Kerri Nelson, Chief Operations Officer, Clarivate talks about how companies can improve their end-to-end customer experience, treating everyone as a customer.
Clarivate implemented a global Customer Delight program in 2019 and a year later acquired CustomersFirst Now, a trusted CX company offering consulting, analytics and software that builds end-to-end Customer Delight programs. Now known as Clarivate Customer Experience Services, the team helps companies improve their customer experience in order to drive deeper customer insights. Kerri has personally led customer experience and customer operations as well as consulted with major brands over the past 25 years.
Clarivate is a global leader in providing solutions to accelerate the lifecycle of innovation and is on a mission to help customers solve some of the world’s most complex problems to build a better future. In order to do so, Clarivate equips innovators with unique insights to bring new ideas to life and it also helps them improve their customer experience (CX). There are three critical behaviors that companies need to adopt in order to create a sustainable focus on customers. In our previous blog, we discussed the value of “being responsive” to each other by responding to emails, voicemails, chats, etc. Finding ways to engage and listen to each other.
Our second critical behavior is “treating everyone as your customer.” Yes, there is the external customer who pays your company for products and services. However, everyday inside a company there are interactions that are about serving each other with data, reports, insights and general help. Building a culture where everyone recognizes that they have a customer or multiple customers helps drive the right attitudes and behaviors.
Treating everyone as your customer
Turning each interaction into a customer interaction will quickly become eye opening for all colleagues. Asking internal customers how to improve services or support is a way to practice and role model what we must do with external customer everyday. We all have customers to serve each day – someone cares about what we do or don’t do. Here are some examples:
- Legal team responding to customer contract updates for sales colleagues
- Real estate team creating a safe workplace for colleagues
- HR paying colleagues on time and accurately
Knowing what customers value and appreciate is critical to any team’s success, both internally and externally, so we need to listen and deliver in a manner that helps our customers to be successful. This is a great way to show respect for each other and the work we all do to ultimately serve our customers. No one team can do this alone.
“I spend most of my time listening to our colleagues as my customers. What can I do to make it easier for them to do their jobs for each other and our customers? We even rolled out a ‘make it easy’ process to gather this feedback and then share what we are doing to implement these suggestions.”
Our next blog will discuss the third behavior: being prepared.
Ensuring everyone internally is on the same page regarding what acceptable behavior is and is not is hugely important to the culture of a company and, ultimately, to its customers’ experience. Many studies have proven that how we behave as an organization is exactly how our customers view us when we interact with them.
For more tips and best practices for a more impactful voice of the customer program please download our white paper.
