CUSTOMER SERVICE
Sharpen customerexperience focus? Good idea. How?
Listening to your customers and colleagues sounds simple enough. But achieving lasting improvement in performance demands major, even disruptive, shifts, writes Maja Smith, Customer Experience Manager at Ford Motor Company of Southern Africa. Virtually every enterprise claims it puts customers at the centre of its business, but only a few can, with hand on heart, really say they have achieved this. That’s because becoming truly customer-centric requires a radical shift in many core business operations, and that’s easier said than done. This is especially so in larger ‘legacy’ organizations where bureaucracy has been built over many years, even decades. At Ford we are not spared that. We have faced significant challenges. But we’re committed to learning from our experiences and have achieved some major improvements as a result. Ford has operated in SA since 1923 when it began assembling Model T cars in a disused sheep-shed in Port Elizabeth. It was the first Ford operation outside North America. After 97 years, Ford contributes more than 1% to SA’s GDP. We recently announced a R15.8bn investment in expanding our SA operations that will enable us to increase our annual output capacity from 168 000 to 200 000.
Customers want transparency, expertise and care
We know how to build cars that people love, but if we’re going to walk the talk in customer experience,
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we need to pay as much attention to the complete ownership experience as we do to manufacturing and selling cars. Our research tells us that our customers value proactive after-sales communications and service. They also want human interaction handled with transparency, expertise and care. And above all, our customers – like all of us – want to be treated with respect. We’ve done a lot of introspection over the past few years and examined what stood in the way of delivering those needs. We found that, like many legacy organizations, we had disparate IT systems across the business. We also realized our key performance indicators could be too inward looking. We needed to hold ourselves to the same standards that our customers hold us to, rather than striving to meet internal performance objectives. We also acknowledged the risk of 'death by data deep-dive' or 'analysis paralysis', where data trumps action and, like many larger organizations; we spent more time talking about the problems than fixing them.
Hold yourselves to the same standards that your customers hold you to We took all these insights and countered them
