customer experience:

in your business?

Do you want to create brand loyalty and repeat business by delivering great customer experiences.
Do you know how good your customer experience is compared to other businesses in your market place.
Are you unsure how to deal with the cultural issues holding back great customer experiences.
Is the turnover of customer facing employees costing your business.
Have customer service courses failed to deliver at the frontline.
Are your services designed to benefit you or your customer.
Does the service environment increase or reduce your revenue and profits.

If these issues seem familiar your company could be wasting money or losing revenues. Businesses that are successful at winning on customer experience take an integrated and holistic approach. Younique can provide the knowledge and support needed to embed great customer experiences into all aspects of your business.

why does the customer experience matter?

In today's markets trying to win solely on aspects such as great quality, price and delivery no longer set your business apart from competitors - they are the norm. Successful businesses focus on customer experiences. Great customer experiences are made up of two elements, the physical and the emotional.

If customers feel good about a service, they won't want to go anywhere else. Independent research has proven that building exceptional customer experiences can create a sustainable competitive advantage by:

Earning a solid reputation as a place customers prefer and recommend to their friends.
Earning higher profits over the longer term with repeat business and add-on business.
Being more efficient and convenient as a place to shop and work, and more productive as operations.
Being more energetic, spirited and fun places with employees who work harder.

Many businesses are now understanding that to be successful they must satisfy both their customer's emotional and physical expectations. Can your company afford to ignore 50% of its customer expectations?

help is on hand...

Younique Business Solutions specialise in delivering customer experience programmes that make a difference for customers. Our approach aligns with your company strategy at all levels. From creating the CE vision and concept through to critical skills development for customer facing employees, we implement customer experience as a way of doing business.

Using proven methods Younique can help you develop your customer experience strategy and concepts, understand how you currently measure up against customer expectations and focus areas for improvement.

By designing service processes, reviewing customer technologies, auditing service environments and developing frontline employees, we get the best results for your company in the shortest time.

We are well placed to support your service managers in:

Creating service concepts that align with your business strategy.
Evaluating how you currently measure up against customer expectations.
Assessing how your current culture supports your customer experience vision.
Designing new or reviewing existing service processes.
Auditing your service environments to see if they are supporting or inhibiting financial performance.
Providing customer facing employees with 360 feedback and development on critical customer experience skills.
Understanding where and how to focus change in your business.

about our approach

Our customer experience development programmes are broken down into five key stages involving - Setting CE Strategy, Assessing Customer Expectations, Service Design, Defining Delivery Processes and Realisation

customer experience strategy

To create the customer experience as a true differentiator in your chosen markets your strategy must work at all levels within your business. Our first activity with clients is the strategy review where you consider your market positioning and current and future direction. A focus on how the customer experience will play a part in your future is reviewed and agreed. A service model is defined and core objectives and measures are identified to inform your customer experience development programme. With a CE performance framework established, service concepts for your business are set. With the CE strategy identified Younique will collate feedback on your current performance. The customer's perception of your current delivery capabilities will be assessed and documented.

customer expectations

Having understood how well your business matches up against the agreed customer experience strategy, Younique will benchmark your service performance against data from your industry to compare and identify areas of change. Areas that you are under or over performing are identified. Your performance gap establishes the first part of your performance development plan.

service design

With the first indications of your service performance understood, aspects such as the value proposition, service culture and service environment are all assessed for alignment with the CE strategy. Aspects found wanting are identified and prioritised ready for change planning. The following are considered in detail:

The Value Proposition - your service design is reviewed from the customer's perspective of value to evaluate cost, quality, time, function, image and relationship performance.

The Service Culture - this aspect of service delivery is crucial as the behaviour of your employees can make or break a successful experience for your customers. This is assessed using our culture and performance review to identity how service oriented the unwritten rules and shared assumptions are in your company. We benchmark your culture against known high performance service organisations and complete a gap analysis to provide a prioritised cultural development plan. This is then used to inform the training and development of customer facing employees right through to the senior managers and leaders within your business.

The Service Environment - will be assessed using one of our Insight Programmes to understand how the retail financial value drivers play out in your market. The outcomes of the review involve identifying how the service concepts translate themselves into operational reality in the store and how they collectively contribute to positive customer experiences and retail performance. Some design changes will be inevitable but essential if an integrated approach is to be made to service delivery.

delivery processes

A good product, delivered well in a great environment can still be let down by a process that dissatisfies the customer. For example, making the customer wait unduly whilst a product or service is delivered will annoy the customer and detract from the customer's experience. Younique review and audit service processes from the customers viewpoint and develop or reengineer as appropriate processes and procedures within your company.

realisation

Defining your customer experience strategy and understanding the current delivery performance is meaningless unless service gaps are closed effectively. Younique provide a number of support programmes to help embed the customer experience within your company as 'business as usual'. A change programme is designed and implemented to include:

Strategic Review - the ongoing monitoring and review of your CE strategy and changing customer perceptions and expectations

Cultural Development - our cultural development solutions include 360 leadership impact and management effectiveness profiling, these together with coaching services are available to bed in the right approaches at senior and middle management level.

Training and Development - customer facing employees can undertake our customer experience development programme that includes 360 feedback on critical skills and competencies that are needed to excel in the service delivery environment. Experiential training programmes exploiting the latest NLP techniques get employees to see, feel and hear service delivery through the customer's eyes. This allows them to own, plan and commit to changes in mindsets and service performance. Coaching to embed advanced service excellence skills and competencies are available to those showing potential.

Environmental Review - our Insight Programmes integrate with the client's retail design teams to provide new or amended design solutions that deliver the service strategy. Younique also have design supply partners that can support the redesign of service space and, if required, provide shopfitting solutions through supply partners.

Value Propositions - Younique have retail consultants that can advise clients on changes to marketing mix, provide mystery shoppers, complete market research and advise on product/service enhancements or changes.

Process Development/Engineering - specialist process design/reengineering support is available to clients that need process changes. Training and development for employees affected by changes in work practices and approaches can be designed and delivered.

case studies

financial services

catering/facilities management