Most retail executives I’ve talked to recently scratch their heads when the topic of improved customer experience comes up. Yes, 60% of them realize it’s critical. Yes 60.9% of their customers think it’s important. But I hear them say over and over again that “it takes more staff to improve face-to-face contact and that’s going to cost money that I don’t have – – my margins are getting crushed right now”.
Which is exactly what keeps a lot of consumer facing businesses from capitalizing on improving the customer journey. A recent study by McKinsey & Co. found this was just plain WRONG !
Researchers did a case study on a rental care company that figured out the customer hot button was speed of checkout. So they did a simple thing – they focused their team on speeding up checkout. Guess what ? Not only did customer satisfaction increase by 90%. The real shocker in all of this is operating costs actually DROPPED by 10% – considered substantial when it comes to managing operations costs in customer service organizations.
If you want to see the Customer Journey thought process created by the three experts at McKinsey that are working in this area, here’s the slideshare of the complete presentation.
How about it ? Do you think your costs would actually go down if you worked harder at improving a customer’s experience the next time you were face-to-face with them ?
