echelon
unleashing potential

Retaining customers in today's economic climate

Achieving customer service, loyalty and retention - today

For some time, ‘fit for purpose’ has been a key business mantra. In the current economic climate, you could add ‘fit for our time’.

Using the ‘fitness’ metaphor implies some form of on-going corporate training programme in order to keep individuals’ skills sharp and organisations supple. So, while formal training is one of the first budgets to suffer in an economic downturn, organisations need to continue to remain competitive – gaining and keeping customers – and thus they need to develop training programmes where the accent is placed less on formal learning and more on ‘learning smarter’. This means building an organisation’s performance and competitiveness by gaining ‘employee engagement’.

Alistair Morrison, managing director of organisation development specialist, Echelon, explained: “Employee engagement is a deeper commitment to the success of the organisation than mere ‘employee motivation’. We have found that employee engagement is built on effective internal communication – especially in today’s economic climate, which is characterised by change and uncertainty.”

Key drivers to change include:

“Sustainable success in relation to any of these depends on people and process being closely aligned with strategy and having an adaptability to exploit opportunity,” said Morrison, whose company espouses a four stage cycle of research, design, implement and sustain in relation to business success – defined as retaining and gaining customers through understanding your organisation’s ‘service DNA’.

“Service DNA is what your customers really want from your service and is dependent, in part, on the promises you make to them,” explained Echelon’s director of consulting, Jenny Hill. “What customers want is always specific and easily deliverable - but generally inconsistently applied across the business. But, once staff understand what customers want specifically - and the positive effect consistent delivery of it can have on their jobs and relationships - they willingly embrace its adoption and keep up the good work with the help of simple reminders.”

Hill believes that four ways to create customer loyalty are to:

To deliver this, she said, you must:

“You need to get your staff to understand the unique characteristics of the brand promise and delivery that motivate the behaviour of your customers,” added Morrison. “Then you implement the processes, behaviours and motivation in order to deliver a quality customer service experience and sustain the level of service consistently at every point of customer interaction to drive customer retention and advocacy and bottom line performance.”

Since employee communication needs to be planned, kept fresh and provided for each audience in an appropriate ‘voice’, Echelon works with clients to design and implement effective communications programmes that deliver employee engagement. These programmes include a combination of consultancy, internal communications, training, self-paced learning materials and various performance support tools and techniques.

To date, Echelon’s ‘service DNA’ programmes have seen:

Echelon’s programme – build around the four stage cycle of research, design, implement and sustain - ensures customers increase their trust in the client’s service because the client’s staff understand what matters to their customers and how to deliver consistently on these key expectations.

“We believe the key to creating and understanding customer loyalty is to develop a forensic insight into customers’ specific expectations and create a branded customer experience that measures needs and gets customers to act as advocates of the service,” Hill said. “These measurements then lead to not only increased customer loyalty but also a reduction in complaints, an increase in compliments, regular service users and, in a competitive job market, reduced staff turnover.”