The document discusses strategies for improving customer service by addressing various organizational functions and enhancing internal collaboration. It presents tools like a customer experience health check and team dynamics profiling to assess and improve customer experience initiatives. The focus is on aligning resources, processes, and strategies to meet evolving customer expectations and ensure sustained service excellence.

1. Building Customer Service “from the inside out”
Customers are more demanding than ever and companies continue to seek to be more competitive
through their customer experience strategies. Creating a level of customer service that is perceived
as excellent by the customer cuts across many areas an organisation. Some are obvious: in core
functions such as marketing, sales, service operations and delivery partners. However success may
include other functions: technology, processes and data for key customer systems; finance for the
necessary investment and returns; HR for learning, knowledge and skill development, and; the board
for building the customer excellence approach throughout the organisation. We use two main
perspective tools:
Customer Experience Health Check looks at
current performance across ten key internal and
external areas of a customer planning
framework. This presented as a diagram with an
overall health score for the organisation and for
each area. The responses are combined to
create an overall Customer Experience Health
Score and a score for each area.
Customer Experience Team Check looks at how
individuals and the core & extended customer
experience teams work together. We use a
leading profiling tool designed for individuals
and teams that identifies what the individuals
are good at and suggests ways that they can
work together to improve team dynamics.
These perspective tools can be used to inform a series of Customer Experience Development events:
1. Building customer excellence form the inside out:
Exploratory Customer Experience events to identify the impact on both customers and internal
operations of current practices; provide a planning framework for future initiatives, and; identify
key individuals and teams
Customer Experience Team build events that create trust, break down silos that may have
developed within an organisation, identify and remove barriers and enable teams to make the
most of what they are to deliver a co-ordinated approach and Senior leadership ‘Customer
experience team effectiveness’ events that improve commitment to change and align plans to
the overall business strategy
2. Keeping the focus on your customers to generate value: Success depends on developing a
customer experience strategy reflecting customers’ needs, their increasing expectations and
preferences with the move to digital / social channels; and expectations to be able to use multiple
channels and receive the same service independent of their journey. Customer in Flow works with
teams to look at the impact on customers of their experience in dealing with the organisation
3. Updating and aligning your key resources and processes affecting the customer experience:
A number of key activities and processes such as enquiries, orders and complaints support the
customer experience using key organisational resources such as finance, technical & IT, knowledge
management, customer data and HR. Customer in Flow works with teams to look at their impact on
the customer, whether delivery appears consistent or where inefficient or out-of-date processes
create “bumps” in the customer journey
4. Keeping the customer service experience under review and align your organisation’s strategy
and planning. Customer in Flow works with organisations to maintain the focus and emphasis on
service excellence to embed new approaches and behaviours so that the programme continues to
deliver over time.