|
 Feature
Article
|
By
Rob Rush
CEO,
LRA Worldwide |
Customer
Retention --
It's All About the Experience, Stupid!
How
"Customer Experience Management" can help CRM keep its eye
on the prize - Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty
Imagine
this nightmare. You're a hotel chain that's undertaken a multi-million
dollar CRM installation in order to better know - and grow - your customers.
Loyal Customer "A" checks into your property in Chicago and
your CRM database alerts staff in the Windy City that he prefers cold
spring water in his room, a Wall Street Journal in the morning
and pulpy orange juice with his breakfast. Your bases are covered, right?
When
his Poland Springs was warm, his Journal arrived late and his
OJ was sans pulp, "A" left angry, never to be heard from again.
Clearly, just knowing his preferences and purchasing behavior was not
enough to drive customer satisfaction or retention.
An
extreme example? Sure, but for every successful CRM installation, the
customer service landscape is littered with CRM projects that didn't
quite hit the mark. In many applications, CRM has a great big blind
spot. While CRM effectively pulls information from the customer to benefit
the company, it lacks insight into the customer's actual experience
with that company across the crucial experiential touch points. No amount
of CRM technology lets the company "see" the customer's experience.
An
integrated Customer Experience Management ("CEM") program
can help fill in those blind spots and complement the potentially powerful
data collected in a CRM project. Put plainly, where CRM is weak, CEM
is strong. By focusing on the experiences of customers and how those
experiences impact behavior, CEM addresses the quality of the company's
execution and the efficacy of the result. In this way, a CEM application
can work hand in hand with CRM to create loyal customers…for life.
Among
the elements involved in a successful CEM support program are:
Standards
& Practices Development - Without a good game plan, you
can't win the game. This process enables a company to design, write,
organize and communicate the standards required for employees to deliver
the desired customer experience - every time. This "game plan"
will serve as the backbone of any CRM program.
Customer
Service & Leadership Training - Put the game plan into
action before your team hits the field. Make sure your employees have
the proper skills and resources to deliver customer service excellence
and are empowered to do so. Regardless of the impressive technology
involved, CRM won't engage people without the right human touch.
Customer
& Employee Research - Is the game plan working? Are you
satisfying your customers and engaging your employees? What do you do
(or not do) that drives loyalty? Answering these questions, allows a
company to better utilize the data gleaned from CRM to service the customer,
not the company.
Quality
Assurance - When all is said and done, are you and your employees
following the game plan? Whether through site inspections, mystery shopping
or call monitoring, this final CEM piece will help nurture a CRM project
to full potential.
Together,
these CEM elements ensure that the customer experience promise a company
makes is being delivered to the customer in ways that CRM is ill-equipped
to handle. Blind spot eliminated.
So
what ever happened to Customer "A"? Turns out the hotel had
a CEM program in place as well. His dissatisfaction was instantly registered
in a customer satisfaction e-survey; a regional manager soothed his
frayed nerves with a weekend in South Beach. The team at the Chicago
hotel was referred back to its standards and practices materials and
a trainer flew into O'Hare that night to conduct a refresher course
at the property, just in case. And when the mystery shopping team showed
up in Chicago two months later…you guessed it -- pulp!
About
the Author
Rob Rush is CEO of LRA Worldwide, a leading consulting and research
company specializing in Customer Experience Management. You can contact
him at rob.rush@lraworldwide,
or find more information by clicking
here.
back
to top
|
New
Clients & Projects |
back
to top
|
Senior
Management Addition |
Zachary
Conen has joined LRA as the company's Director of Marketing
For
more information, click
here.
back
to top
|
About
LRA Worldwide |
LRA
Worldwide is a leading consulting and research company that specializes
in Customer Experience Management. LRA helps organizations design and
deliver exceptional customer experiences across all key touch points
using an integrated suite of services that measure and improve service
quality, customer satisfaction, employee performance, loyalty and profitability.
The company provides market research services, designs and writes customer
service and operating standards, develop high-level training and workplace
learning programs, and implements performance measurement processes
including customer and employee satisfaction feedback systems, mystery
shopping and quality assurance programs, in a process that continually
monitors and improves the customer experience. LRA has deep sector expertise
in the food service and facilities management, gaming, hospitality and
leisure, sports and entertainment, and travel and transportation industries.
For more information, please visit the company's Web site at www.lraworldwide.com
or contact:
Zachary Conen
Director of Marketing
Tel: +1.215.449.0304
Fax: +1.215.957.6570
E-mail: zach.conen@lraworldwide.com
back
to top
|
Other
News |
LRA
has relocated its corporate headquarters to accommodate the firm's continuing
growth. For more information click
here.
Whether
you are a member of the media researching an article, a potential client
interested in retaining LRA, or have a special request, this is the
place to access general information about the company.
LRA Worldwide
300 Welsh Road
Building 1, Suite 200
Horsham, Pennsylvania 19044.2263, USA
Tel: +1.215.957.1999
Fax: +1.215.957.6570
e-Mail: zach.conen@lraworldwide.com
back
to top
©2004
LRA Worldwide. All rights reserved.
Your
privacy is important to us. We never share, sell, or rent personal information
without your advance permission or unless ordered by a court of law.
Legal Notice.
If
you received a mailing from us, (a) your email address is either listed
with us as someone has expressly shared this address for the purpose
of receiving information in the future ("opt-in"), or (b)
you have registered or purchased or otherwise have an existing relationship
with us. If you wish to unsubscribe to this newsletter, please click
here.
