Creating "wow" at the Retail front end?
Posted by Ajay Kelkar on Sun, Jun 14, 2009
Last week, Cequity was speaking at an event hosted by the Retailers Association of India(RAI) and the topic was really about how Retailers can make Customer experience their true diffrentiator!
The interesting thing in Retail is that eventually ,competitive advantage in location,merchandize assortments & price can be replicated by competition ,but Customer experience can be a unique diffrentiator. The difficult thing about this is that Retail brands have so many touch points with customers and how do you make each of these interactions "memorable".
Many organizations,especially in growth markets & industries are already dangerously "out of synch" from their customers. One of the indicators of this is this Bain’s research
that found 80% of companies believed they were delivering a superior
customer experience while only 8% of their customers thought they were receiving
a superior experience.
I believe that the key lies in not making the "customer experience" the accountability for any one function but rather making it a key company competency across function. Bruce Temkin of Forrester has this interesting perspective "Treat customer experience as a competence, not a function.
Delivering great customer experiences isn’t something that a small
group of people can do on their own — everyone in the company needs to
be fully engaged in the effort. It all starts at the top; the CEO and
his executive team need to be fully engaged in the effort. To keep a
companywide focus on customers, companies need a systematic and
continuous approach for incorporating customer insights into all of
their efforts. That’s why we recommend building a voice-of-the-customer
program".
In the last 12 months Customer experience management (CEM) has started to get more profile but it is still just a good idea emerging into an area of marketing thought currently dominated by CRM. CEM is currently a poor cousin to CRM. If it is to grow up and become a powerful business tool it must move out of marketing and directly link itself to business outcomes. See what Adam Ramshaw has to say about ‘Will Customer Experience Management grow up big and strong like its rich cousin CRM?
http://crmguru.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/crmguru.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1638