A few years ago, I realized there is a certain type of client I truly enjoy working with – insightful leaders. Like a rock and roll star thanking their fans at the end of every show, insightful leaders intuitively understand success is a result of your customer, not your product or service.
Insight is defined as the capacity to “gain an accurate and deep intuitive understanding of a person or thing.”
Insightful leaders are purposeful about understanding the customer. Like an entrepreneur who counts on every single sale, you’ll do whatever it takes to make every experience count. You possess a thick skin and the overwhelming desire to learn from every customer comment, positive or negative. If needed, you have a willingness to change everything about your business, and the wisdom to seek out those changes most important…to your customers.
Customer Experience Rules
As customers become more empowered, they are facing more difficulty. It becomes harder and harder to obtain the experiences they seek, on their timeline. So when you hear your customers don’t use your website because it’s out of date or have switched to a competitor because they offer a mobile technology, it can be painful.
The truth hurts. Or as the insightful leader believes: the truth sets you free.
Insightful leaders understand that customer experience is more than dictating a few new customer service processes. It’s a constant focus. It requires creating a workplace that supports customer experience through an inspired culture, not by doing it “the way we’ve always done it.”
Moments of Truth
Using our Customer Journey Workshop, we help our clients uncover those areas where customers become baffled or downright frustrated. These “make or break” moments are called Moments of Truth, in Customer Experience vernacular. Times when customers forget everything you’ve done well and decide to move on. Worse yet, you may never know why.
I often have people answer 9 questions to determine where their organization is on the customer-focused spectrum. We didn’t make these up. The questions are adapted from Fast Company magazine by leadership speaker, John Spence.
The key here is to answer honestly. If you answer all nine questions with a 9 or 10, I’d love to meet you. Because I love to meet insightful leaders.
If not, you should start by mapping your own customer’s journey. These key metrics can help establish a culture that drives everything from your marketing and positioning to the hiring decisions and employee training you put into place.
Just a few more steps in your own journey to be an insightful leader.
Helicx provides companies and organizations with a toolbox of processes (assessments, benchmarking and workshops) to enable them to create systems that attract and retain the best customers and the best employees. The Helicx process focuses on the business activities that most influence the customer experience such as marketing, sales, employee interactions and leadership. To see if these processes are right for your organization, take this survey.
