The Keys to Growing a Customer-Obsessed Managed Services Business

In today's hyper-competitive environment, fulfilling customers' demands is the primary reason companies transform their businesses. They position their customers at the epicenter of everything they do and focus on providing them with the best experience possible. These companies aim to deliver more than just good customer service.  

They listen to their customers and employees, collect valuable feedback, ensure they understand customer pain points and build processes to overcome them. In return, they're rewarded with trust, sustainability, and loyalty.

Customer relationships are more important than ever. By constantly improving the customer's journey, businesses demonstrate their dedication to creating long-term customer value and providing experiences that enhance customer engagement. And ensuring they have their best interests at heart. 

What Is Customer Obsession?

Customer obsession is a state of focusing on creating a better customer experience by challenging the status quo and viewing exchanges from the customer's perspective. That means customer needs are front and center, including sales, marketing, support, and operations. It demands a long-term commitment to a customer-first approach and encompasses feedback from customers and employees. The customer-obsessed culture embraces fundamental values: empathy, respect, simplicity, communication, customer focus, and trust.

For example, it's essential to meet SLAs (standard service agreements) and SLOs (service level objectives) in a managed services business. Still, they must go beyond the performance-based SLA and focus on creating the best experience for the end-user. That element of going above and beyond is what sets customer-obsessed organizations apart. The focus is on consistently understanding various approaches you can implement to improve the customer experience and maximize customer engagement.

Customer Engagement

Engaging with customers is a vital element of empowered customers. The concept of gaining a competitive advantage is changing from competing on the best product and price to building trust. It incorporates obtaining customer feedback through engagement, taking your business model and the structure, and structuring it around the customer.

In a managed services business, we strive to understand our customers' goals and continually engage with them to develop the right solutions. 

"All end users remember when they take those post-call surveys is the previous experience they had at the end of a four to seven-minute call. But when you ask them triggered questions, like "What could we do better? You grow by taking those answers and developing your model around them. You'll build the next generation of anything you're trying to do. Customer feedback and obsession drive the entire industry," says DJ Oreb, President, Managed Services Division.

That's the only way to ensure all end users have a positive and seamless experience, whether building repeatable processes for automation, moving to the cloud, or optimizing the IT Service Desk. Customer obsession applies to companies in many verticals, including fast food. 

Chick-fil-A is a great example. By engaging with their customers, they successfully implemented new processes by addressing feedback from customers and employees.

Below, we’ll explore a mini framework of the end-to-end process they implemented:

• Gathered feedback from customers by using triggered (open-ended) questions
• Created processes to address each primary pain point 
• "I feel like I am just another customer." – added personalization 
• "I feel like they don't get my order right." – added multiple touch points to verify the order
• "I feel like there isn't a personal touch when I pick up my food." – added an employee to give the customer their order and verified their name

With these assessments, they developed an iterative process for ongoing improvement and continued the feedback loop.

Employee Engagement

A customer-obsessed company is also an employee-obsessed company, as it's considered everyone's responsibility to focus on the customer experience throughout their buyer and user journey. 

What’s Included With Employee Engagement? 

• Excellent training
• Positive job recognition
• Management coaching and mentoring
• Compassionate QA teams
• Opportunities for career development
• Opportunities to participate in change management efforts

DJ Oreb mentions: "An employee is well-positioned to give you the intricacies on how you can improve the customer experience from the perspective of how they do their job. For example, what new things can be implemented to lower average handle time? What tools can we put in place from a customer-obsessed perspective? An employee has an idea of the way the customer wants things." From this, everyone gains from better performance and reduced turnover.

Ingredients of a Customer-Obsessed Culture

Customer engagement and employee engagement are primary ingredients to building a customer-obsessed culture, inspiring the organization with solid principles, creating the right team, and encouraging innovation and an iterative process.

What Inspires a Customer-Obsessed Culture?

• Empathy: understanding the customer's pain points
• Respect: respecting the customer's point of view.
• Simplicity: helping customers make things work and keeping things simple
• Communication: encouraging dialogue 
• Customer Focus: defining customer goals and objectives 
• Trust: building transparency

Forming solid, long-term partnerships and collaborating with experienced, knowledgeable IT professionals can speed things up, reduce costs and help put your organization on the right track. 

We will ensure you have the proper infrastructure, technical support, cloud or onsite services, and maximum security your organization needs to build and sustain a customer-obsessed culture. When your IT foundation is ready, we will be here to design digital transformation managed service strategies to position your company for future leadership. 

Contact us so we can aid you in meeting your business and customer expectations, focus on the right things, and get the job done.