When your customers interact with your business, they’re expecting a seamless experience. Ideally, their perception of your organization should be that everyone is engaged, informed, and well-versed in your line of work. Doing business with your company should be so easy, it almost feels effortless.
In order to achieve this friction-free customer experience, organizations need to do a lot of work in the background. Delivering consistent experiences doesn’t only improve customer satisfaction. Consistency can also help drive loyalty, reduce confusion, and help improve your reputation. Implement initiatives throughout your organization to create consistency for your end customer, and you’ll see major benefits.
1. Use Tools to Keep Information Current and Consistent
Specialized software can be the secret sauce to making sense of complex organizational information. Everything from training materials to FAQs can get messy without a method of managing them. Use platforms like a component content management system (CCMS) to organize your content at a granular level throughout its life cycle.
A CCMS doesn’t just keep content organized, it can allow you to use content components as mix-and-match resources. Your team will always have the correct, most up-to-date version of this how-to video or that product description. This provides a consistent experience whether an image or paragraph is embedded in an internal process document or posted on your e-commerce site. Since all content components are searchable, team members will have exactly the content they need at their fingertips.
With simple navigation and a central location, a CCMS provides all employees equal access to information. Distributed teams aren’t reliant on messy server files full of outdated content. Document owners can be sure the content within those docs is up-to-date and cleared for all team members to use.
2. Provide Robust Training on Key Systems
Consistency doesn’t come without intention, nor does it come without adequate training. Once you’ve adopted new tools or systems, build a training plan that meets the needs of your business.
Work with your learning and development coordinator to develop a training program for your team. Conduct listening sessions with individual contributors and managers to learn about the pain points firsthand. Log the concerns shared and ask probing questions to get deeper insight. Then use this data to influence how you shape your training program and how you’ll reinforce system utilization over time.
Leverage your internal communications function and collaboration spaces to share success stories for your new systems. Use data to show progress over time, especially when it comes to customer loyalty and satisfaction. Benchmark your current state and reference the goals you established on your journey toward consistency. If you’re targeting customer satisfaction, show your monthly or quarterly progress on your metrics dashboard. As you experience wins, celebrate these accomplishments publicly to reinforce your initiative and drive engagement.
3. Agree on Shared Language
Corporate jargon has a bad reputation for a reason — it’s opaque and often confusing. That said, company acronyms and industry-specific terms have valuable uses. It would be silly for a digital marketer to trot out “search engine optimization” in every sentence when “SEO” is widely understood. Nevertheless, when you have a special language, it’s important to ensure that everyone can speak and understand it.
Take a look at the common language used within your organization. Some terms may be specific to departments, projects, or products. Others may be culturally driven or terms used when your organization was in a different state, like pre-merger. Consider various terms to determine which ones have an acceptable use and, if so, what audience they should be used with. And identify any outdated or confusing locutions that should be given the heave-ho.
Next, deploy your shared language glossary with department leaders to gain buy-in and spark constructive debate. Once everyone is in agreement, you can reinforce the established language and usage rules. When you do, your teams will be working from the same playbook on project teams and with your customers.
4. Define Rules, Permissions, and Approval Levels
Empowered associates can have a major impact on consistency, both good and bad. Customer service representatives with the authority to fix problems, reimburse charges, and the like are among the most appreciated. But if a customer calls with similar issues and gets wildly different responses each time, that’s where satisfaction can take a nosedive.
Combat this issue by defining the rules, permissions, and approval levels for your team. This exercise will require a deep dive into policies and practices, but it’s an effort that’ll pay dividends. When team members are confident in what they can do independently and what needs sign-off, they can better serve customers. And when your customers reach out, they’ll know that they’ll be well taken care of, no matter who’s on the other end.
Your CCMS can assist in this effort, housing your defined rules and ensuring that everyone is working from the same current version. To guide process updates, reference employee and customer feedback. When permissions are loosened or tightened, assess the overall experience for your team and end customer. With care and strategic implementation, well-considered rules can provide autonomy and confidence that will yield consistently positive experiences every time.
Consistency Can Improve Employee Retention and Overall Performance
Teams that feel supported and well-informed simply do better work, making your efforts to create consistency twice as valuable. As you create your consistency improvement plan, keep your internal users in mind. Include employees, managers, and customers on your key audience list throughout your project.
Consider how each audience will interact with your business and the systems you use to get the job done. Request feedback before, during, and after your improvements have been implemented to get front-line input, which can improve overall outcomes. Change can be hard, so remember to share the reason for the changes as well as how your organization will be changing. When you do, you’ll enjoy a smooth transition into a consistent, clear customer experience that’s a delight to deliver.