Are you easy to do business with?

Are you easy to do business with?

Making Panasonic TOUGHBOOK easy to do business with is the focus of multi-tasking Head of Customer Experience Claire Harvey. Here she talks about the challenges of transforming large organisations to ensure their internal processes are designed to do just that.

When people see my job title, I’m often asked: what does a Head of Customer Experience do? Put Customer Experience or CX into Google and there are host of different answers covering everything from call centres to product branding but in reality, I see it much more simply than that. My job is to make Panasonic TOUGHBOOK easy to do business with.

Just like all large organisations, we rely on processes to drive our company. Sure, our public-facing teams are very in tune with our customers. We have a reputation for listening to the customer and incorporating that feedback into the next generation of our rugged computing products. The ability of our professional services team to create tailormade solutions for our clients – from docking stations to mobile applications – is second to none and has helped to make us the European market leader. But sometimes the processes that evolve to run our business are simply not as customer friendly as they could be. Can customers receive demo equipment fast enough, is it easy to place an order and can our teams respond quickly enough to specific enquiries?

In a successful business with a long history, these processes can often develop over many years and are updated and adapted to the emerging needs of the business; and sometimes those process end up having a negative impact on the customer experience without it ever being anyone’s intention. My job is to spot those issues, ideally head them off at the pass before they become reality or resolve them quickly when they do.

For me, no two days are the same and I enjoy the variety. I could be discussing the supply chain in one moment and then looking at the purchase order system or servicing and maintenance the next. About 40% of my time is spent handling issues and 60% on planned business transformation projects to help improve the customer experience. My project management experience and ability to juggle multiple tasks is a blessing. My brain likes to think that way. In fact, I created our transformation mind map for customer experience in the kitchen while cooking dinner one evening!

And with the backing of senior management and all our incredible support teams we have in the business, we are making it easier to do business with us every day. One example is our voice of the customer programme. Historically we would survey our customers annually to monitor satisfaction levels using Net Promoter Score (NPS). The scores we were receiving were great, but we realised that we weren’t really listening to our customers by just asking them once a year. Now we have implemented an online system that automatically asks how we are doing after every customer interaction. We receive feedback while the experience is still top of the customer’s mind and the feedback we get is so much more detailed and actionable. It is these types of small steps, taken each day, that ultimately create a company culture and processes that are truly in tune with its customers.

Some people describe my role as a trouble-shooter but I think it is so much more than that. In reality, I am a connector, helping the business to connect all its operations and processes to make sure everything we do makes it easier for our customers and partners to work with us. At the end of the day, that continuous progress is essential for any organisation to thrive!