Are you worrying about Economic Crisis? Focus on Customer Experience.

Companies do not want to spend EXTRA during economic downturn. Who cares for customer experience during economic crisis ? General mood is negative, companies are struggling to survive, maintain sales & margins ,  lay off is imminent , big campaigns are put on hold, no new investments. Mood is sombre. 

To change the mood of every stake holders this is the right time to focus on customer experience initiative. When else you would focus on this? 

Good times are booming times , hence no time and need to focus on Customer Experience (CE) initiatives. Sales are anyway growing. Everybody is growing, expanding capacity  & happy. 

This is the time when you not only can retain your existing customers, make them spend same or more, get new customers , get new referrals. Yes in down time people are spending less therefore it is all the more important that you continue have your market share. That will only happen if and only if your enterprise is preferred by customers to deal with. Customers will remember how there were treated in bad times. 

Companies not focusing on CE will lose some so new customers are floating to be captured by better customer experience. Word of Mouth (WOM) & referral business is at all time high in bad times as people want to be doubly sure where they wish to spend.  

Most Important: Remember in down time customers are also in sombre mood.  In this time of crisis when companies focus on emotional customer experience, it will go long long way to win more & more customers in bad times. They will remember you in good times as well. Its a win win proposition. 

Following para from Forrester report will reinforce the need to focus on customer experience initiatives in down time: 

Faced with increasing competition from new entrants, coupled with the 2008 financial crisis that pummeled the shipping industry, Maersk Line was seeing its margins shrink. Firms in the industry were cutting prices to maintain revenues, threatening to erode margins even further. To avoid the “race to the bottom,” Maersk Line’s executive management team determined that customer experience would play an important role in creating customer loyalty and stopping this commoditization. In 2009, the executive team turned to a 17-year veteran at the company, Jesper Engelbrecht Thomsen, the firm’s vice president of customer service, to improve the end-to-end customer experience.

Within 3 years with the organisation level CE initiatives this company registered growth in Net Promoter Score (NPS) by 40%. Therefore irrespective of type of business & business cycle , it pays to focus on CE initiatives. 

Do you want more severe economic downturn to embrace CE initiatives? 

Place for odd man out is empty. Be the one to occupy that.