How do you deliver the best experience for your citizens and customers?
It’s easy to fall into the trap of “hiring great customer service staff” or “focusing on improving customer outcomes.”
But the reality is that great customer experience begins the moment you start planning a new policy or strategy. Research by Accenture found that “81% of prospective buyers were frustrated because the company doesn’t make it easy to do business with them.” While this research was focused on the private sector, you’d be foolish to ignore the significance of this statistic.
So, why you should care about being customer-centric?
1. Increase customer satisfaction
Being customer-centric allows you to focus on what your customers do and don’t like, allowing you to tailor your service delivery to enhance what they like, and improve what they don’t. Tailored offerings = happy customers.
2. Finding opportunities to grow and improve.
When the customer is at the heart of everything you do, it becomes much easier to find gaps in your service delivery. For example, through rolling out a new digital service you discover that your users are predominantly engaging with you via a mobile device. This means your next update can be designed to streamline mobile usability and improve the user experience.
3. Improve bottom line outcomes
Focusing on customer needs allows you to ‘cut the fat’ and strip back elements of your service that users are engaging with, which can often lead to financial savings.
4. Happier employees and increased retention
HubSpot found a connection between customer-centricity and job meaningfulness and loyalty. Happy customers often results in fewer complaints and a customer service team that enjoys coming to work.
So, what does it take to become customer-centric?
The Government Customer Innovation Week brings you four days of insightful learnings and advice from some of Australia’s top government departments on policy design, enhancing customer experience, and front-line service delivery. If improving customer outcomes is important to you, you will not want to miss this event.
