Customer Obsession: How to Take Action on the Customer-centric Catchphrase
For more than 25 years across a wide range of businesses, I have been leading customer-centric organizations and gaining a deep understanding of what it takes to build and maintain long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with customers. Throughout my career, I have been focused on creating customer-centric cultures that put the needs of customers at the forefront of every decision.
By establishing clear performance metrics, implementing effective customer feedback mechanisms, and leveraging the latest tools and technologies, I have been able to create a culture of excellence that delivers measurable results.
What customer obsession means to me
I was recently asked my thoughts around the term “customer obsession.” To be honest, I sometimes have a hard time with it. Everyone is now saying that they’re customer-focused or customer-obsessed. It’s become a mantra. But for me, it's really about what you do, more than how you talk about it.
I think about the first time that I heard the phrase customer-obsessed. It was from Jeff Bezos in the early days of Amazon. If you look at that company and its tremendous growth, it still has a real focus on customers. It has built its people, processes, and tools to empower all employees, so at the end of the day, they can do the right thing for the customer. And that, for me, is being customer-obsessed.
Granted, for B2B companies like 8x8, that makes customer obsession a little different from Amazon’s retail story. But in my view, the secret sauce is balancing what your customer believes they bought with what they actually received, and it means doing the right thing that works for everyone and forging a true partnership.
The reality is, it has to be a partnership between the customer and the vendor. If a relationship just works for the customer and not the vendor, then it's not a true partnership. To that end, customer obsession doesn’t mean that the customer is always right. Customer obsession involves mutual respect, finding a middle ground, developing a great partnership, and at the end of the day, doing the right thing.
Words are cheap. Action speaks volumes. So recently, we went behind the scenes at 8x8 to share how we as a company have, and still are, taking the necessary steps to transform ourselves into a customer-obsessed organization.
Where our customer-obsessed story started
Every company has a story. Ours at 8x8 is more than 30 years in the making. The company has both created and weathered a fair share of change over three decades. But in 2020, the pandemic changed 8x8 in an unprecedented way. As organizations around the world were suddenly forced to send the majority of their employees home, there became an immediate—almost overnight—need for our cloud-based unified communications and contact center solutions to support remote work.
For 8x8 and its customer service department, this meant an influx of service requests unmatched in our company’s history, and that immediacy of both customer volume and need truly set 8x8 staff on its heels. Calls, chats, and emails requesting the rapid and sometimes overnight deployment of cloud-based services for organizations of every size and every industry were being triaged at best. There was no time to get to know and develop a partnership with every new customer as we had focused on before. The volume, need, and time sensitivity were too great.
Our support, technical, and professional services organizations did the best they could against overwhelming expectations, but critical metrics, such as first day resolution and customer satisfaction (CSAT), still suffered considerably, with negative sentiment spilling over to social media and business and customer review sites.
We knew we had to take action.
Creating a customer experience (CX) vision
A customer experience game changer for 8x8 was the reinstatement of the role of a Chief Customer Officer (CCO). We were delighted that industry veteran Walt Weisner took on this role, bringing a quarter of a century of experience in leading customer care and support roles. Walt delivered to the organization an aspirational three-year vision and plan to not just improve the organization’s customer experience, but make it a competitive differentiator.
The CX strategy is simple and includes the following elements:
- Listen to the voice of the customer
- Establish metrics and milestones
- Commit to change
This three-year plan means setting clear and achievable milestones to drive our customer experience transformation forward. Year one focuses on transformation. Year two focuses on optimization. Then with year three, it’s all about leveraging and maintaining a built-to-last program.
In an internal case study, my team shared how they and their teams have implemented our CX strategy and the positive effect it’s had to date on the 8x8 customer experience. Now, we want to share that story with other organizations who have the same great customer experience aspirations and determination.
