Client Centric

Consulting

Reinvent your customer experience

MISSION: SUPPORTING YOU IN THE CREATION OF AN EXCEPTIONAL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Collaboratively defined improvement projects, tailored to your strategic and operational needs


Why is it strategic for your company to invest in the customer experience?

Your customers often expect more than just value for money: they remember the overall experience with your brand, which either makes them come back or turn to a competitor for their next purchase.

Beyond your product offering, your customers are very sensitive to:
  • Access to clear and relevant information before purchase
  • Ease of buying and receiving your product
  • Smooth contact, empathy and responsiveness in case of problems
  • …

Investing in your customer experience is part of a long-term vision for building customer loyalty: simplifying and customising their journey, from purchase preparation to after-sales... with quick results in operational efficiency, cost control and customer culture within your teams.

An unrivaled customer experience reinforces your customers' brand loyalty: they will naturally think of your company for any future purchases, and generate positive word of mouth.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER FOR AN EXCEPTIONAL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

OFFERING A MULTICHANNEL CUSTOMER JOURNEY

Your customers' journeys are not linear and often involve several channels: some customers get information online and then buy in store, some test in store but buy online, and others request after-sales services via Facebook. Therefore it is essential to define your multichannel strategy to guarantee a coherent and effective overall experience.

By setting up multichannel journeys, you can avoid situations where e-commerce customers bring a defective product to the store and hear "Sorry, I can't do anything for you as it was purchased on the website, please call the customer service" – as an example.

In recent years, the way your customers interact with your brand has changed: less phone calls, more emails and messages on social networks. If they could, some customers would chat with your brand over Whatsapp as they do with their loved ones.

This contact digitalisation requires new skills (conciseness, ability to convey empathy in writing, etc.) and adapting your Customer Service in terms of organisation, training and recruitment:
  • How many staff do you need to handle customer requests on digital channels?
  • How to answer to digital requests outside of standard business hours?
  • Should you train the entire Customer Service department or set up a dedicated team?
  • What employee profile to recruit for handling digital contacts?

PUTTING THE CUSTOMER AT THE HEART OF YOUR BUSINESS

Every day, your customers interact with highly customer-oriented companies that offer an exceptional customer experience. They will therefore hold your company against these standards: a failure, such as taking 3 months to address an after-sales request without any progress updates, will have a significant impact on your brand image in their eyes.

Aligning your customer experience with these standards means rethinking your organisation, by putting yourself in the shoes of your customers:
  • What are their needs and expectations? Their moments of enchantment and friction points in their customer journey?
  • What are your competitors doing? And above all, what are the companies reputed for excellent customer experience doing?
  • What to change as a priority to make the customer's journey easier?

Customising the customer experience remains a key differentiating factor for your business: it shows your customers that you are listening to them, constantly looking for the best answer to their needs and that they are not just a number in your bottom line.

This customisation is based on:
  • IT tools that recognise the customer, collect data, record requests and purchase history
  • Processes enabling your business to customise the response to the profile, history or context, without going through 3 validation steps before responding to the customer

Successful personalisation can become a strong component of your "relational style": your customers know that your response is always as tailor-made as possible.

To collect customer feedback, you first need to choose the topics on which you want customer opinion, and the type of feedback you want to collect:
  • On which topics do you need statistics?
  • On which points do you need a detailed, more personal feedback?

This preliminary work will allow you to choose the most appropriate approaches to gather customer feedback: email surveys, focus groups, online forums, in-store terminals or surveys.

In the longer term, it is also important to design a continuous improvement system leveraging customer feedback to improve your offerings and customer experience.

OVERSEEING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE EFFECTIVELY

Your customer experience objectives determine which indicators to track. A limited number of KPIs will help you to monitor your activity more finely than a multitude of indicators: it allows you to prioritise and know where to focus your efforts.

For each selected indicator, you must set a target and a time frame for achieving it. This will allow you to set up a clear dashboard, which can be shared with the teams on a regular basis, to show progress and explain business decisions.

This work on indicators is essential if you outsource parts of your customer service, to monitor the actions of your service provider and ensure that they meet your customer experience priorities.

Well configured IT tools that are adapted to your needs will enable you to simplify the customer journeys: inform them at the right time, shorten processing times, be more relevant in your answers. You will therefore be more productive and improve the overall customer experience.
  • CRM tools to better know your customers, their profile and their purchases
  • File management or after-sales ticketing tools to log exchanges with your customers: reason for contact, problem encountered, resolution provided...
  • Tools to keep in touch with your customers: telephony, email and/or chat management system, SMS sending/receiving solutions...
  • Tools to collect customer feedbacks: email surveys, scoring...

These tools must necessarily communicate with each other (pulling the CRM profile when opening a new customer record for example) thanks to connectors or because they are part of an integrated global system (record management + emails + Facebook Messenger in the same tool, for example).

Multiple factors can impact the performance of your customer service:
  • A customer service that started with a single employee, using their professional email and phone number, and who is now facing too many customer requests
  • Customer processes (delivery, after-sales service, etc.) that are no longer suitable given quick business growth
  • New skills required with the launch of a chat or customer service in another language
  • Accessibility problems during busy periods, or excessively limited business hours
  • …

When facing these problems, it is important to react quickly: understand the underlying cause of the problem and take corrective action (new process, reorganisation of teams...) before repeated calls and emails degrade service quality, customer satisfaction and ultimately cause customers to leave... or employees getting exhausted from working in a permanent emergency state.

WHY CHOOSE CLIENT CENTRIC CONSULTING TO SUPPORT YOU?

MY EXPERTISE

  • Consultant then manager in different consultancies: over 30 strategy and organisation assignments carried out since 2008, in French and English
  • Specialised in Customer Experience since 2013
  • Clients: large French companies, international groups, mid-cap companies, SMEs
  • Industries: luxury goods, food distribution, specialised distribution, agri-food, automotive, banking, insurance, utilities
  • Graduated from ESCP Europe Business School in 2008

Transversal skills: strategic analysis, modelling and growth/income projections, project management, business plan writing, roadmaps, action plans, workshop and seminar facilitation, training

EXAMPLES OF PAST PROJECTS

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Client Centric

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Reinvent your customer experience

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