Nobody said it was Easy to Build an Exceptional Customer Experience

Delivering an exceptional customer experience is good for long-term business prospects. If we accept that premise, the unavoidable question is how to go about creating that experience. There are no cheats and no shortcuts. It’s hard work but it might just safeguard the future of our business.

This is essentially a process of turning the business inside out, to understand how it feels to work with us from the outside. We need to map customers’ journeys and understand their needs and expectations at each step. This analysis must include the end users of our infrastructure projects and those who will be affected while they are being carried out.

Then we must evaluate the experience we deliver against the one a customer would expect or hope to have – measuring ourselves against the very best businesses, inside and outside of our sector.

This may not be a comfortable experience. Analysis at the depth required isn’t a trivial exercise. It’s likely to involve deep dives into key processes, looking at the data and gathering insights from customers, asset owners and users, and our team.

From this detailed review will flow a set of remedies that are unique to our business. In general terms, the pathway to delivering an exceptional customer experience will probably involve the following:

● Breaking down silos and building cross-functional awareness so that everyone sees the entire journey and how their actions have knock-on effects.
● Getting everyone to accept ownership of ‘what happens next’ so that they actively seek to improve the quality of subsequent customer interactions.
● Open mindedness, innovation and an unwillingness to accept how things have always been done.

Improving customer experience starts with people. A renewed focus on recruiting the right people and training them well will pay enormous dividends. Motivate and incentivise people to do the right thing and ensure their goals are fixed on doing what is best for customers and asset users and look beyond the next project deliverable.

Above all, we must avoid the temptation to impose fixes. If changes are to be sustained there needs to be a shift of culture to one in which everyone takes ownership and develops the empathy to see the business through customers’ eyes. This is what top performing brands do and what infrastructure contractors need to learn how to do more effectively and consistently.