Placing Customer Experience at the Heart of Opportunity
Do you know that 65% of today’s business leaders say the next two years will be more transformational than the past 50 years? This is an exciting, fast-changing new era. One in which Customer Experience will shape the competitive landscape.
A rapidly changing world
In the current age of digitization, companies are increasingly able to refine and verify their understanding of what customers’ needs are – and then personalize their products, channels and services. But more importantly, they can innovate new ways to engage, create opportunity, and capture and increase loyalty and value.
Regardless of the industry you’re in –retail, hospitality, telecommunications, financial services, and so on – it is clearer than ever: understanding customers’ needs and acting upon it at any point of their engagement with your business is a Must Meet. There is simply no way of understating this, yet there is ample opportunity to overlook it or to downplay it. My advice: Don’t. I’ll say it again: This is a Must Meet. It’s essential and vital in order to stay relevant, solidify growth and earn market leadership.
Companies that are at the forefront of customer excellence face the challenge that delivering this isn’t something you can easily implement or something you can mandate. Rather it’s something innate to your company’s culture, belief system and governing values. Authenticity and consistency are key to making it happen. So, no – it’s not for the fainthearted, nor for the wannabees. You have to be genuinely committed to making it work – committed to putting your customers at the heart of everything you do.
Fits like a glove
For us at SES Networks, Customer Experience isn’t simply an initiative or something we like to talk about. It’s something we live every day. And given we’re the world’s leading satellite operator and provider of managed services, our customers expect nothing less! Our customers have made and continue to make tremendous investments in our company and our solutions. Investments that fuel their opportunities for growth and expansion. And let’s not forget their reputation and relationships with their own end-customers. For SES Networks, providing a world-class Customer Experience is not just a competitive advantage… it’s a habit, an expectation, a gene in our DNA.
So, we set out to bring SES Networks’ Customer Experience to the next level, a commitment to delivering Continuous Excellence. It meant elevating to a bigger, all-encompassing and more complex, overall Experience Management strategy. And that’s what lead to the creation of Heartbeat. Starting as a Customer Experience programme, Heartbeat evolved into a full business methodology covering our strategic, tactical and operational grounds and impacting all aspects on how we do business.
Customer Experience and brand experience have always been closely intertwined. Brand makes the promise, and designed Customer Experience helps make that promise real at every touchpoint, process, product and service. This creates value for our customers and partners by developing solutions that enable the best end-user experiences. It shifts our focus beyond making SES Networks a company that is easy to do business with to empowering our customers and partners via unparalleled end user experiences.
The vital ingredient
But let’s be clear. Cleverly designing and improving experiences is good, but it won’t get you all the way there. Essential to our efforts is our ability to bring culture into play. Individual employees are at the heart of this success. There’s no way to build loyal customers without loyal employees. Our employees are the ultimate brand ambassadors and drivers of Customer Experience. Almost every member of the SES Networks team engages directly with our customers at some point – if not through direct contact, then by enabling those that do. Our customers feel it. And that, in turn, impacts how they feel about our brand, their willingness to think along and create new opportunities and greater value. This all starts with individual employees. Employee experience is vital to Customer Experience.
Through Heartbeat, we set out to harness, enrich and capture our unique culture so it can help bring our brand to life, make our promises shine, and fuel the experiences we want to create with authenticity and genuine commitment. This is what sets leading companies apart. A heartfelt, unique and authentic culture and the means to demonstrate it in everything we do for our customers.
What’s next…
In line with this relentless customer-centric drive and spirit of innovation, our next area of focus is personalization. In a world of diverse people and roles, a personalized approach and the ability to cater to individual needs is critical to ensuring the best Customer Experience possible. And that’s what we plan to do… use data to create a personalized experience for our customers.
In it together
Customer Experience at SES Networks is more than a function or a stand-alone discipline. Our dedicated Customer Experience team is the central role in this and is continuously uncovering new ways to help our customers and partners get the maximum value from their investment. A team that is the center of excellence and expertise for everyone; that seeks out new insights and innovative ways of engaging with customers; and that works very closely with the rest of the organization, so we can raise the bar together.
That’s what Customer Experience is all about. It’s not a buzz phrase. And it’s not something you boast about on your home page. Customer Experience should be the reason you come to work every morning. It should drive every decision the organization makes. It should be at the heart of your opportunity.
