Turn your business into a success story – invest in an excellent customer experience

An excellent customer experience is a competitive advantage for any enterprise. But how can you differentiate yourself the best on the market by offering an excellent customer experience? Improving the customer experience usually begins with fixing problems, but this alone is not enough to achieve success in the world of business. You need continuous measures and planning instead of simply reacting in order for you to be able to change the customer experience in the direction you want it to go.

Enterprises and organisations exist for their customers. They create services or products for their customers or help with, say, the allocation of their resources. Organisations of course go for growth and profit. Money comes in when customers are satisfied, and satisfied customers buy more and stay as customers for longer. A good customer experience, including impressions and emotions, has a positive impact on customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, and the willingness to recommend the business. In such a positive cycle, finding new customers is easier and growing the existing customer base becomes faster.

Leading the transformation from a sales-focused organisation into a customer-focused organisation

At Innolink, we changed course in 2016 by deciding on so-called organisation-wide Must Win Battles to guide our operations. Developing the customer experience has since been a central strategic goal for knowledge-driven leadership services.

Over the years, developing the customer experience has required investments and making the change from a sales-oriented organisation into a customer-oriented one. The journey has been challenging, but systematic and long-term work has generated results. We have managed to see this challenging transformation through, and our customers can see it. The on-going measurement of the customer experience is part of our knowledge-driven leadership culture and helps us keep track of how our customer-oriented operations develop.

Our customers are more satisfied with the services we provide than they were two years ago, even though our comparison database indicates that the Coronavirus pandemic has generally had a negative impact on customer satisfaction.

According to a strategic customer survey we conducted this year, we have been able to make our organisation even more customer-oriented. Our NPS score, indicating the willingness to recommend, is noticeably high at 74 on a scale of -100 to 100. Other results measuring the customer experience also indicate that our customers are very satisfied with the work done together with our knowledge-driven leadership specialists. Our customers feel that their contact persons at Innolink are very willing to serve (4.8/5), reliable (4.7/5), and skilled (4.7/5).

Staff is key when it comes to developing the customer experience

Our customer survey certifies our customer pledge: “We facilitate everyday management.” Our goal is to provide vision and to be proactive in supporting the everyday operations of our customers and to provide them with the best service in a smooth and easy way. This generates business benefits for both parties.

We demand a lot from ourselves to develop an excellent customer experience and encourage each other to achieve it continuously. In support of an excellent personnel experience, we have built a personnel strategy that supports our self-guided specialist in reacting in an agile and innovative way to our customer needs. Bold innovation energises employees and creates memorable encounters with customers. There will be a nice annual bonus added to the personnel fund when the wanted NPS is achieved. This will be a good counterbalance to our hard targets and requirements and build the foundation for constructing a new success story.

Now is the time to boldly refresh the ways in which you encounter your customers. How are you developing your customer experience? What kinds of experiences do you want to provide for your customers? Let’s create a comprehensive vision of your customer experience together to support the management and development of your business operations.

The author is the CEO and owner of Innolink

Pekka Vuorela

pekka.vuorela@innolink.fi

+358 50 5718804

www.innolink.eu

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