Is The Gap Between Customer Service and Customer Experience Limiting Your Market Share?

IIs customer loyalty dead?

Is there any way for manufacturers and distributors to win the loyalty of their customers? Or are there simply too many competitors in the marketplace today to merit any real effort to gain and maintain loyal customers?

At Dorn Group, we firmly believe that customer loyalty is not dead. The key to revitalizing this relationship is for manufacturers and distributors to understand and improve the customer experience.

What is customer experience?

It encompasses the entire journey a customer goes through, from pre- to post-purchase.

For manufacturers and distributors, it’s important to map out this customer journey and identify where you can strengthen your level of interaction with potential customers at every stage.

Understanding Customer Experience

Where and how do manufacturers and distributors gain insight into the true customer experience? And how do they implement a new and improved experience for their customers and their end users?

The first step is to understand what customer experience means. The term means different things to different people in some manufacturing circles.

Customer experience is often seen as the same thing as customer service, which is often the department that’s answering phones, helping distributors, or helping end users in a technical manner.

Customer service can certainly be a part of the customer experience, but it generally encompasses much more than that.

It begins when a potential customer starts seeking a solution to a problem they’re having. It continues all the way to finding a product and a partner to help them fix their problem, the actual purchase of the solution, and the support they receive thereafter.

If you map out and understand the journey that your customers have, you can figure out what to do within each stage of their total customer experience. Find out where you might have gaps and learn where you can strengthen your level of interaction with potential customers at every point across that journey.

Aligning Your Organization

One of the key starting points for improving customer experience is alignment within the organization. All departments, from marketing to operations, should work towards the same common goals and objectives.

You should provide your customer service group, your marketing group, your sales group, and your operations with a unified experience.

You want your customer to have a great sales experience with your operations. If the education and information coming out of the organization is garbage, it will effectively wreck your customer experience.

Consequently, it is absolutely critical in today’s market to have that alignment across your organization, and to have a deep understanding of what that whole experience will look like.

Balancing Your Approach

Another factor to take into consideration is balance. Do you have a balanced approach? Does your marketing team come out and vomit everything out pre-sale so you never hear from that customer again?

Your sales team and the rapid store operations team should be ready to assist the customer with their experience when they’re needed. Marketing should not dominate the pre-sale process while operations are not heard from until it’s time to ship.

To be well balanced, all your functional groups as a manufacturer and distributor should be working together to provide a unified customer experience.

Where To Begin

So, how do you get started?

You can go to a variety of areas, but let’s go back to alignment. Get corporate alignment. Get distributor alignment. Get aligned on the same common goals, objectives, and experience. Set that experience criteria.

Understand what it is you’re going to deliver and be exceptional at it. You don’t have to be exceptional at everything. You don’t have to be the number one company or distributor at all parts of every experience. But whether it’s social, digital, or in-person – whatever part of the process you’ve determined is the priority – be exceptional and good at that. Then, fill in where you need help and support from there.

In essence, start today by getting aligned within your company to understand what you do well and where you can create that value.

When our clients are looking to invest in their business, they want to know where to invest, how much to invest, what type of return they can expect, and the impact that investment will have. In today’s industry, those investments often come in the form of new digital systems, new software products, or new tech products.

But just having the technology doesn’t mean that you’re going to be improving the customer experience.

This is why we tell clients (before they invest heavily in technology or other heavy investments) that they should first understand what problem they are trying to solve. Once you know that, you can identify what areas of the customer journey you’re trying to improve.

And when you improve the customer experience, you know you’ve made a good investment.

Customer loyalty isn’t dead. While it’s true that most industrial equipment and supplies don’t automatically inspire faithful devotion, a great through-channel customer experience can create the kind of loyalty that is critical to your success.

Work to understand the most efficient, cost effective, impactful way to improve the customer experience and you will be on a direct path to increased customer loyalty and market share.

Thoughts? Questions?

As always, feel free to reach out to talk in greater depth about these and other issues impacting your business.