Building a successful customer experience culture for your business

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Customer Experience

Do your staff avoid working on repeat customers because they have never received tips from them? 

According to EDU, A 5% increase in customer retention can lead to a 25-95% increase in profitability. About 84% of companies that work to improve their customer experience report an increase in revenue. 

Customer experience is the heart and brain of any business, whether offering goods or services. Even if it offers services, when you think that customer care and customer service are the same, your business is on the path to the grave. 

Customer care is broader and long-term. Customer service is the immediate, transactional support provided to customers before, during, or after a purchase. Customer service focuses on short-term resolving specific issues, answering questions, or addressing complaints. 

Customer Care creates emotional bonds, turning satisfied customers into loyal advocates who drive repeat business and referrals. Customer experience covers customer service, customer care, and everything else.

Customer experience ensures smooth day-to-day interactions and builds trust in the moment. 

Define your customer experience tradition, lifestyle, and norms.

Customer experience is not guesswork. You must have a comprehensive business strategy for customer experience. This involves the formulation of client charters, service-level agreement measures, and strategies. You cannot set goals for what you do not know.  Customer care cannot be owned by a single department. 

It is a cross-functional effort of customer experience, relationship-building, and operational execution that must be involved in defining the customer care tradition of a business.

With the Customer experience strategy, it is a walk in the park to design the end-to-end customer journey that aligns with the brand’s values and business goals.

Treat customer experience as a value centre, not a cost centre.

Traditionally, customer care is seen as an expense, leading to minimized investments. When customer experience is treated as a strategic asset, it automatically triples customer loyalty, reputation, retention, and revenue. The customer will move from one corner of Kampala to another to have coffee, even when there are so many coffee shops in their neighbourhood.

Your tradition establishes the tone, your lifestyle defines the everyday practice, and your conventions ensure that everyone is on the same page. It’s all about providing a consistent, great, and memorable experience for your customers.

A mindset shift is critical.

Once you have defined your customer experience style and norms. You must push for a corresponding decision-making process. In Uganda, we still have people who make assumptions about the quality of customer care based on tribe or the educational level of staff. People learn, but also staff rules can make a difference. You can still have well-educated, rude staff. You can still have polite staff who are well-educated and delight customers. 

Instill in staff a growth mindset by encouraging them to ask: Is my job to turn this interaction into trust? How can I make this customer feel valued, even if they’re upset? What can I learn from this to improve our service?’ This shifts their focus from merely resolving issues to building relationships, fostering empathy, and driving continuous improvement—key elements of a customer-centric culture.

Bad-mannered customers are not kings.

Staff should also be valued. Staff tend to uphold an exceptional customer care culture if they are also respected and valued at work. Customers should not be kings all the time, but the customer should feel heard and valued, so they return, but do not reward their bad behaviour. They might share their positive experience with others. If a customer enjoys bad treatment of staff, they should be warned and further action taken, including banning them.

Human face.

You cannot talk about excellent customer care with 100% automation or AI. There must be a human oversight or human touch at different service points on top of AI. Even text or bulk messages cannot be fully automated. That is why a certain food delivery e-commerce platform was put on the spot for recommending pork to a Muslim in a text. Yes, they have an updated database system and tools, but they erred.  

The human element is the cornerstone of effective customer experience, serving as the irreplaceable differentiator between transactional support and meaningful, loyalty-building relationships. Humans have the emotional intelligence to detect nuance, tone, and emotion. A disgruntled customer isn’t just a checklist to go through in under ten minutes.

Humans can sense emotions, which is crucial for resolving issues that require understanding beyond AI prompts or customer care manuals. Invest in adequate staff. Not a few members of staff are just trying to save costs. Who says AI can completely replicate an authentic human connection? Trust grows when customers feel seen and heard, and excel at context-driven solutions that rigid scripts or AI cannot replicate judgment calls. 

Develop training and product training.

You cannot maintain a customer care culture without training or assuming they can learn on the job. Every member of staff should know all products, services, and rate cards at their fingertips. Product knowledge training must be done for all staff. It must be emphasised during induction. Staff should not start work without proper customer care training. Every member of staff, including the security guards, can impact customer care. Train them all.

Annual refresher courses and ongoing professional development opportunities should be provided to maintain high standards of customer care. Training should also incorporate role-playing exercises, case studies, customer handling manuals, and feedback sessions to enhance the training’s effectiveness. 

Build an audit and monitoring system.

You cannot track and maintain a certain level of customer care in a business if you are not tracking the experience daily. Plan to invest in mystery shoppers. Have experts audit staff on preparedness and planning regarding customer experience. You can always document the best customer experience incidents per week and review them with staff periodically. 

Businesses should have an integrated CRM system in place for easy monitoring. Develop tools and processes to measure and improve care quality. Track metrics like Customer Effort Score (CES).

Develop a Service Level Agreement (SLA) culture to enable you to track customer experience. A Service Level Agreement (SLA) functions as a legally binding contract between a service provider and its clientele, explicitly detailing the anticipated service quality. It formalizes the provider’s commitment to deliver specified services and establishes quantifiable benchmarks for performance evaluation. 

The core purpose of an SLA is to cultivate mutual trust and accountability. By clearly outlining expectations, SLAs facilitate effective performance management, stimulate continuous service improvement, and provide a structured mechanism for conflict resolution. This structured approach minimizes misunderstandings and ensures that both parties are aligned on the terms and conditions of the service provision.

Design a reward and punishment system for customer care. 

As a business, design a reward system for staff excelling in customer experience staff so that certain norms stick. The consistent ones can win shopping vouchers. As a business, you can also invest in whistle-blowing tools to reward those who report unacceptable customer care incidents. Staff should also sign customer care pledge cards every year to ensure compliance and commitment.

It is also worth noting that businesses that view customer experience as a value center rather than a cost center achieve double revenue growth. A business that delivers exceptional customer service immediately builds goodwill. A customer-centric business model leads to significant success, quick resolution of complaints, and careful follow-up to ensure customer value and relationship strengthening. A company with great care follows up later to ensure the customer feels valued, strengthening their relationship.

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