We’ve long extolled how the Customer Experience (CX) is your business’s most important product, and that no matter how good your actual goods and services are, a poor CX will doom your business. Most business owners, CEOs, and managers agree, but many have deluded themselves into believing that their businesses are already customer-centric. Evidently, as much as 80% of CEOs believe this, whereas only 8% of their customers feel the same way. That’s a huge disconnect, and no business leader can afford to ignore it.
Understanding and rectifying this dissonance is paramount to your business’s sustainable success. Let’s talk about the path you must follow to bridge the gap.
Self-Evaluate
The journey begins through self-evaluation. As a leader in your business, you should begin by performing a comprehensive evaluation of your own operations, probing every facet of how your company interacts with its customers. Candidly assess internal policies, employee training programs, and your overall organizational culture. Leave no stone unturned.
Talk to the Troops
Your employees are your frontline ambassadors, representing your brand to the wider world. They possess invaluable insights into the customer experience because they see it with their own eyes every day. Encourage them to participate in feedback surveys aimed at gauging their perceptions of the work they do. Just as importantly, you should take the same survey to see how your answers align with theirs.
Walk in Their Shoes
Make sure you step into the shoes of your frontline staff to see firsthand the nuances of their customer interactions and to appreciate the full breadth of the customer journey. Spending this time will foster empathy and provide you with valuable insights into the details that statistics alone will not capture. Further, if you are able to be a customer without your employees knowing, you should see what it’s like from the other side. There’s always something new to learn.
Face the Music
Perception resides in the eyes of the beholder, and the most important beholder is your customer. Deploy similar surveys as the ones you used for yourself and your employees to gather more data and give you and your team a reality check. This is how you’ll challenge your assumptions, leveraging customer feedback to illuminate your company’s blind spots. You can’t fix what you don’t know is broken. Face those hard truths.
Hyperfocus
Once you’ve peeled back the layers of perception and discovered the areas where your beliefs fail to align with those of your employees and customers, the time has come to attack those weaknesses and improve them through employee training and reworking your policies. But you can’t stop there, as you’ll need to test these changes to ensure they’re successful. Mystery shopping is your best tool for this job, as you’ll be able to instruct shoppers to focus on whatever problems concern you most. These shoppers will identify the discrepancies between what you expect to give and what your customers actually receive.
Embrace the Challenge
Perception and reality needn’t differ. By embarking on this journey of self-evaluation, soliciting employee feedback, walking in the customer’s shoes, and deploying mystery shopping, your business can bridge the gap between what you hope your business is and what customers believe it to be. Let’s commit to aligning these perceptions to customer realities together, ensuring your business truly embodies customer-centricity. Are you ready to take this first step towards bridging the gap?
Your first step is reaching out to us at The Brandt Group. Our feedback surveys, mystery shoppers, and leadership development tools will help you take your business to the next level. Make your aspirations a reality today.
