Customer feedback also can come from numerous channels. It’s important to take advantage of where the customer is going and his or her preferences, Carroll says.
“You want it consistent because you don’t know which channel they are going to go in. You don’t know how they are going to interact with you next,” he says. “They might have done the last interaction online. This one might be a phone call. So that experience for them has to be very consistent, but you have to have processes that are very flexible.”
Customers provide the direction
Once you’ve collected and digested customer information to find answers, you need to move that into a change that will be delivered back to the customer.
Carroll says, when he first came to Discover, people were more resistant to change.
Now, the employees don’t hold on as much because they know the shelf life might be limited and the routines haven’t become an entrenched standard or tradition. Change can cause people to resist, especially if they built whatever you’re changing, he says.
When encouraging a change, Carroll recommends using data to prove your point. It needs to go back to the customers.
“The customer should be telling you what you need to change,” he says. “Again, if you’re focused on that, you can look at the data and look at processes and say, ‘These things are not really providing a benefit anymore.’ If you have a good data source where you’re capturing customer information, you’re going to find the truth and the opportunity within that.”
It’s critical to always ask: What does your customer tell you? And then, are you able to act on that and how quickly can you act on that? Carroll says with some reasonable targets along the way, you can build a company that’s able to take feedback and react fairly quickly. That in turn will make a difference in the way customers view their relationship with your company.
Your employees are also a good source because they know what the customers are telling them. If you can start addressing the experiences that didn’t go so well, it will not only help your business, it also makes your employees’ jobs easier and more fulfilling, he says.
“It all ties together. That’s the relationship they want to create with the customer,” Carroll says.
If there’s something in the middle of that customer relationship that management can remove, it’s easy to get buy-in for the change — especially if everyone has the goal of putting customers first.
“All of our teams are built with the customer in mind,” he says. “The meetings start with the customer; the meetings end with the customer.”
