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For 2021, Think ‘CX (Customer Experience) First’ When You Plan Your Marketing

This article is more than 3 years old.

Investing in a superior, shareworthy customer experience and spirited, humane and timely customer service is hands down the most powerful “marketing” move you can make in 2021.

“Of course you would say that, Micah,” I hear you chuckle, being a customer service turnaround and customer experience consultant. But, but, but... I have always been a proponent of traditional marketing, and a student of it from Hopkins to Ogilvy and onward. The thing is, though, while traditional marketing retains it power, in our current, customer- and social media-driven era, there’s now a built-in catch:

The deeper the penetration a company’s traditional marketing makes, the bigger the chance for it to be taken ironically if the customer experience doesn’t live up to the hype.

So please do your marketing team a favor: give those great marketing professionals something worth marketing about, that won’t embarrass them down the road.

Fortuitously, there are so many ways to invest in improving–even transforming–your customer experience and the quality of your customer service delivery. I’d suggest you put your efforts, resources, and money toward some or all of the following:

• Customer service standards (best practices) development and deployment. (To get you started on this, email me – forbes@micahsolomon.com – for my free “Nine Principles of Great Customer Service” document.)

• eLearning customized to your company’s customer service realities and aspirations

• Live training, including the teaching of situational empathy, the kind of empathic skill that allows a customer-facing employee to focus quickly and effectively on the challenges and passions of the customer being addressed at the moment

• Homegrown efforts such as starting a company or departmental “customer service book club”

• Sustainment: Sustainment is essential whether your initiative is entirely homegrown and DIY or involves an outside company like ours. (Sustainment is known in my customer service consulting firm as “making the initiative live on after Mr. Solomon has left the building,” but it’s just as essential when your initiative is entirely homegrown and DIY.

One of the best sustainment approaches is free and straightforward to implement: start what I call a “customer service minute” (it actually takes a few minutes, but no more than 10); this is a mini-meeting where you discuss, at the beginning of the day or beginning of the shift, a single principle of customer service improvement. Have a different employee lead it every day so that they can “learn by teaching” and so the burden never falls disproportionately on a single attendee.

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