Omega Management Group

Now it's time to act on your CEMDNA Playbook Strategy, building on the Measure and Analyze phases of your CEM strategy.

Corrective Action Plan

A natural result of the Measure and Analyze phases is that adjustments will be needed as you begin to act on your CEMDNA Playbook Strategy. Start with a plan of action and identifying key issues, such as:

Quarterly frequency with corrective action Look at your results on a quarterly basis and take appropriate corrective action based on results of Phase 2 steps.

Closed-loop Action Alerts A critical element of your Corrective Action Plan is to "close the loop" on every Action Alert, both positive and negative, to be sure that you address the need to take any further action.

Prepare your corrective action plan Corrective action plans address critical external customer issues. Such plans should be formulated prior to the Act Phase, reflecting your interaction with key accounts based upon their experience and issues that emerge. Remember, you want to be "married" to your key accounts, and every good marriage is a partnership, built on mutual trust and respect. You also will know what corrective actions are needed based on your activities in Phase 2, Analyze. While implementing corrective actions, be sure to address internal systemic issue and customer-related processes. Take a close look at all of your customer touchpoints to make sure you are leaving nothing to chance.

Implement your corrective action plan Assign responsibility to front-line and management-level personnel to carry out the external and internal plans you've just developed.

Verify and communicate results Verify that the corrective actions have resolved customer issues. Be proactive and reach out to customers who may or have experienced the same issue and present your solution. Be sure to address any specific systemic problems that caused the problem in the first place.

Employee Engagement

If your organization is like the majority of companies, you consider the quality and performance of your employees as a major business asset. Indeed, many firms list "our people" as their biggest competitive differentiator. It's also true that payroll, benefits and other direct expenses linked to employees are the number one expense item for most organizations. The cost of replacing employees is similar to the cost of acquiring new customers, so you do not want to have a high turnover among either group.

Add to this the fact that employees are the ones who interact most frequently with your external stakeholders, then it becomes obvious that "happy employees" breed satisfied, loyal customers, suppliers, business partners and shareholders. Nevertheless, the vast majority of organizations do not have a formal, structured program in place to engage, reward and retain employees for delivering outstanding customer service or to educate them on strengthening their CEM knowledge and skills.

Employee engagement means understanding, measuring and improving the emotional relationship between employees and their work. Employee engagement is more than employee satisfaction; it relates to measuring and improving items that will directly affect business outcomes. Employee engagement is typically not wholly owned by the HR organization, but requires the active involvement of line management. In a recent Gallup survey, more engaged companies outperformed the earnings-per-share of their competitors by 18%.

Employee Recognition and Education:

Employee Recognition/Compensation Set balanced goals based on achieving key performance indicators (KPIs) for customer satisfaction and loyalty. Recognize and reward employees individually and/or by groups. Most importantly, link employee compensation to achieving measurable gains in customer satisfaction.

Employee Training Commit to a continuous employee CEM training program, including "soft skills" (people skills) as well as technical or job-based competence. In addition, take advantage of certification courses that are available in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) as well as Customer Experience Management (CEM). This advanced-level instruction can pay big dividends for your company and provide career advancement for employees.

Learn more about our Employee Rewards Program.

Learn more about our certified CEM Professional (CEMPRO) training.

WinBack Analysis

Invariably, no matter how well you have designed and implemented your CEM strategy, you will lose customers. If they are key accounts, you probably would like to win them back, and following the Corrective Action Plan can come in handy even now. If they are not key accounts, the tendency is to want to re-engage them, but think hard about the profitability of some of these accounts. Some customers consume much more service/support resources than they contribute in revenue, referrals and name recognition, so you really will not miss them should they leave.

But let's look at customers who leave who are key accounts today or may reach that status in the foreseeable future. Follow these CEMDNA Playbook Strategy guidelines

Contact and survey each lost customer Determine the key drivers for termination of their relationship with you. This will help determine the key drivers for re-entry. If possible, form focus groups of lost customers to gain insight through face-to-face interaction. Next, a small (8-10) number of questions drawn from the focus group can form the basis of a web survey sent to all your customers, or logical subsets, to see if any other accounts are vulnerable to leaving. This will be your primary indicator of why customers chose to leave. With detailed analysis and reporting of results, you can use this intelligence to see storm clouds forming while there is still time to avoid losing the account.

Develop and implement a recapture program Based on survey results above, identify the strategic and/or profitable accounts you want to win back and implement a recapture program. Consider assigning these accounts to senior managers for this purpose.

Prevent future attrition Focus on the primary key drivers for termination, and determine recurring systemic issues that are causing problems. With this information in hand, implement corrective action plans to minimize unwanted customer attrition in the future.

Omega can help you devise effective, proactive strategies to successfully re-establish profitable relationships with former customers who were lost to your competition or for other business reasons. We work directly with your former customers to review your business history with them and then use this information to help identify "re-entry" opportunities. The information provides insight into why the competition was chosen over your company, or what business reasons motivated the defection. But it also documents why you initially prevailed over your competitors. Further, it provides critical information necessary for recommending training and education, as well as the opportunity to improve your company's overall sales performance.

When you've lost a customer to your competition, we uncover the key reasons behind the decision making process information that is highly instructive to either help you win back your customer or to use in future sales opportunities.

Communication to Stakeholders

With the groundwork of a successful CEM program defined and implemented, it is now time for formal communications with your key stakeholders. These are the internal and external groups whom you've been surveying and analyzing all along. By now, they naturally are curious about what it all means.

One thing is clear. You have created expectations for process improvements in your customer- and employee-facing operations. If you don't communicate transparently on results of your CEM strategy, then you will lose credibility with your stakeholders and invite them to assume the findings must be negative, which probably explains your silence.

While not every component of your CEM strategy will meet its stated objectives, you will have a very compelling story to tell about specific improvements in customer satisfaction and loyalty in many areas. The CEMDNA Playbook Strategy provides a host of online, offline and other marketing tools that tell your story of customer satisfaction, loyalty and service excellence powerfully and persuasively to internal and external audiences. You can use these communications tools to further brand your CEM strategy and to formally kick off the program if you have been waiting to do so until you knew what the results would be.

Learn more about our CEM Communications program.