Customer Experience System

Achieving Competitive Excellence Series (ACES)

Course Contents

Course Description

Customers are the life blood of any manufacturer: Without customers, the firm would cease to exist. This vital course prepares manufacturers to understand their customers at a deep level and to use this information to make compete effectively. While other courses deal with ways to minimize costs or increase efficiency, the Customer System course focuses on how to build revenues by understanding and serving customers more effectively.

This course is designed for the leadership team, especially those involved in leadership, sales, marketing, customer service, customer relationship management or other aspect of service to the customer. Ideally, 5-16 of the top leaders of the organization will take this course first, will develop their plans and will then teach it to others as a way to introduce and earn support for the plans.

Learning Objectives

Participants will benefit by seeing how the entire organization plays a role in securing, serving and retaining customers. By the end of this course, the participants will:

Believe in the importance of having a robust customer system for listening to and acting on the Voice of the Customer that is fully integrated into the daily work and strategy of the organization.
Understand how to listen to, report on and act on the Voice of the Customer to create customer experiences as well as products that satisfy and delight customers.
Create a general 12-month customer system plan that will tie into the firm’s strategic plans and goals, its measures of success and its daily operations.

This course uses a combination of cases, examples and lecture to convey the ideas. The participants then discuss and select the methods they believe are best suited to their firm.

Course Content

The Customer System course focuses on the importance of listening to the Voice of the Customer (VOC) and of building relationships with current and potential customers in order to boost revenues by building loyalty, recommendations and share of spending

The course outline includes:

Why paying attention to the Voice of the Customer – the customers’ wants and needs – is vital and has economic benefits.
How to identify current and potential customers and customer segments and prioritize them by their importance to business success.
How to determine the customers’ needs and expectations, including their opinions on how the manufacturing firm compares to its competitors in terms of important competitive strengths and areas for improvement.
A description of the pros and cons of various research methods for determining customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction and competitive position in the market. This includes ideas for using the new media, sales calls and other personal meetings with customers to obtain valuable insights to customer perceptions.
How to manage customer experiences and build relationships with valued customers at all touch points. This includes the steps in customer experience management and the importance of integrating the customer system with the human system.
How to identify, resolve and prevent customer problems.
How to track the Voice of the Customer over time and integrate it with other market measures into an integrated measurement and analysis system to guide and monitor company strategy.

The course tools include examples of:

Excellent methods for researching customer needs, competitive positioning, satisfaction and problem resolution.
Ways of analyzing and reporting on the Voice of the Customer.
Voice of the Customer and market measures appropriate for a balanced scorecard or dashboard of measures.

Timing

This course lasts between 4 hours and 4-1/4 hours depending on the size of the group and the degree of discussion.