Growth – it comes from customer experience

IN MY last article I spoke of what growth means to me and overall how we’ve managed to experience growth within Management Consulting in KwaZulu-Natal. Per my last article I alluded to Customer Experience being a contributor to growth. In this article I will explore what Customer Experience is and how focusing on this can assist an organisation in achieving growth.

Customer experience is the journey of a customer, it is the sum of all the customer’s interactions with an organisation. This includes, but is not limited to, when a customer first becomes aware of an organisation and its offerings, to opening an account and making a purchase, as well as to making a payment to that organisation.

A quote from the founder of WalMart aptly demonstrates the importance of Customer Experience. “There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

In a world where competing products and services are increasingly similar, customer experience is often the only clear differentiator and as a result is the key to keeping existing customers and attracting new ones. Per the Customer Experience Barometer (CEB) conducted by KPMG which measured Customer Experience across 30 key attributes, it was found that customers placed greater importance on “value for money” and “staff who are honest and tell the truth” than branding and the look and feel of the store/office.

Further to that the CEB also measured performance against importance across the 30 key attributes. The findings reflect a significant gap between performance and importance. Herein lies the opportunity for organisations to improve the customer experience by focusing on what is important to their customers and improving the performance thereof.

Placing the customer at the heart of the organisation, that is creating a customer-centric culture, provides the opportunity to gain insight into what customers value, and in this way organisations can look toward improving the customer experience.

By building customer-centric cultures, organisations are discovering new ways of doing business with their customers and new products or services that their customers truly want or need. In doing so organisations are able to demonstrate an understanding of their customers, leading to increased trust and growth in their customer base and revenue.

When organisations start taking the lead on generating excellent customer service, they can begin setting the industry standard. By being the best, they set the expectations of their customers and become the supplier or service provider of choice.

In my next article I will look at cost optimisation and revenue enhancement as a means to growth in organisations.

Ebrahim is a KPMG director and head of management consulting – KZN. He can be reached at 083 611 1184 or farouk.ebrahim@kpmg.co.za.