Media release- 7/1/2011

Top 8 Business Challenges in 2011

The success of business in 2011 will be determined by the quality of the employee & customer experiences consistently delivered.

The ability to attract the right people, increased loyalty, reduce marketing costs and the power of customer’s recommendations will all result in growth and profitability.

Managing Director Chris Bell of Customer Experiences a company that specialises in the development of high quality customer experience said business must understand that in today’s global market customers dictates the terms. The fact is customers have an abundance of choice thanks to an increasingly competitive economy and the internet.

Bell said that if business focuses on the following eight challenges in 2011 and adopt a real customer focused culture, they will gain a clear competitive advantage.

Top 8 Challenges

1) Focus on your business from the customer’s perspective the only perspective that matters.
Consistently, surveys show that business believe they are delivering a better customer experience than there customers do.

2) Disengaged employees don’t deliver consistently high quality customer experiences
57% of NZ employees go to work everyday disengaged, when did you last have a “rave about” customer experience?

3) We are less loyal as customers than we have ever been.
Loyalty is not about Fly Buys or Air points it’s about building real relationships

4) The right people want to work with organisations that focus on them and their customers.
Do this and they will start knocking on your door. Do this and they will start delivering the magic at your front counter

5) When a customers talks to others about you, today the world listens
Positive word of mouth is today most powerful form of advertising. Negative word of mouth can put you under.

6) Creativity is the 2011 competitive advantage
Are you capitalising on the creativity within your organisation?

7) Don’t survey your customers unless you are totally committed to acting on the data
Try ringing me at dinner time to ask once again what I think of your customer experience.

8) Most products & services are commodities leaving price as the only possible competitive advantage
Today’s competitive advantage will come from the value you can add over and above just the sale of a product or service at a competitive price.

The key, Chris Bell suggests, is to realise that in a world of excess, uniformity and repetition, people buy experiences, not products or services. When people feel good about their experience they will not only return, they will tell their friends.
To turn a financial exchange into a rewarding experience, businesses have to be creative and they have to be fully committed to seeing the world through their customers’ eyes.

- Chris Bell is managing director of Customer Experiences; a company that specialises in helping businesses improve the way in which they interact with customers and clients. www.customerexperiences.co.nz