Corporate Culture Will Bind Employees to the Company to Help Deliver Customer Experience in 2022

In 2022, customers and employees alike won’t be afraid to vote with their feet. With wide ranging choice, customer loyalty will come from outstanding customer experience. In turn, delivery of customer experience will only be possible if company culture binds employees to the organisation in a meaningful way. iManage Chief Customer Success Officer, Dean Leung, shares his thoughts on key imperatives that will drive delivery of superior customer experience in the coming year:

• News Flash: Anyone Who Joins for Money, Will Leave for Money. There’s a fierce battle for talent right now. Potential employees on the market are asking for outrageous pay, and more often than not, they’re getting it. Before organisations pat themselves on the back for successfully filling any staffing gaps in their departments by hiring one of these individuals, however, they should realise that anyone who goes to an organisation solely because of money, will leave for money as soon as there’s a better opportunity somewhere else. In order to hold on to talent, there needs to be something other than money that binds the individual to the organisation, and that’s where culture comes in. Company culture is more important than ever – and it’s the secret sauce that prevents a company from being viewed as an interchangeable “commodity” by its employees.
• “I Like Your Organisation. Now, About Your Carbon Footprint…”. The Gen Z workforce wants to work for companies whose values align with their own. To that end, they’re very much invested in what a company is doing from a diversity, equity, and inclusion standpoint, an environmental standpoint, and so on. Lest companies think young employees are the only ones asking about these sorts of things, rest assured that potential clients are starting to as well. Increasingly, they are requesting information about the demographic makeup of senior leadership or the size of a company’s carbon footprint in their RFPs, to help them decide which companies they want to do business with. The most successful organisations will be those that take these matters seriously and thoughtfully rather than implementing a superficial “checkbox approach” – something that potential employees and potential clients can see right through.
• Tech Touch Only Gets You So Far – Human Touch Still Plays a Role. Companies can’t do one-size-fits-all marketing when they’re targeting new customers – they need to finely hone their personas and continually refine them to drive engagement. Does tech play a role here? Absolutely – you need a tech touch to be able to scale and maintain a single 360-degree view of the customer across all touchpoints. It can’t be entirely about the tech touch, though – you also need the human touch. Companies need to be able to know when to bring in the appropriate expert to provide the appropriate advice for individuals in particular stages of the journey where they reach a fork in the road. Recognising where people need that helping hand shows that the company is not only engaged in the success of their journey, but also that they recognise exactly how to amplify positive experiences for customers, while minimising any potential negatives.
• Customers Aren’t Afraid to Vote with Their Feet If They’re Not Getting the Experience They Want. What happens when even the biggest, most entrenched giant within an industry is revealed to be one subpar customer experience away from losing millions of customers? We found out recently when Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp experienced an unexpected outage that took their services offline for nearly six hours. The result? A competing service, Telegram, gained 70 million customers in a single day, many of whom were defecting from WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. The message for companies of all sizes and status is that providing a seamless customer experience is more important than ever in building customer loyalty. Customers have plenty of options – and if you’re not providing a smooth, seamless experience, they’ll be more than happy to take their business elsewhere.
• Security Is Expected – Always. You wouldn’t walk into a bank and ask them not to let any criminals steal your money; or ask your mobile service provider whether or not the new phone you just purchased is secure. The expectation now is that security is inherent for any product or service that customers procure from a vendor – and that both company and customer information is protected at every stage of its lifecycle. The trick is for companies to execute this strong security while not interfering with end user productivity and the ability to get work done seamlessly.