So being customer-friendly presupposes having visibility into the customer's needs. And yet that is where things often go wrong. Customer friendliness becomes a training by a training agency where general aspects of customer friendliness are trained. Rarely is the actual customer need the basis of improving customer friendliness.

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Improving customer service starts with customer needs

A clear picture of what the customer wants and expects from you is the basis for improving customer friendliness. To get a good picture of that, it is important to find out from your customers what their needs are. Only when you know those needs can you respond to them. We often see that customers do not expect anything crazy at all. Yet it is not wise to assume that we know what the customer wants. We also often see that organizations adopt general standards or determine internally how they will shape customer friendliness..

Customer friendliness goes beyond good morning, good afternoon.

So what else is customer friendliness? Do you hear a: "We need to be more customer-friendly, so we are now going to train the employees who have contact with customers to be more customer-friendly." In such a project, everyone learns to repeat the customer's name nicely, and at the end of the conversation to ask if there are any further questions. Fair is fair, it's better than nothing. But in really wanting to improve edge friendliness, that training is only one of the last steps. Really improving customer friendliness or customer focus is how you do it:

1. 1. 1. Ask customers what they want, how they currently experience the service and, most importantly, what could be improved.
      2. Use the input from a customer survey to improve what needs to be improved in the customers' eyes. These can be complex business processes but also simple things like waiting times that are too long
      3. Start an improvement process where you assess all areas of improvement and make plans to improve the bottlenecks
      4. Make sure you address processes across departments
      5. Continue to conduct ongoing customer surveys to monitor the effect of improvement pathways

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What does customer-friendly work yield?

In addition to the question of what is customer-friendliness, we naturally ask the question of what does it deliver? When customer-friendliness is improved in the way mentioned above and there is commitment from the organization, results can be achieved almost immediately. Small adjustments can have major consequences. Working structurally on customer friendliness will pay off handsomely:

1. 1. 1. Higher customer satisfaction that makes customers less likely to walk away (lower churn) and more likely to purchase more services or products from you.
      2. Less unnecessary customer contact. The moment you respond more and more to what your customers need and adjust internal business processes accordingly, customers will contact you less often simply because they have fewer questions/complaints.
      3. A competitive advantage. If your organization is seen as more customer-friendly than its competitors, that gives you a valuable competitive advantage.

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Really improve customer friendliness?

Then do it right from the start and results will be able to be achieved quickly. For example, in 1 of our projects with a large client, we went from an average customer rating of 6.3 to 8 in 4 months. And that was an organization with thousands of customer contacts every day.

By the way, improving customer friendliness does not always have to be difficult. Being friendly in general does not have to be difficult. If you can't manage to look at customer friendliness and how to make a start with it, maybe we can help you. Hopefully we were able to give you an answer to the question, what is customer friendliness?