The 2006 Leadership Excellence Summit
"The Customer Focused Leader"
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Jeanne Bliss CustomerBliss |
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Bliss began by questioning the participants about why they should even care about customer loyalty. The answer is customer loyalty increases retention which in turn increase revenue, increases cross-selling opportunities, increases word-of-mouth and reduces costs because if you do it right the first time, people will not complain and you do not have to spend money dealing with the complaints.
"You have to earn loyalty," Bliss emphasized. It's not automatically there as many companies this it is. To earn loyalty you need to make customer leadership a strategic priority.
She has had to "arm wrestle" many companies to put customer priority on the agenda. This is because many companies mistakenly believe that they already have this as a priority. Corporations tell their employees to focus on the customer and this results in each employee focusing in a different way and nothing meaningful happens for the customer.
Companies can take two approaches to dealing with customers, Bliss said. They can make the experience complex to their advantage or they can "break the cycle and advocate for the customer." To explain this, Bliss said that for instance, if you're taking out a loan from a bank, the bank can follow the first approach and make you wait for an appointment, fill out long forms, and not tell you when you'll get a definitive answer. However, if the bank takes the second approach, it can allow you to make an appointment ahead of time, fill out the forms online before you come and let you know that you'll get an answer within 24 hours. The latter approach is much more likely to result in a loyal customer.
Bliss said that part of the way to achieve customer loyalty is to create an emotional experience for each person that wants to do business with you. One company that has created such an experience is Harley-Davidson. It has managed to not only create a customer base that is made up of everyone from doctors to lawyers to construction workers but customers that live and breathe its brand. The Harley-Davidson logo is the most widely requested trademark tattoo. How many other companies find its logo being tattooed on its customers?
After explaining how important the customer experience is to an organization, Bliss explained to the attendees how they could implement this into their company. The first step is to "establish baseline metrics that compete with quarterly sales goals." You must elevate customers to the position of asset within your company and have an annual customer plan.
The second step is to define what you'll deliver to the customer. To do this you must know what the customer wants from you and what they value so that you can create the experience. Bliss said that companies often think that customers value one thing when in fact they value something entirely different.
Next, companies must drive accountability. This is one of the harder steps because you must have a way to make employees see how valuable the customer is and what happens if they have a good and bad experience. One way to do this is to have a customer room. This is an actual room in your company that has things like sales charts and surveys from your customers. Each month, employees should walk through this room so that each can visually see how what they are doing, or not doing, is impacting the customer.
The last steps to achieving customer loyalty and to improving the experience is to, based on the information gained from the previous steps, redefine the experience and implement it. There must be continual evaluation and improvement to this plan.
Bliss finished by emphasizing that everyone in the company must be involved in order to achieve the goal of valuing the customer experience. A CEO cannot do it alone. Customer leadership cannot be given to just one person to fix and its value can't be stressed enough.
As "chief customer zealot" driving the strategic crusade for customer profitability for five United States market leaders, Jeanne Bliss has fought valiantly to get "customer" a place on the corporate agenda by redirecting priorities and creating transformational changes to the brands' customer experience. She has led the achievement of 95% loyalty rates, changed customer experiences across 50,000 person organizations and convinced even the staunchest curmudgeons to help push the customer rock up the hill.
Bliss developed her passion for the customer at Lands' End, Inc. where she reported to the company's founder as leader for the Lands' End Customer Experience. She served Allstate Corporation as their officer for Customer Satisfaction & Retention. Bliss was Vice President of Franchise Services for Coldwell Banker Corporation. She was Microsoft Corporation's General Manager of Worldwide Customer & Partner Loyalty. At Mazda Corporation, she initiated the brands' retention effort as Senior Manager, Customer Satisfaction.
She is the author of Chief Customer Officer: Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action, which packages her 25 years' reporting to CEOs as their strategist and zealot for helping them focus their businesses on customers and customer profitability. As President of CustomerBliss, she coaches leaders on how to wrap their company's focus around customer profits. Bliss is a world-wide keynote speaker and coach, helping companies focus on customers as the major asset of their businesses, leading the actions to drive customer profitability.