Helping existing clients transform their mobile customer experience and build better, more empathetic customer relationships.
(Adrian Swinscoe, Independent customer experience consultant, adviser, speaker and author)
Ever found yourself in the situation where a new customer gets in touch and is keen to talk to you about your solution?
Excited, you arrange to meet them and start to talk about how you can not only provide a ‘fix’ for their current challenge, but that your platform or solution can do so much more.
However, after the paperwork has been signed, your solution has been implemented and the client’s immediate problem has been fixed, you find yourself feeling frustrated that the client is not using your solution more widely.
Sound familiar?
It’s a situation I come across a lot when talking to tech sales and account management teams. Some of the challenges they face with landing new accounts and expanding existing ones are not uncommon.
Companies often buy technology to ‘fix’ a certain problem despite the potential for broader use and application. However, in buying the technology and achieving a ‘fix’ for their immediate problem, the technology provider often gets ‘pigeon-holed’. Whilst frustrating, this is normal behaviour as it’s in in our nature to categorise people and things, so we can maintain some sort of order in our memories. Our brains can’t help pigeon-holing people and things.
Other companies have lots of ideas but struggle to put many of them into action. Often this is not about the lack of desire, but more about the lack of opportunity to work more collaboratively to solve problems, do more and achieve more.
With these challenges in mind, I have been working with the team at OpenMarket to help their clients see the greater potential of the technology they’ve purchased. By working with them to shape practical action plans for broader applications, these companies are able to transform their mobile customer experience and build better, more empathetic relationships with their customers.
Our approach has been to design solutions that combine customer experience best practice, psychological and behavioural insights, OpenMarket’s Empathetic Interaction, and a lean/agile approach to problem solving. It helps companies quickly identify potential new applications and develop ‘quick and dirty’ action plans for implementation.
Does it work?
Well, we recently trialed a new CX workshop format with a customer in London. Here’s some feedback from the Product Manager who helped us arrange the workshop:
“I just wanted to say a massive thank you for today – it was really engaging, informative, generated lots of ideas and positive feedback.”
A few days later she went on to say:
“The session last week was great – thank you very much for coming along. We actually sent the first SMS broadcast yesterday – triggered by the ideas that came out of the workshop.”
Great feedback, I am sure you would agree.
What is clear, even after doing one workshop like this, is that there is a real opportunity within these interactive sessions to deliver huge value to OpenMarket’s clients and their customers.
I, for one, am looking forward to helping facilitate more of this activity with companies that are interested in, not only fixing the problem at hand, but taking action to more broadly optimize the customer experience across their organisations.
Author – Adrian Swinscoe, Independent customer experience consultant, adviser, speaker and author of ‘How To Wow: 68 Effortless Ways to Make Every Customer Experience Amazing’