You can't help noticing today that some organisations seem to have "stopped bothering about customers". Perhaps it's an indication that some in our "throw-away society" now consider that an existing customer is no more than a passing encounter that can be simply cast aside, and easily replaced with a new one.

In the past few weeks I've been personally reminded several times, how rare it has become for customers to experience good service, and there's a danger that some organisations are simply taking advantage of that fact and simply not bothering anymore.

• Not bothering to return calls,
• not bothering to provide quotations when they promise to
• not bothering to provide an after-sales service for their products,
• not bothering to tell their account holders that their bank branch has closed down
  
• not bothering to provide comprehensive operating instructions for their products, or...
• not even bothering to provide a number to call if they need help

But what it does reveal, is that there's now an incredible opportunity for organisations to differentiate themselves by simply paying attention to the needs of their customers.

In this episode I'm going to tap into our customer experience research again, and give away the secret of how you can make your organisation incredibly successful at what it does, by getting CX right.

It's how a business can out-perform its competition, and how a public service can build incredible public support.

But first I want to take a look at what NOT TO DO.

I'm going to look at three key things our research confirms about:

"How to lose customers – without really trying!"

• Establishing a customer experience baseline
• Managing customer experience transformations with support from CTMA
• Leadership training, coaching programmes and events

At the time of recording this episode, many businesses and public services are finding it a great challenge to satisfy customers. It has particular relevance while many parts of the world are recovering from a global health crisis, and suffering from disrupted international supply chains, travel disorder, economic instability, domestic and geo-political tensions. (Huge kudos to all those involved in travel, hospitality, health, energy, food distribution and retail – and all the other industries suffering from current uncertainty and turmoil).

But being ready to "get CX right when everything seems to be going wrong", is just as important when everything seems to be going well.

With Murphy's Law stating that: "Anything that can go wrong - will go wrong". and Finagle's Law stating that when it does go wrong, it'll happen, at "the worst possible time", and with so many variables at play when you're dealing with real live customers, you must always be ready for Murphy's and Finagle's Laws to strike.

All it takes, for your systems, processes, customer journeys, and desired customer outcomes to be thrown off course, is for a customer or member of staff to take a small step in an unplanned direction, or an unplanned event to occur. And it can be a challenging and expensive task to get things back on track.

Even a simple incident can seriously undermine productivity, customer satisfaction, and staff wellbeing. In other words, in "Getting CX Right", you always need to be ready for everything to go wrong.

I'm afraid I can't help with the prevention of unplanned events, but in this episode I'll be looking at a selection of some of the guiding principles we use in our customer experience transformation programmes to help our clients to be in a much better position to respond to their customers when problems do occur.

These guiding principles can be used to underpin your business-as-usual strategy, and also relied upon to support how your organisation responds to unplanned events or a crisis.

They can help you to reduce costs, reduce reputational risk, and recover faster from unplanned events or a crisis, whilst improving productivity, improving customer satisfaction and loyalty, and improving staff capability and wellbeing.

Workshop: "Guiding Principles for getting CX right - even when everything seems to be going wrong!"

We've created a workshop to help you get a jump-start towards "Getting CX Right, when everything seems to be going wrong"

Delivered live and online directly to your organisation, we review a series of key Guiding Principles and discuss how they might be applied to your organisation to help you to continue to satisfy and impress your customers - even when everything seems to be going wrong.

Please click here to schedule a call to discuss when your organisation would like to take part in this event: www.CTMAworld.com/murphy

• Managing customer experience transformations with support from CTMA
• Leadership training, coaching programmes and events

I've been getting a lot of questions recently about how hard it is for customer experience professionals to get buy-in for investment in customer experience improvement programmes. This, at a time when business, public services and customers are all experiencing so much change and so many challenges. It's almost as though the huge efforts and sacrifices that so many made during the global health crisis, to keep responding to their customers, has been forgotten.

During the global health crisis, customer service functions needed to duck and weave to keep their organisations afloat. In record time, they had to change their operating procedures, adopt new practices and new technologies, and many moving to remote working.

There wasn't time to go through a lengthy business justification and an ROI calculation. It was a case of survival for those who could adapt the fastest and best to do whatever was needed to serve their customers.

But now, as the world slowly returns to normal, many organisations have moved on to what they see as a new crisis of change. It's one driven by a cascade of issues like increased prices, limited finance and resources, and problems of shipping and supply.

But there's a risk, that the customer is now being missed out of the equation and that organisations may have forgotten that their success is, and always has been, driven by their ability to satisfy the needs of their customers.

For customer experience professionals to succeed in the current environment, they are having to rebuild the rigour of disciplines and frameworks to describe and justify where customer experience investment is needed to support this, and future crises of change.

So, I'd like to turn to one of the diagnostic frameworks we use in our customer experience transformation programmes to help demonstrate the role that positive customer experiences have on an organisation's success, and the cost of getting things wrong. In this episode we look at the four alternate realities of the corporate-customer universe.

By the end of this episode you should have a better insight into the dynamics at play that undermine value, add unnecessary costs, and the steps you need to take to get the information you need, to make the best decisions, to set the right priorities, and take the right actions, for your organisation to succeed in these challenging times.

We've prepared a CTMA Practice Guide "The Four Alternate Realities of the Corporate-Customer Universe" that summarises the key points in this episode.
Request your copy here

• Managing customer experience transformations with support from CTMA
• Leadership training, coaching programmes and events