International Process and Performance Institute

Customer Interactions - How important are they?

Every time - and I do mean EVERY TIME - a customer interacts with a business that interaction plays a significant role in the business's profitable revenue (growth or shrinkage). Every customer interaction is an opporunity for us as a business to differeniate ourselves because the hard reality is that most of us aren't very good at it at all.

The only thing our customers care about are the interactions they have with us. Each contact from a customer should be greeted as what it really is, an opportunity show our customers that we not only care, we care about what they care about and our there to make our customers' lives simpler, easier and more successful.

Things like how we are available, how quickly we respond, how good we are at understanding what the customer wants from us (precluded by our understanding of the customer's need), and (of course) how well we do at fulfilling that need are fast becoming the "make or break" points for customer loyalty.

At the end of the day the only thing that really matters to our customers are these interaction points, these customer-facing or customer-oriented processes. And the ONLY thing that matters is how the customer judges that interaction - and they (we) absolutely judge the businesses we interact with.

The overall game plan is to eliminate every possible reason that we can for our customers to need to contact us, then when they do (there will still be plenty of contacts I promise you) we need to make sure we respond when our customers expect us to, in the way they expect us to, and to help them achieve their goal (why they contacted us!) as quickly and easily as possible.

This stuff should be on every CXO's agenda... period.