Leaders often look for a partner to help them educate and inspire their people to deliver memorable and profitable customer experiences. At The Michelli Experience, we help front-line employees, managers, and senior leaders deliver relevant and engaging service experiences. To that end, we provide short-term and extended consulting services, keynote and workshop presentations, and bestselling books to meet your needs. Our culture of service excellence is anchored to our mission, vision, and values. – Joseph A. Michelli
Joseph Michelli is my guest next week and as always, Joe made the podcast…well, a Michelli Experience. We discussed his new book, Driven to Delight, which I recommend. When you reflect for a moment on how a product-centric Mercedes-Benz transformed into a customer-centric organization, well it is very difficult to even imagine. The culture not only had to change at Mercedes-Benz but also in their long established dealer chain. Michelli tells the story like no one else could. The preceding link will enable a few bonuses by utilizing the code “VIP”.
An excerpt from next week’s podcast.
Joe Dager: Mercedes-Benz committed to a multi-year program or something right from the very beginning. It was like there are no quick fixes here. I mean that’s contrary to what we all think. We always try to say, well, let’s get it done. Right?
Joseph Michelli: I was just involved in a Harvard Business Review article where they did a bunch of research on why companies are not achieving what they’re trying to do in this customer experience phase. If you look at the research now, Forester says about 92% of companies are putting on their strategic list that they want to improve the customer experience. Despite 92% of companies saying that is a priority, we’re at one of the lowest times in history for customer satisfaction if you use metrics like the American Consumer Satisfaction Index.
We have all these people prioritizing and then we’ve got very few customers feeling it, so something has gone wrong. I think one of the things that gets wrong about it is that as per the Harvard research recently, lots of these brands are just trying to do something without aiming, and they don’t think of it as a long-term transformation. They think of it as a service initiative or customer service initiative, and they don’t build the infrastructure and they don’t change the hearts and minds of their people to build it into their culture and so it doesn’t sustain, and it doesn’t manifest in any significant in the life of the customer.
Mercedes-Benz has had a few of those flirtations along the way but, this time, around, they trudged down and said, we’re going multi-year, and we’re going to put money behind it. We’re going to try to really look at a reapplication of resource, so in a classic Lean way, they said where are we wasting our dollars that aren’t delivering throughput to our customers and then where can we reclaim those dollars and put them into some other offering for the customers that are going to engage in far more.
I think your point is well taken; that multi-year was a big breakthrough concept, and it’s in keeping with the differentiators between wannabes and true customer experience leaders.
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