Most of the current business industry leaders are pretty different from one another. Take Amazon and Airbnb, for example. Sure, they’re in tech, but they serve completely different needs, with different products and services, and different missions. If you ask them what led to their success, you mind hear of a slew of reasons that are as different as the companies themselves. Among those reasons, however, you’ll hear at least one common answer – and it’ll ring true for every other successful business you ask that question to – it’s the relentless pursuit of an amazing customer experience.
An amazing customer experience is often the function of one or more factors taken to the extreme. Whether it’s Airbnb’s volume of apartments, community, and insurance, or Amazon’s incredibly low prices and free two-day delivery, however, the process of creating that experience starts with a keen attentiveness to, and focus on addressing customer and market needs. To better illustrate that point, it might help to remember how Amazon grew over 20 years from a small online book store, into the d-facto leader in e-commerce with more than 235 million products.
With a vision to build the Earth’s most customer centric company, Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bozos, recruited Tom Schonhoff as Amazon’s fifth employee in 1995 to build and lead its customer service department. Tom would take calls from angry customers, painstakingly write replies to questions, and eventually request customer feedback about their experience shopping with Amazon. That feedback was turned into a what our customers are saying (WOCAS) report to better understand customer needs. This report was used as the basis for improving customer service interactions with millions of customers over the years to follow, as well as product decisions, pricing, delivery standards, and much more.
It might be hard to imagine today, but back when Amazon was first pioneering its innovative customer experience, the lack of software to keep track of customer interactions made high quality of service much harder to deliver. Today, software is in abundance, and customers have grown to expect a high degree of attentiveness and quality of care, which thankfully CRM software makes rendering pretty easy. Businesses using Troop.Works CRM, for example, can listen to customers and engage with them through social media, emails, and phone calls, and can use the resulting data to generate actionable insights and customer centric strategies.
