Placing importance on the customer experience KPI

In a constantly evolving, competitive, and dynamic business landscape, the biggest question organisations across all industries ask themselves is: “how do we set ourselves apart?”

This single question forces us to ask what will make us the supplier of choice, or the preferred partner – and how do we carry this through along every point of the business’s operations – whether it’s on the shop floor, in the boardroom, in the marketing team or back of office.

My answer is simple – it’s the customer experience.

Why customer experience?

The customer needs to be central in everything we do, as the main - and final - thought. The reason is easy, because without customers we will no longer be needed as company.

How the customer feels at every interaction, from initial awareness to purchase, to after-sales support, creates a positive impression about your brand, and confidence in your product.

Whether you are a business-to-business company, or end-consumer facing, every person you’re in contact with, is impacted by an experience.

As a proudly local tyre manufacturer, we are not always in direct contact with the end-customer. We have risen to this challenge by adopting customer satisfaction as one of our strategic pillars.

Incorporating the customer into operations

No doubt, customer experience has emerged as a strategic priority in every business. My day’s work is focused on our strategic plan which is optimising customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and investor satisfaction. A study undertaken internally - the Footprint Evaluation - supported our focus on the customer experience. It emphasised that across all business functions and operations, the importance of adding to the customer experience in everything we do, was key.

One of the successful outcomes of that approach was an improvement to our lead distribution time. Faster time to client meant our customers were happy. This was achieved by examining our business set up and arising out of that was identifying that our overflow warehouse was not necessary. We were able to increase an existing warehouse’s capacity by approximately 15%.

By examining our business through a customer-centric lens, it helped us identify areas for improvement. ?

My goal is to be able to achieve sustainable results with efficient cost-improving customer satisfaction, and for Operations to become an added value to the product matching the customer expectations.

Using data to optimise customer experience

As humans, we use emotions to take decisions. It’s more effective, however, to use data to make informed decisions. Data and data analysis further allows us to be more agile in making decisions, which is important in a dynamic business environment.

As part of the Operations team, we have an overview of the entire business processes and functions at a single glance, our dashboards provide a variety of data sets to base decisions on.

In manufacturing, it’s essential to have an always-on approach to identify digital solutions that optimise our operations. Incorporating data gathering in any digital transformation plan, means we have the ability to make better decisions with more data.

Insights into customer analytics, journey mapping, predictive analytics, and real time monitoring are all impactful methods to digitally gather data and analyse it with a view to optimising our processes, and by extension, our customer satisfaction.

Entrenching a customer-centric operation

One of the most important tasks to do is to understand the customer needs and to be able to add value to them. On-time delivery service, back orders, and deadlines in deliveries and actions are some of our standard KPIs.

Embedded in these are a customer-centric focus – on time, quick action, and meeting deadlines, means the customer is experiencing a professional level of service. Customer Experience is therefore, the most important KPIs to follow.

In businesses where operational teams do not have the opportunity to interact with customers or clients, my opinion is that customer visits are required. This allows teams to gain first-hand experience of why their role in the operations is critical – every team plays a role in ensuring customer satisfaction.

As a team working together towards the same goal, it’s important to ensure we are all on the same page – keeping customer satisfaction as the ultimate goal.?

#SumitomoRubberSA #operations #localmanufacturing?SATMC (South African Tyre Manufacturers Conference)