Pick our brains - Knowledgebase
Question 9 of 32 View all 32 questions
- Q.How important is customer experience in running a successful business in today’s marketplace?
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- Jamie Greenwood
- NJL Yorkline
A.Paramount - being better than the rest = more business
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- Michael Bates
- Walton Bates Associates
A.Critical: because there is so much competition in every sector you must take your chances when you can get them. Clients are paid marketing.
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- Ian Baggett
- Adderstone Group
A.Not that relevant in most of our businesses.
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A.Key.
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A.It’s very, very important. In my book staff come first before customers. This may sound strange, but highly satisfied and motivated staff will deliver higher levels of customer satisfaction. Without satisfied customers the business will go nowhere. The Service/ Profit Chain shows that satisfied staff produce satisfied customers who are happy to pay well for good service. They will come back time and time again and recommend their friends and relations also. The end result is that the company is profitable and has a sound future.
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A.It’s the be all and end all. It’s the quality of service, the delivery of service that will determine the successful from the unsuccessful companies in the future. The customer experience is absolutely vital.
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A.Well, gosh, it’s paramount. Without customers you haven’t got a business and, again, you’re only as good as your last job and I still find certain sectors, without singling them out, that they feel they’re doing the customers a favour instead of treating the customer as a king.
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- David Stonehouse
- TSG
A.Critical, although do tend to overlook too often in the day to day workings!
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- Tony Whelan
- Whelan Construction
A.8/10 - Most of our business is repeat business.
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A.It’s very important because they recommend new business all the time. We get more new business from recommendations than any other thing and I think most people do too.
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A.Very
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A.You can’t have a successful business without successful customer experience, it’s just impossible. So it’s absolutely essential. The way that that works is it’s as good as it possibly can be and constantly being improved.
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- David Gillam
- Spinnaka Ltd
A.For us it’s everything. The majority of our business comes through recommendation, from people speaking to other people. It really quite surprised me that when we started getting into what’s called the second charge market, or the loans business, and doing valuations, our first ever customer actually recommended us to his biggest competitors. It seemed quite bizarre at the time, but it was on the basis that he said we had a much better service than the other people he dealt with. It seems strange but people are generally quite helpful in that way; they tell people about their experiences and say, these guys are good, deal with them.
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- Paul Callaghan
- Leighton Ltd
A.I guess when we say customer experience we’re saying how, particularly with us, our business tends to rely on repeat business or long term relationships. We don’t sell a one-off product and then not expect the customer to come back to us again. All of our customers we hope are going to be with us for a long period of time so somebody like British Airways, one of our biggest customers, has been with us since 2001 and the relationship gets stronger and stronger all the time. That’s because as a customer we hope they’re going to regard us as being very responsive, very able, able to meet what they require and in a timely manner and also to be wary of cost problems that they would have. But, at the end of the day, the customer determines whether the business is going to succeed or not. If you’ve got a very good staff and you’ve got a very good product but you ain’t got any customers then there’s no business there. The customer experience must be good, particularly for anybody who wants to have long term relationships with customers.
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- Martin McTague
- Pical CIC
A.It’s vital. I think if you’re not customer facing and you’re not aware of what the customers are experiencing then you are inevitably going to make mistakes. I don’t say we get it right all the time but we try.
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- Fiona Raglan
- Dipsticks Research
A.Hugely. It’s the most important aspect of our business, and we have to deliver it exceptionally otherwise we wouldn’t get any repeat business. It’s quite interesting, we’re doing a huge amount of work at the moment for Yorkshire Tourist Board and I was down in York last week. They had a whole array of front covers for their next brochure and they didn’t know which one to choose. So I took the opportunity to say, “Give them to us, we’ll do an omnibus survey of 1,000 people, we won’t charge you anything for it, and let’s just run it with half a dozen questions and we’ll deliver the results back to you at the beginning of this week so you can make an informed decision before you go into the print run.” It’s very important for me to be able to offer those extra bits and try and improve the whole customer experience so that they think about us when they make any sort of decision, and that goes for all clients in all fields. It’s not just giving away free work, but it’s all about understanding your customers’ needs. To take another example, we do a huge amount of work for the BBC Trust and they wanted to do some tendering. They were going to do a conference call and I said no, I’ll come down to London tomorrow. To me that kind of relationship is very important.
