Customer feedback, business transformation and achieving frictionless time to value

Feedback provides organizations with rich insight into what business changes should become a priority, and why. Tom Gregory, VP Customer Experience and Transformation at IFS, examines the ways feedback can and should shape business innovation and moments of service.

As you may already be aware, IFS is committed to helping customers excel in their sector by enabling great Moment of Service. The basic idea is that all interactions should stand out and consistently deliver exactly what was promised –and more.

Feedback is invaluable, but it is most potent if it is timely, and therefore also actionable. A simple analogy would be entering a supermarket and finding no baskets available. You continue to shop, arriving at the checkout grappling with your goods. The cashier asks if there were baskets at the door, and you reply ‘no’. So, a concern was raised, but by then it’s too late to address the issue for you.

The key here is recognizing the difference in value between this simple explicit feedback (‘the customer said there were no baskets…’) and more nuanced implicit feedback (‘…but also suggested said that extra aisle-end baskets would be a good idea’).

Imagine, instead, being handed a basket on entry the next day, and having extra baskets available at the end of each aisle. Your shopping experience is seamless, and you might even pick up a second basket to buy more.

Understanding the journey

Let’s look at this again using a B2B example. IFS sells globally. But what if a customer comes to us saying they’d like to access services and documentation in their own language? Our implicit insight would be to immediately look closely at how that situation could arise. Are we providing easy to access language options on all our documentation and FAQs? Are we offering ways to translate our online community pages? Are there other localized options we could explore? In this way we address the root of the issue with a business shift to deliver a better Moment of Service. Simply viewing a 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent) performance score in isolation cannot reveal the underlying issues at play during a customer experience.

Organizations need to be listening to their customers at every step of their journey. Increasingly, Experience Insight Management Applications and, even better, enterprise solutions with embedded Experience Management capabilities such as IFS Cloud, are leveraging the ability to drive value from customer insights. For example, our new IFS Voice of the Customer program has supplemented customer pulse surveys with regular survey snapshots at key moments in the customer journey, allowing us to understand the end-to-end experience and swiftly identify and address any issues.

For example, we might ask a customer in the initial stages of an implementation project if they are happy with the way we are working, or to share worries or concerns. Any issues can be immediately addressed (what can we do to fix that for you?), and equally any praise can be fed immediately through to the team.

Rapid and frictionless

One of the projects within IFS at present is finding ways to ensure getting value from engaging with IFS is rapid and frictionless. For example, optimizing handovers between groups engaging with customers ensures that work isn’t unnecessarily repeated: all information established during pre-sales fact-finding is automatically cascaded to the scoping team.

This frictionless approach is also being applied to making it faster and easier for prospects to interrogate IFS capabilities. Industry-specific videos and process examples, click-through trials and remote access taster demos remove the barriers, frustration and resource delays often associated with traditional vendor sales cycles. Similarly, by sharing our cloud strategy, product road map and technical specifications of systems at the earliest opportunity, customers get the clarity and confidence they need.

Experience never stops growing

IFS specializes in five industry sectors, understands all the industry benchmarks and best practice operations in each, and has completed thousands of implementations. In most cases we can confidently predict the business value of a transformation, the timeframe required, and the resources and costs for a given sector. And, where a scenario is more complex, IFS Business Value Assurance tools can quickly capture, model and illustrate the individual business case. This informs the Customer Success Plan and provides the assurance of the delivery of the customer value, while providing a great and frictionless experience.

Our own trajectory is based on customer feedback that expects IFS to be responsive, agile and committed – values we have adopted as our ‘North Star’. This manifests in all sorts of areas – from customer advisory boards informing product development, to facilitating customer collaboratives, bringing users facing similar business challenges together to share their sector insight and advice.

Successful business transformation takes trust and transparency. I firmly believe engineering a relationship that, to a customer, consistently always seems to offer ‘the personal touch’ is one of the most compelling Moment of Service IFS can deliver.

See how you can gain valuable insights from your customers’ experience as part of your business transformation – https://www.ifs.com/solutions/customer-experience-management