An external customer may require information that needs to be obtained via several people internally within your organisation. This is called the Customer Experience Chain or CX for short.
Regardless of where you are in the Customer Experience Chain, you are still ultimately serving the external customer. Colleagues who approach you for assistance require a service from you and as such become your customers. In a large organisation, it can be hard to appreciate the importance of your role in the overall customer experience chain, however improvements can be made by dedicated training courses.
Remember: “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.”
The service we provide our external customers is only as good as the service we provide internally to our colleagues.
Make sure you’re NOT that weak link!
Important
It’s not just ‘front line’ staff who require training on how to provide an exceptional customer experience, all staff in every department do, especially if you want to build a culture of customer service excellence. The overall customer experience is changed by every single interaction between customer and the organisation. So the marketing team may be responsible for emails contact, the sales team for making contact by phone and the accounts team who send out invoices to customers once the product or service is delivered. The best performing companies involve not only employees but also distributors, resellers and channel partners if necessary to try to encourage an environment of ‘customer obsession’. Some companies even go so far as to appoint a member of staff with overall responsibility for monitoring and improving their customer experience or have dedicated cross – functional teams appointed to do the same role.
However customer service is monitored and evaluated, people who play a key role in customer service need training which should be relevant to them, up to date and offered to everybody in a team on a regular basis, to keep you ahead of your competitors. For more advice on best practice, contact Neville Beardsmore of CFA Training to find out more.