Four Steps to Making Customer Service an Organizational Priority

The original version of this article appeared on Resonate’s blog. Resonate is an Australian customer experience management (CEM) provider, founded by EO Sydney member Jeff Carruthers. 

At many well-meaning companies, customer experience or advocacy initiatives are driven from the top down or assigned to specific departments. However, customer satisfaction isn’t simply a goal for the marketing, sales or account services departments.

It should be an organizational priority that ultimately helps drive the entire business forward. Here’s how to accomplish this in four steps.

1. Make it known and set a goal

The first and most important step is identifying the goal and getting the message out there. Be sure you have buy-in from from key stakeholders who can spread the word and communicate the message.

Here, communication is key. You want to clearly communicate why this goal is important and how it will impact each employee in the business.

2. Drive accountability and ownership

This is when you can really help drive customer experience across the entire organization. By assigning responsibility, accountability and ownership to each team and, essentially, to each staff member, you are ensuring their participation and engagement.

The best way to do this is to announce one overall SMART goal for the company, and then ask each department to create sub-goals as well as the tactical plan for how their department will help the company to achieve the greater goal. Hold them accountable for the goals. Consider using incentives to increase motivation.

3. Track and operationalize customer experience

Now that your goals are set and the organization is on board, it’s important to track progress and make it easy for employees to understand how, specifically, they can improve customer experience.

With technology like the Resonate Pulse Platform, you can easily and reliably operationalize the voice of customer data as well as close the loop on customer feedback. Drill down and find the root cause of customer experience issues and then resolve issues quickly and efficiently.

4. Provide feedback to staff

Providing feedback is highly important. Again, communication is key. Reviewing progress on a weekly or monthly schedule allows each staff member to engage with results and, more importantly, strategize solutions. It also encourages the transparency needed for open communication between departments.

Without regular feedback on how they are progressing in their goals and the organization-wide goal, these types of initiatives can sometimes be pushed to the back and forgotten about.

Jeff Carruthers founded Resonate in 2001, and has steered the business with a focus on what makes organizations relevant to contemporary customers as well as a keen eye for technical innovation. He joined EO in 2015.