose with passion helps you accomplish it!

To be innovative in customer experience initiatives it is important to pursue with a solution-oriented mindset. This will inspire focus on ideas, insights, or thoughts that lead to varied ways of addressing and progressing out of a problem.

The leaders should work to create an environment that allows people to be keenly observant, curious enough to accelerate their learnings, and bold to experiment with new ideas.

Differential Thinking

In the famous words of Thomas Edison, “There is a better way to do things, find it!” To be innovative one needs to be constantly looking for newer, better, different ways of finding solutions. Our mind is like a kaleidoscope. With little turning and twisting, it throws back new approaches to address a particular task. 

Customer Experience is one domain that challenges you enough. The Cx fraternity has to spend a whole lot of time and effort convincing the ROI of the program that is either proposed or in progress. It is a fact that extreme pressure and stressful situations are never the breeding ground of ideas. 

A few easy disciplines come very handy in combating such situations and prepare us better to resolve tricky situations. Here are a few tips:

• No idea is a stupid or a bad idea. Encourage your teams and yourselves to share any and every thought that crosses your mind. Create forums or mediums to welcome such conversations.

• Have a laundry list of ideas, categorized by specific opportunity. Brainstorm on possibilities, risks, and applicability and summarise in the notes. 

• Do not fear the new or unknown but be open to exploring and taking calculated risks. Test run the ideas and conclude with informed decisions.

• When expanding on ideas, think of visual tools like diagrams, process maps, mind maps, etc to dig deeper and identify all possible paths of working through them

Mundane methods can be an answer to a problem at hand but it implies mediocrity.

To pursue excellence, one must be creative and constantly looking for better ways. 

Allow the ideas to flow freely, be spontaneous, and experience joy in serving your customers.

Being Mindful and Consistent

You would agree that creativity demands discipline and can be very exhausting. It is fair to admit that day-to-day distractions cause immense disruption in the creative thinking process. At the same time, isolating oneself completely from the world can also lead to a very one-sided view of the new idea. Especially, when it comes to solving business problems, the different solutions may need varied perspectives and hence either extreme is harmful to the innovative mindset.

Being mindful and consistent is an answer to striking the balance in this wide spectrum of environmental factors. Specifically, relating to CXM and the dynamics involved in the process, we must stay focused and ideation is more of a habit than an act.

Ikigai beautifully explains the art of being mindful and consistent and that is through the power of flow!  Our process of thinking through new ideas, working to build on those ideas, and executing them, should all be well integrated into our daily lives. It’s true that most of our ideas strike when we are in a relaxed state of mind say in the shower, or when we are half asleep, or listening to some great music, or just driving back home. Creativity is only healthy and effective if it’s organic and not a mere calendared activity.

Finding balance enough to work with clarity in a much ambiguous and complex program like CX management can be an uphill task. Here are a few tips to make it possible:

Don’t be too tight with measuring output vis a vis time involved. Creativity should be allowed a smooth flow of thoughts without an evil eye of time pressure. To stay in the flow, it is important to be staying with your idea at the moment and delving into it as deep as it demands.

-However, demanding the situation could be, take some time for relaxing or doing things that drive you away from pressure. In the flow state, one should be able to effortlessly navigate from intense work mode to a fine state of peace and calm. This helps you stay engaged and allows you to stay on the path of fresh ideas and thoughts consistently.

-Take pauses to comprehend your findings. Separate simple and concise thoughts from complex and intricate detailing. Creativity tends to trap in a timeless loop of thoughts so it is important to prepare a laundry list of what is workable and what is not. Step away from time to time and come back to it for a fresh perspective.

Simple ideas could lead to breakthroughs, let creativity be your default setting.

Collective Intelligence

"Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much." As wisely stated by Helen Keller sounds quite cliché when it comes to the ground realities of the business world and is often underestimated in its power. Believe it or not, this particular principle, collective intelligence works like a superfood for innovation.

The ask here is to create and build a high-performance team that is diverse and complements one another in skills to amplify the desired outcomes. Collaboration is not only about different individuals working cohesively together towards an idea but also how each individual fills the blind spots in the creative process. The understanding is that the group intelligence derived from teamwork results in ideas that are more evolved and successful.

Customer Experience Management demands mobilizing several ideas and insights efficiently within the enterprise across the board. This could mean a diverse set of people from different functions or roles have to adapt to the change. If the suggested reforms are not vetted for varied processes or policies in the organization, the ideas could backfire and derail the customer experience program.

Without simplifying the concept of collective intelligence, let us understand a few strategic insights that could help move on that path.

1.       Hire for Collective Intelligence
With a clear vision and goal in mind, enterprises should corroborate a way to hire people not just for hard skills or technical skills and knowledge but also search for competencies that enable an innovative mindset. Critical thinking, problem-solving, and ambiguity, are some of the abilities to look for in the hiring process. It is important to see how the new hire will complement the existing team.

2.       Diversity is the key
The innovation team must be formed by resources that are multidisciplinary to make sure that there is a perspective that covers depth and width allowing information to feed new ideas. It is important to allow healthy exchange across disciplines and encourage a trustworthy, open environment. Everyone in the team should be aligned to a common goal and understand their responsibility and role.

3.       Integrated with Business
The team while focusing on new ideas, forming insights, and building innovative solutions to business problems, cannot be functioning in siloes. It is important to have them associated with ground realities and be aware of existing issues or priorities. They need to work in alignment with the organization’s vision and goals and understand the inside out of business. This has to be an open lab kind of a structure wherein all masterminds come together, virtually or physically to brainstorm ideas.

A set of right minds, breaking the status quo, and working in unison can lead to many more creative endeavors.

Value Add

Building an environment of innovation in any business starts with putting together a framework, that includes the right environment, skilled resources, and processes. This would allow a seamless flow of new ideas about services, products, and methods or policies. There is no denying that it involves a certain amount of investment both in time and material.

Value addition is an important guiding principle that works as a foundation for creative pursuits in business. In simple words, value add implies looking at creating ideas that can help resolve a problem, faster, better, and may be cheaper. The ideas that serve no direct or indirect purpose to the growth of the organization and/or their customer are an effort in vain.

Following the underlined recommendations for value add will not only aid organizations in ensuring a return on their investment but also the journey could be a lot easier.

1.    Clarity in the problem that one is trying to solve is a must to keep the focus and not beat around the bush. The beneficiary of the solution, impact on business, etc. are worth a discussion at the beginning.

2.    Build a strong understanding of consumer needs: Knowing your target customer and having a solid grasp on their changing demands, and expectations, is a key to ideas that would be relatable.

3.    Brainstorm the impact of the idea on stakeholders, both internal and external. It is important to have a holistic view of how the idea would create positive as well as negative impacts in the value chain.

4.    Test and try the idea for scalability, performance, results, and feedback before finalizing it across the organization.

Innovation in Customer Experience Management specifically demands value added to the customer that keeps the brand standing out in the market. Strong and timely communication helps in taking these ideas further to the end-user and building their trust. Customer Journey Mapping and feedback are great tools to use for vetting the idea and developing it further.

Ideas should always be measured for the value they bring in! Always look for that extra worth in new ideas!

5 Rules of CX to hold on to in Volatile Situations

The business world is trailing a horrifying landscape of managing shifting customer demands at a pace like never before. The dynamics of markets are such that it makes almost no sense to have a plan. The leaders are exhausted and find themselves caught up running around and looking for some sanity in never-ending chaos.

The pressure of delivering on business outcomes is an uphill task considering the declining top-line because of low customer acquisition. The focus for leaders transcends automatically to the bottom line that has a ripple effect on operational costs reduction.  The Customer Experience (Cx) program is one low-lying baby that is first to face the banter, and this needs to change.

Anyone witnessing this panic caused by volatile customer demands or market dynamics and on the verge of withdrawing funding or pulling resources from Cx must press the STOP button NOW!

To begin with, this is the time to remind oneself of the benefits expected from Cx. The whole premise of Cx is based on understanding the consumer expectations and defining your strategy around them. It would help draw focus on key metrics like customer retention, loyalty, and advocacy and lends you an opportunity to stand out in your competitive landscape.

In conflicting situations like shunting the project completely vs. bearing the budgetary constraints or financials to keep the effort moving, these five rules will help progress on the Cx path:

1.       Stay glued to the customer

Never lose sight of the customer! Irrespective of the challenges, one cannot compromise on this aspect. It is even more important to listen to the voice of consumers in volatile conditions. The Clients are part of the same world, and they might be equally uncertain and unclear about their demands. Hearing their concerns and being empathetic goes a long way in building customer loyalty and advocacy. This would allow organizations to know better about the delivery of experience and the demand from the real world rather than hearsay.

2.      Stick to your vision BUT be open to adjusting your plans

It sounds cliched but still holds so much relevance in our decision-making on transformation programs. This particular rule is more of a mindset game than anything else. The Decision-makers often succumb to the change by activating their victim mode. The feeling of losing control, being trapped, and being directionless are a few drawbacks in this situation. An important point to recall in these moments is that no change has any power to impact a vision. A firm belief in Cx-Vision and making progress towards it, with few minor bumps or adjustments in the plan, may provide immense strength to an effort of driving results.

3.  Check your employee pulse

Like we can’t lose touch with our customers, staying connected to our workforce is equally important to work through uncertain times. The term VUCA (volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) stands true for all, be it the business market, consumers, or employees. The stress and panic emerging from harsh situations hit the entire business ecosystem, including the employees. An employee stands at a risk of losing focus and disengagement and hence directly impacting productivity or quality of work. An enterprise must keep its workforce motivated by feeling valued and empowered in the system. Cx philosophy lays a lot of importance on how employee experience strengthens the overall customer experience.

4.       Take calculated decisions

There is enough said about data and its importance in the decision-making process. Cx program and its governance are no different. At the time of program review, decisions are better driven when they are more fact-based and do not result from feelings. Cx metrics and measures carry a lot of importance at this critical point. The leaders must have key performance indicators at their fingertips to make better decisions. Do, Defer or Die, whatever the decision may be on ongoing Cx initiatives, it better be based on quantifiable factors. An impulsive decision that is “one for all” stalling all running programs is a NO GO!

5.       Communicate Effectively

Ability to translate one’s thoughts into the right words at the right time to the right audience! Especially in the business environment, panic or stress could easily take the form of fear or rain insecurities of all kinds to the ones involved. Effective communication is an established tool for seamless operations and goes unnoticed in decision-making strategies. Effective leadership in current times is an ability to accept the change, understand the impact, and communicate relevant and timely information to all stakeholders. A genuine and transparent communication helps keep all the unnecessary noise at bay and allows the trust to flourish amongst resources, directly or indirectly, associated with the Cx program.

Building futuristic leaders is the biggest challenge that organizations face today. A big part of new-age leadership is staying resilient, empathetic, and innovative in a volatile world. Staying grounded and sticking to our basics always comes as an aid to effective decision-making and helping businesses thrive in the most challenging situations.

Success and Growth in 2022 through "Empathy"

The year 2021 is drawing to a close. In retrospect, 2021 had been the year of reckoning as we were dealing with living with the pandemic. Vaccination and work started opening, but many dynamics have changed. Health is a priority, and we started embracing technology more. Digital learning, business, marketing, connecting with peers, customers, and employees have undergone a shift with the pandemic. Hybrid work is now a way of work, and thankfully we are seeing business sentiments coming back with growth in the economy. But the one thing that the pandemic taught us or changed for us is that it made a case for empathy with ourselves, our peers, our customers, and our suppliers." 

Understanding Empathy

Empathy," by definition, is how we understand and connect with the feelings of others. However, this also involves a portion of emotional intelligence as empathy requires self-awareness, listening, and self-actualization skills. It all starts with the priority to imbibe empathy in the organizational culture to create and deliver solutions.

"Empathy for Business Success" 

It can be a refreshing approach as we steer to 2022 with greater rigor. But, uncertainty is the only certainty, and there has been more significant change every day in business, work, and the way we connect with everyone around us. 

Empathy is a pivotal way for solutions and deliveries that make the difference. It can enhance creativity because cultivating an empathetic attitude means paying attention to another point of view. It means stretching outside one's frame to realize and understand others. Thus, collaborating with different people, including customers and suppliers, can give a perspective on the actual problems, how the issues are shifting. What new perspective and thought process is needed to handle and tackle it differently. Thus, it means understanding "what is the problem" and "who has the problem." This will necessarily lead to developing solutions so that all stakeholders see through it in the same way. Thus value can be derived by overlaying all thoughts of the stakeholders involved.

Understanding and connecting with others has many advantages for business, including

1. Greater customer satisfaction and referral rates as products and deliverables will be tuned to deal with the customer's (internal and external) needs, motivations, and pain points.

2. Innovation and enhanced productivity

3. Competitive edge as customers will come back again and again and spread word of mouth.

4. Lesser employee attrition and enhanced collaboration

Operationalizing Empathy in your Business in 2022

Operationalizing empathy for new ideas starts by listening. Connecting and taking appropriate feedback to create combinations brings a unique perspective for employees, suppliers, and customers.

a) Understanding Customer Needs

Understanding your customer's "needs" more than desires is the first step to creating a focus to include empathy in deliverables. Pandemic has made it pertinent that some changes are necessary. Now, customers' safety and health are a priority, and deliverables include this. Also, consider reflecting at a regular point of intervals for the following questions - 

• What do your regular feedback surveys say about your deliverables? Are you considering them and taking them?

• How is your customer relationship management evolving? How much priority does your customers (internal and external) give to it?

• Are you connecting to your customers at a regular point?

• What do your customers think about you?

• What is essential for your customers, and how has the pandemic and uncertainty changed their worldview?

Collect all your data and create programs and actions to identify these goals for yourself and your team. Also, we are highlighting a few more ways through which you can bring more "empathy" to your business. Hence more ideas, more innovation, more productivity by identifying the issues and with whom it is happening.

 b) Creating an empathetic culture 

A culture is a collective thought process, priorities, and behavior of a group or group of people together. In your business, creating an empathetic culture would mean -  

1. Focus on listening and understanding the needs, wants, and others' perspectives.

2. Leadership commitment to pave the way through policy actions while reinforcing values and holding people responsible.

3. Identify the culture leaders or champions who can support to build the case for an empathetic organization with renewed goals to listen, understand and contribute through new ideas, perspectives.

c) Tools to create empathy

1. Customer Journey Mapping is an effective tool to create new goals and identify deliverables for opportunities with customers, employees, and suppliers.

2. you can also create and outline some use cases, a storyboard with some pivotal customer interactions for reference, and reflections across the business/organization

3. Customer feedback assessment by making it a priority to listen and engage regularly.

We wish this new year brings new perspectives, ideas, and greater empathy to connect to your customer (internal and external) for more tremendous success and achievement of objectives.

Happy New Year!

What’s the right way to keeping your Customers First!

 Keeping the customer first and foremost in the decision-making for organizational endeavors is an effective strategy for business success. Organizations across the globe have been able to build and grow with a “Customer First" approach; for example, Amazon, Apple, and the list can go on and on. This is simply because a business's prime function is to serve the customers through its products and services and the "Customer First" approach supports keeping customer’s interests at the heart of all decisions. It is the best way for a business to retain, engage and focus on customers when there are multiple options available to customers for every product and service. 

 However, "Customer First" doesn't mean that it has to be a “Yes Always” or the Customer is the “God or king” approach. Putting the customer in a commanding position or at a high pedestal can never build the much-needed value addition from organizations to engage and serve.

Some common questions which we usually encounter, when deploying and suggesting the "Customer First" approach is:

- Does keeping Customer First mean agreeing to the customer at all times OR simply not saying NO to the customer?

- Does it mean giving priority to Customers' interests over business or employee interests?

- Catering to all rational and irrational demand that harms the business?

- How much should we stretch to serve the customers when going out of the way to serve?

Well, there is no straightforward answer to all these questions! What one has to keep in mind is to consider customer’s interests and their impact on them, directly or indirectly, while we are working through business decisions. It has to be a Win-Win for both customers and the business. The business also needs to flourish and exist to continue while executing through a “Customer First” approach. Customers need to be treated as humans and understood well enough to model their needs and expectations and align them with business outcomes. 

 Let us try and understand through this blog, 6 ways to keep your “Customers First” strategy right:

 1. Align your company’s purpose with customers in mind

 Every business has a purpose through which it supports and serves its customers. The purpose becomes the guiding force for a company to build the Vision, Mission, and Strategy and charter the direction and approaches that the business will want to take. “Customer First” focus will mean that the purpose is built with customers in mind.

2. Communicate your Customer-centric approach to all stakeholders 

Clarity and communication of your company’s purpose, mission, and goals to your end-users, employees, and other stakeholders helps in infusing the customer centricity approach transparently and consistently. The initiatives and all activities need to be formalized around the “Purpose” and with a common end goal. For instance, Google Vision is built around its purpose to provide access to information in one click. So its activities, approaches, goals are all are built around it. Communicating a consistent message across the board, including your customers along with keeping messages transparent, relevant is a great way in avoiding any pitfalls.

3. Begin with an understanding that it's a Cultural Shift and mindset change

 Customer-Centric Culture by definition means that customer’s needs and expectations become the center of the business model, so much so that every employee or stakeholder makes it a habit to always pursue customers interest and perception in their daily work. Clear communication for context building in line with purpose goes a long way in building a customer-centric culture. 

Empathy, Customer Journey Mapping, and numerous approaches if practiced across different levels supports decision-making and enables understanding of customers ' views and pain points at crucial junctures., This also serves the employees with context for taking the right actions and decisions with no exceptions.

4. Empower your employees 

Empower your employees with processes, skills, knowledge, and accountability so they can support the customer with their needs. The “Customer First” approach can only be built in an organization when employees know “what is important” for the business and how their work impacts their customers or business results. This keeps them engaged and empowered to make the right decisions. For instance, take a hypothetical case in a B2B organization where a customer would want a massive discount. Now, here “Customer First” doesn’t mean giving the discount by making it a loss-making deal for the company. But it means the employees coach, inform and support the customer on how the cost structure is important and is build for the value it is bringing on.

Customers do not buy the product but buy the value it is bringing while using the product/service.

5. Know and understand your Customer well enough 

Understand your Customer Expectations and Perceptions to create those products/services that can fulfill their need for an easier and better life.

 To know “Your Customers” and to cater to their needs, an organization must work towards building an understanding of their target customer’s pain points, the problems they are looking to resolve, and solutions that can be provided. It is important to be in the customer’s shoes and know what are the customer’s attitudes, preferences, motivations, and needs. Providing your customers with personalized interactions and approaching them with empathy is an excellent way to ensure the “Customer First” approach is on right track.

6. Utilize the right tools for execution, governance, and feedback of Customer First Strategy

Last but not least is to utilize the right tools for execution, governance, improvement, and feedback for building the “Customer First” approach. It means defining and training everyone on: 

- What “Customer First” shall mean for your business

- “Defining” and creating structures, processes for enabling the ideology

- Feedback and insights from all stakeholders to be utilized to reflect, learn and improve on actions 

- Lean, simple, participative, and collaborative governance with transparency for effective value addition.

Numerous tools such as Net promoter score, Customer Churn, customer experience feedback, sales data, qualitative/quantitative research for different hypotheses can be utilized to measure, learn and improve the current deliverables and build newer approaches while keeping "Customer First" at the heart.

To conclude, “Customer First” is simply a strategy with a focus on the customer by treating them as humans and not Gods. Human beings have emotions, expectations, and needs to which business is adding value by understanding and aligning with their thoughts, needs, and expectation in the best possible way.

What are you doing to create your “Customer First” approach? Let us know by writing to us at contact@pinkguava.org