You Want to Talk to Our Happy Clients? – Let Me Get Back to You.

If you’ve read some of the interviews of top-notch consultants that we have distributed to you by emails like this, you may have noticed our aggravated lack of concern with the customer experience. This month’s guest, Jennifer Ramirez of CX Ventures, has earned both undergraduate and graduate degrees in psychology and behavioral psychology, logged over 20 years’ experience in customer satisfaction consulting and leadership training, and opened our eyes to our own glaring deficiency. She may also rescue you from a looming disaster.

If you’re like me, you don’t need to be reminded to put your clients and their needs first. But there’s a giant, cavernous gap between being client-focused and giving each client a delightful, can’t wait to do that again experience. “When was the last time you walked through your product or service experience as if you were a customer?” Jennifer asks. “Do you know what it’s really like to buy from yourself?” She forthrightly encourages, “Go try your product – use it and see what it’s like. Go through and understand your product or service experience as if you are a customer.”

It’s easy to guess why business owners might not know whether their customers absolutely love the experience they’re receiving. We all have to worry about financial performance and results, recruiting and hiring, vendor performance and turnover, complying with government regulations, cash flow, insurance – the list seems endless. Somewhere along the way, and even though we have told ourselves that we put the client or customer first, the problems we confront every day have sucked up all our attention and we don’t have any left to pay to the customer.

Jennifer shared that her typical client intuitively knows that something’s not right but can’t pinpoint what’s wrong. “About half of my clients first approached me with concerns about client retention or losing customers to competitors,” Jennifer recalled. “Most of the others were concerned about the other side of that coin – getting new customers.”

To borrow a familiar parable, Jennifer helps her clients by teaching them how to fish. Jennifer and her team create strategies to improve the client’s customer experience and satisfaction. “We help clients design winning strategies and winning approaches to get and keep customers,” she explains. Not only do Jennifer and her team create strategies, but they also help implement the strategy and they coach the leadership team and the front-line?staff to implement the strategy. Finally, to help the client move quickly toward a “best in class” result, they develop the metrics the client uses to measure and drive top-flight performance.

When helping craft a high-performance customer experience team, Jennifer looks for a person who has rotated through multiple and divergent roles within a business or industry similar to that of the client. Having this kind of experience helps a leader understand how each part of the business may contribute to or detract from the customer’s experience in its own, unique way and how all the parts work together to shape the overall customer experience. Jennifer explained, “Clients have usually been surprised when they learn that some of the parts of their 'the customer comes first'?practices actually create negative customer experiences.”

Jennifer’s approach to helping each client can vary as widely as do her clients’ individual circumstances, which include Fortune 1000 companies and local, closely held companies. However, she typically begins each engagement using an established process. Her process, coupled with her wealth of experience and expertise, guides her and her team to create a custom strategy with tactics and metrics that help her clients measure progress toward and attain their goals.

In one example that Jennifer shared with us, she helped a tire and auto repair and maintenance shop with ties to its community dating back 47 years?get to the root of its inability to timely deal with customer calls. Using the client’s existing point-of-sale software, Jennifer created a communication strategy that included a process to communicate with customers by text message. The text messages are used to remind and confirm the appointment with the customer; give them periodic status updates about the status of the service, give them cost estimates, and answer their questions almost instantly. This single piece of the improved communications strategy generates thousands of communications between the shop’s employees and their customers each month, but it has allowed the shop to take on more customers by communicating with them efficiently and almost instantly. Not only are the customers happier, but the shop’s employees are happier too.

In another case involving a multi-national client with thousands of customers, Jennifer described how she helped her client reduce its single largest expense - commission payments to third party agents – by improving the customer’s experience. Calling on her own innovation skills, which in this case were needed because mobile apps were not then commonly available, Jennifer and her team developed and implemented an online platform that allowed the client’s customer to “stage” a transaction before interacting with the client’s employees or third-party agents. This allowed the?client?and the customer to more quickly and easily review and process the transaction, reduce the time required for each transaction, and reduce the number of transactions handled by the third-party service providers.

You may have noticed that I’ve described only parts of the overall communications strategies that Jennifer and her team created for each of these clients. The analysis of the customer experience may include a process for deciding which client pain points to focus on first, a five-year road map for the company to execute, or identifying a customer experience leader. The client that is the subject of the second example identified above also established, with Jennifer’s help, a client experience steering committee whose members included senior directors of the company and that was charged with implementing the customer experience strategy designed by Jennifer and her team. Jennifer also shared that this client is well on its way to exceeding their customer experience goals.

If she was looking to consult with someone offering customer satisfaction and experience improvement services, Jennifer says that the most important consideration would be the consultant’s methodology. Next, she wants to know how well the consultant understands the client’s business and industry. Finally, she would explore the depth of the consultant’s experience, whether they have a proven track record, and the network of contributing resources they’ve established.

If you’re interested in learning more about Jennifer and her work, or if you or someone you know would benefit by consulting with her, please reach out to me. I’d be honored to connect you.