Is your business as customer-centric as you think? - TNS Global

Is your business as customer-centric as you think?

Customer Experience 1


You can’t create a truly customer-centric business culture without delivering actionable and tailored customer insight to every employee every time they touch customers. Companies that hold back from using customer experience data in their daily business will only stretch the gap between the performance they invest in and the customer preference they seek for their products.

Many businesses believe that they are focused on their customer. Their executives have crafted customer strategies and performance metrics. Their employees are equipped with customer satisfaction metrics and multi-platform complaint management procedures. And yet, they are not ready to identify and respond to customer issues quickly when things go wrong in daily business. The problem is, in most cases, they have not been able to plug the voice of the customer into their day-to-day business culture.



Mind the gap! TNS’s Customer Insights Survey proves that companies can no longer ensure loyalty and spend simply by providing a reliable customer service. In fact, many of the customers that defect to a competitor actually feel their existing provider was doing a good job, but they still moved anyway. And such defections are taking place across categories which were once considered essentially ‘sticky’ with low churn rates: 60% of customers are likely to defect to another brand when buying new electronic products; 57% would replace their car with a different brand; and 64% would opt for another manufacturer when selecting white goods like a washing machine. The most successful businesses have bucked this trend by translating what’s best about their performance into an active customer preference for their products and services. TNS’s research shows that market

leaders have the lowest performance-preference gap in their competitive environment. In fact, TNS found that customers with the strongest relationships and preference for their providers are three times more likely to stay loyal, six times more likely to recommend the brand and five times more likely to buy additional products and services from the company. A paradigm shift in sharing and using customer experience data The difference between these successful businesses and the many others with dangerously wide performance-preference gaps is that they have developed a system to make sense of the voice of the customer at every level of their organisation. They have broken down the walls between customer strategy, decided upon at the C-suite level, and the customer interaction that takes place at the frontline.

They don’t just provide their employees with a means of hearing what customers say; they guide them towards tailored customer insight and prioritised actions that align perfectly with what the business wants to achieve. This is the challenge that most businesses face in closing the performance-preference gap. They must move beyond upgrading their customer experience management and start transforming their entire organisation, unifying it around the customer experiences that actually drive preference. Doing so will require nothing short of a paradigm shift in how they share and use data. The tools required to make that shift happen are now available, but they still require the will to use them; to translate customer insight into the backbone of operational execution.



Executing strategy from the frontline Any business seeking to become truly customercentric needs a precise understanding of the touchpoints that matter most to its customers, and the pain points they experience. But this understanding is just the start. While it remains separated from the day-to-day customer interactions that take place on the frontline it can have minimal influence over the experiences that are created – and whether these will deliver lasting value in terms of preference and loyalty.

Plenty of businesses have made strategic decisions about their customer priorities; many have provided employees with tools that capture the voice of the customer. The problem is that very few have managed to connect the two and channel the relevant customer insights to their frontline employees in daily business.

Transforming businesses through operational customer insight What these businesses require is a continuous, systematic process for capturing the experiences that customers have and presenting front line employees with timely action plans that fit the customer priorities. They need a means of ensuring that every

business decision, at every level, is informed by realtime operational customer feedback. Such timely, actionable insight is precisely what our partnership with market-leading customer experience software company Medallia provides.



What does true customer-centricity look like? TNS uses Medallia’s market-leading technology to create a breakthrough, transformational Customer Experience Management solution. It captures customer data in real-time, channels it to all relevant employees and prioritises actions on the customer experiences that matter most. It doesn’t just make the voice of the customer heard; it translates it into the actions that will deliver the greatest value to the business, including increased preference for a company’s products.

Plugging prioritised, timely and actionable insights into all areas of a company isn’t just a customer experience management solution; it’s a business transformation tool. It unites organisations, builds cultures and focuses operations on delivering the customer experiences that count.

And it empowers employees at all levels to make the decisions that will safeguard future success. Some of the key principles of this new paradigm are: ■■

Customer experience data is captured instantly across all forms of customer interaction, including web, social and mobile in one place

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Relevant insights are revealed with TNS’s leading approach to decoding customer relationships along with the latest social media and text analytics tools

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Tailored customer information is securely delivered to every employee from the C-suite to the frontline, in a relevant and actionable format, in real-time

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Delivering the frontline strategic alignment that business leaders want

“We believe in a centralised approach to synthesising all customer information rather than having different pockets of people collecting different data and making their own assumptions about what that data says.” Ann Lewnes SVP and CMO, Adobe Source: TNS Customer Insight Surveys

Information is prioritised around actions that fix issues as they emerge, focusing efforts on measures that will have the greatest impact on customer preference



About TNS customer insight surveys TNS customer insight surveys 2013/2014 explored the views of over 40,000 customers across 20 countries in a range of categories. The studies provide in-depth and actionable insights into customer behaviour and used TNS’s TRI*M methodology to investigate switching behaviour and attitudes, relationship strength, the proportions of at risk customers in each sector, the factors influencing retention/switching, and more.

Find out more To discover more about this unique new approach please get in touch [email protected]

As part of the programme, TNS also explored the views of CMOs of global organisations via a series of qualitative interviews to capture their perspectives on customer experience management today.

About TNS TNS advises clients on specific growth strategies around new market entry, innovation, brand switching and stakeholder management, based on long-established expertise and market-leading solutions. With a presence in over 80 countries, TNS has more conversations with the world’s consumers than anyone else and understands individual human behaviours and attitudes across every cultural, economic and political region of the world. TNS is part of Kantar, the data investment management division of WPP and one of the world’s largest insight, information and consultancy groups. Please visit www.tnsglobal.com for more information.
