Does Your Right Hand Know What Your Left is Doing?

by Jeff Dwoskin

It was going to be a great day. I could feel it. The sun was up, and so was I. I was feeling pretty good about the final touches I put on a new presentation. I was proud of it– not only was it a brilliant idea in my book, I loaded the presentation with all the bells and whistles I could muster – graphs, large fonts, bullet points, and bullet points supported by sub bullet points. Did I mention that the bullet points flew in from the side of the screen (that’s how you know they are really important)?

Much to my dismay, someone else had already presented the same idea a week earlier and it was already in the implementation stage. I was devastated, thinking of all the time I wasted on the PowerPoint help tab in attempt to master the animation.

Of course I was disappointed, but I’m fortunate to work with an amazing team of professionals. We watch each other’s backs, and more importantly, we watch our client’s backs – not because we have to, but because we WANT to. We’re a team dedicated to improving everything around us. Unfortunately, my presentation was one of those rare incidents where the left hand of the team wasn’t paying attention to what the right hand of the team was doing. We weren’t coordinating in the right ways.

We learned a similar lesson through one of our amazing clients.

When data from one of our retail clients showed that their satisfaction had hit a bump – we jumped into action. This wasn’t your typical tiny bump, however. It turned out to be a big problem hidden under a mountain of data. Luckily, we’re data ninjas, and finding the needle in the haystack is what gets our hearts pumping. We’re able to dive into data and emerge with some very specific details about what that data means to our clients’ customer satisfaction.

The particular needle in question was an issue with shipping — but not just shipping in general, shipping from one specific location (of many) the client had across the country. This one particular distribution center was under-performing and single-handedly pulling the entire satisfaction score down. Through further analysis and discussions with the client, it became clear that the retailer’s distribution centers were not privy to any of the data collected by the corporate office. Thus, they were not sufficiently aware of the customer dissatisfaction. They didn’t know they had a problem, so they couldn’t possibly have fixed it.

We recommended that our client share their customer experience data with their individual, regional distribution centers. This way, distribution center management is always equipped with the necessary information to facilitate changes to improve customer satisfaction.

Sharing knowledge and information is the key. Communicating customer experience data throughout the organization can improve satisfaction across the board and drive future sales.

This is only one example of an issue that we see happening more and more in today’s, multi-layered, multi-channel world. All of your organization’s touch points (web, mobile, store locations, call centers, social media) need to work together to deliver a satisfactory experience that keeps your customers coming back. Customers are interacting with organizations in many different ways today, and oftentimes the changes that need to occur within an organization in order to improve the customer experience require efforts from multiple departments.

So, always let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.  This will ensure everyone is happy, and even potentially help avoid some embarrassing PowerPoint presentations, no matter how animated your bullets are.

To learn more about ForeSee’s multi-channel customer experience analytics, visit our website. You can also subscribe to my posts to keep up with ForeSee’s team of “data ninjas,” or subscribe to The ForeSee Blog.