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In my past 6 years as a consultant for some of the biggest brands in Financial Services, Tech, and Retail, strong Change Management has been the difference between extraordinary adoption and just a completed project, or even success or project failure. Prior to making your associates aware of the change, I recommend completing a Change Management Assessment. While creating your plan to build Desire, a great idea is to bring in 2-4 influential associates to understand what their concerns are, questions they have, and their thoughts on what the general populous reactions will be to the changes. Sometimes the most forgotten area of change management, Reinforcement is your opportunity to implement incentives (and consequences if necessary) to help your associates keep/adopt the change.

And they should, as companies with top 20% VoC programs report (Aberdeen Group) 10X YoY increase in company revenue compared to all others If you have a VoC program or are interesting in building one, where are all the places you should “listen” to their voice? After customer service interactions, whether it be with a human or through self service, transaction or incident surveys attempt to capture the customer’s experience while trying to solve a problem, answer a question, or request service from a company. Much, much more Phone trees, agents entering in disposition codes, and customers entering in email and chat boxes their reason for contacting you are easy to calculate and specific behavioral feedback, your customers are providing you about their experience. Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)

So instead of talking about empowerment, I talk with my reports about how I can help them exercise their responsible freedom, and how they can help their reports exercise theirs. It’s a great book for the Customer Service Leader who looking for direction that spans both strategic and tactical, combined with real life stories. We need to hire, develop and foster our associates (and our associates’ associates) to think critically, do what they believe is the right thing for the customer, and not feel they have done something wrong by erring on the side of the customer. Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)

In the first part of this post, Defining a Great Customer Experience – Starting at the Top, we talked about the difficulties in defining a great customer experience, how its more than just “Delivery > Expectations”, and how a great experience starts at the top of the companies funnel. The expectations provided during the Awareness, Consideration, and Intent [to purchase] phases of the sales funnel process set the stage for Purchase/Conversion and bottom of the funnel interactions