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What's Your "Customer Resolution" for 2009?

By Bill Cusick
January 6, 2009

Ideas on how to make meaningful goals to improve your company’s customer experience.

The year has begun, and I think we all know this is a challenging time for businesses. But one way to optimize your bottom line in 2009 is to make at least one “customer resolution.”

This is a simple exercise that can yield positive results. The idea is to resolve to improve at least one aspect of your company’s customer experience.

Here are a few quick ideas.

• Grab as much of your “standard” customer correspondence as you can get your hands on. This could be monthly statements and invoices; customer form letters; anything that you know is sent to large numbers of customers on a regular basis. Now look at them. Nothing fancy. Just read through them as if you were a customer, a customer without any special knowledge about your industry or company.

• Pop on to your website, and pick two or three easy tasks that a typical prospect or customer might like to accomplish. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes, and walk through these tasks – gathering information, asking a question, or (if you have this) paying a bill or other customer process. Note how many clicks it takes, and how simple or complex it seems.

• Call into your company’s offices or call center and, acting as a customer, attempt to get a couple of questions answered. Pay particular attention to the tone of the employee as he or she helps you. Or, if possible, listen in to a few actual customer calls. Note nature of the customer requests, the hold time (if possible) and the tone of the customer at the end of the call.

Here’s my guarantee to you: If you just spend a little time and make a sincere effort to better understand one aspect of the customer experience, you will discover some problem that in hindsight seems incredibly obvious: the billing statement is confusing for no reason; you are using terminology a typical customer doesn’t understand; irrelevant content or poor navigation on your website are getting in the way of what your customers really want; or your call center employees lack the freedom to actually help solve customer problems.

Once you uncover the issues with your customer experience, you’ll see that many are problems that aren’t all that hard to fix. You owe it to your customers and your company to make the effort.

So, what’s your “customer resolution” for 2009? Take the initiative! There’s a big payoff for those that do.

Bill Cusick is CEO of Vox, Inc., a customer experience research and consulting firm. Contact him through the feedback form on our Contact Us page. Copyright 2008 Vox, Inc. All rights reserved.