National Customer Engagement Monitor provides sharpened insight and great discussions

More and more organizations in the top three stages of customer-centricity

To get right to the point, customer-driven organizations in the Netherlands are currently doing well. 80% say they collect customer feedback through, for example, an annual customer satisfaction research or customer journey study. This is of course a very good basis, but to become a 'mature' customer-driven organization you need to be able to base all decisions and actions on customer feedback and customer needs. To achieve this goal, Blauw defines five stages of maturity in customer-drivenness to determine where you are as an organization.

In the Netherlands, compared to 2019, there has been 7% growth. With this, 64% of organizations are in the three highest stages (analyze, collaborate and transform) of being customer-driven.

Three aspects of customer centricity improved from last year:

• Exemplary management and board.
• Relevant feedback more often followed up immediately.
• Turn customer insights directly into improvement actions.

Participants recognized during the Roundtable session that the role model behavior of management and the board is very important in making the organization more customer-centric. If this influential group propagates the importance of customer experience and customer centricity, significant changes are actually possible within the organization. Converting customer insights directly into improvement actions is still difficult, according to a number of participants. There is a noticeable difference between saying and doing. Customer researches are often carried out and customer insights collected, but the results often end up in the closet. The advice mentioned by participants is: Start small and focus on one or two points. Then develop and monitor those points, and then look at other aspects to incrementally increase customer drivenness.

Customer-driven risers and fallers

If we look at the customer-driven nature of different sectors in the Netherlands, ICT and automation score the highest. Many of the work processes in these sectors are already lean and agile. As a result, they are often better able to focus on the customer and include them in decisions and adjustments. The business services & communications and financial services sectors dropped this year. From the study, we see that here more often a clear plan to become customer-driven is missing. In addition, the sense of responsibility for the customer experience decreases among employees who do not have direct customer contact. In several of these organizations, management is focused on targets and KPIs that stand in the way of being truly customer-driven.

According to participants in the Round Table session, the latter is recognizable: there are several targets in the company besides the customer experience KPIs (efficiency, profit, etc.). Those targets compete with each other. Often new initiatives have to be screened through internal laws and regulations. As a result, getting everyone in the organization on the same page and implementing new ideas fails because of the silos present. People recognize that it is difficult to put and keep customers first. For example, in the financial services industry, where claims are still often driven by processing time rather than offering a customer-focused solution. Participants also recognize the other side, where customer drivenness gets lost in the organization and everyone continues to focus on the scores and KPIs. The number then takes on a life of its own and forms its own ecosystem, as it were, which does not necessarily contribute to a better customer experience.

Positive impact of COVID-19 on customer centricity!

This year's NKM had a less fun but interesting theme, namely COVID-19. This situation caused employees to work from home (online) and many processes within organizations had to change. The good news is that organizations have become even more customer-driven (51%) and the customer experience is more positive at 40% of the organizations themselves. Organizations that have become more customer-driven (especially those in the top three phases) apparently seek proactive contact with their customers at this time. According to one participant, this took extra work at the beginning of COVID-19, but they now see that customer satisfaction scores have gone up at all touch points. Customers appreciate this type of contact with explanations of why, for example, certain products or services cannot be delivered immediately (downgrading expectations). In organizations that continue to proactively contact during these times, you see this increase in satisfaction. Soon, when we slowly return to "normal" life, the question is whether customers will still accept these obstacles caused by COVID-19, and as a result, satisfaction might drop again?

How do you advance a maturity stage?

To move one stage further in customer-centricity, below we share key insights and tips from the research and discussion at the Roundtable session.

Tips for taking the next step from the Ignoring and Gathering phases

The majority of the Round Table session participants are no longer in this phase. It is the phase where people are still barely engaged in customer-driven thinking, are primarily focused on internal processes and are primarily gathering insights. For those who are still in these phases, here are three building blocks to move forward:

• A board and management that feel, discuss and also propagate the importance of being customer-driven.
• Start small from an enthusiastic team with a clear plan to become increasingly customer-driven.
• Get outside inspiration and internally share stories from some loyal customers/ambassadors.

Three conditions for moving from Analyzing into the Collaboration phase

The majority of Round Table participants are in this third phase, Analyzing. With that, their focus is on, how they can grow to the fourth phase of maturity (Collaboration).

Organizations that want to move from this phase to the next step, in addition to continuously measuring and listening to customer signals, are also working on things like Driver Analyses and User Experience research. From the research and discussion, we discussed three important conditions to move from these phases a step further and structurally implement customer-driven improvements:

• Realize from a basis of trust, safety and autonomy. The authority for employees to act customer-oriented themselves is sometimes not yet self-evident. One participant indicated that they immediately respond to customer needs if a change is noticeable, but then they must have the decision-making authority to play a role in this, and that is not always the case yet. A participant from the financial sector indicated that if you continue to focus on lead time when calling customers, for example, you are not giving employees enough space to achieve the "wow" effect for the customer. This space is needed to grow to the next stage. A good example of self-direction is the customer-oriented calling by conductors at NS. Here the goal is for the announcements to become more personal and human. The conductors have been given more autonomy in the announcements and are allowed to give it their own flavor. For example, you now hear, "Put on your umbrella when you get off the train." Sincere attention that is increasingly noted positively by travelers.

• Improve continuously, letting go of discussions about the accuracy of scores and KPIs. Continue to properly anticipate customer feedback and keep the bigger picture of the customer in mind. As mentioned earlier in this report, some organizations place too much emphasis on KPIs and scores. As a result, they lose sight of the actual goal and can be less flexible in optimizing the customer experience.

• Form multidisciplinary teams that contribute enthusiastically to the customer experience. They take the lead, prioritize, determine concrete actions, in order to do a little bit better for the customer. That ensures acceleration, improvement and job satisfaction! According to the participants, this requires working less in silos. The customer experience should be a subject on the agenda in all departments of the organization, as it were. According to them, it takes quite some time and energy to work multidisciplinary within an organization. Too often the customer experience expert or the CX team is still looked at at this stage when it comes to these kinds of issues. Only when this changes can all processes and choices within the organization be customer-driven. Everyone should be able to think along!

According to one of the participants, there is a lot of interaction between being customer-driven and being agile, self-directed and multidisciplinary. It's a new kind of mindset that you have to have. It is a transformation and culture change within itself, which is bigger than just customer experience.

Building blocks and tips for the Collaboration and Transformation phases:

To achieve the highest stages of customer centricity, the entire organization must base all decisions and actions taken on customer feedback and insights. It is about continuously creating added value for customers. Organizations where this succeeds have established processes and collaborations between departments that ensure that the customer experience is structurally improved. The following tips and insights can help an organization achieve this:

• Having a clear customer-driven purpose. During the Roundtable session, the organization Picnic was discussed as an example. Picnic's entire system is set up to measure everything relevant to the customer experience. Whereby they share the collected customer insights broadly within the organization to then work short-cycle to devise, test and realize improvements. In doing so, they also find it important to show customers, what is done with the feedback. All this does require a different kind of employee. The CEO, Michiel Muller says the following about this: "The more intelligent and autonomous the employees are, the fewer processes you need to deal with the growing complexity. "According to Picnic, the right partnerships and employees ensure acceleration and new ideas. A current example was the hiring of 300 employees with a guest-oriented mindset, from the well-known hospitality staffing agency Mise en Place.

• Clear roles so that it is clear who is working on what part of the overall customer experience. This sparked a conversation during the session about the need for a separate CX team to deal with the entire customer experience. Can you make improvements in an organization's customer satisfaction even without its own customer experience team? To do so, all departments within the organization must be knowledgeable about the customer experience. The question here is how proactively do departments within the organization step up to marketing or the CX team to gain knowledge and insights. This still happens very little according to the participants.

• Everyone in the organization takes responsibility for the customer experience. Employees in all departments must feel the need to be involved with customer satisfaction. A challenge for one of the participants is, how can you know if you have the right selection of people working for you? Do you have people in your organization who really feel something about being "customer-driven" or do I have people in the organization who purely want to make a career? Another participant indicated during the session that they had set up a separate CX team that worked across departments. This worked well for a while, but eventually the team itself became its own department, communicating less and less with other departments and taking actions in other departments. This phenomenon is being noticed in other organizations as well. Companies start with a CX team to break through their own silos. But ultimately, in the Working Together phase, beyond the departments, teams and silos, you want to work together and for everyone to take responsibility for the greater good, the customer and the overall customer experience.

Learning from each other's experiences in customer centricity

The Roundtable session provided valuable knowledge sharing on how an organization can continue to grow in customer-centricity. Especially the development from Analyzing to Collaborating still appears to be a difficult task for many. For this, silos must be broken down and the need for customer-driven work must be felt throughout the organization. By sharing each other's experiences, the participants in this session gained new knowledge and inspiration to apply this back in their own organizations.

Download our infographic with the survey results here.