Together with our customer
We talk a lot about the customer experience today, and rightly so. For a long time now, we have operated in an era where customers determine what they want and how they want it. The days are long gone when success in business only required superior productivity or logistics. We have moved through several production phases shifting the focus from production to customer – to working and developing, together with customers.
Everything starts with identifying the customer’s journey
The theme for 2018, the year Lindström celebrated its 170th anniversary, was customer experience. We worked hard to find even better ways of placing our customers at the heart of our operations. The year began with the launch of the customer path and workshops entitled “Together with Customers”, held in all of the 24 Lindström subsidiaries around the world. In the workshops, everyone at Lindström and its subsidiary Comforta was able to discover the customer path and learn what our customers do and expect from us at each stage of the path. The key was to examine the ways in which each of us in our own roles can have an impact on the various stages of the customer path.
Workshops began in the spring of 2018, with teams of people from different operations playing a game and exploring the customer path. In the first round of workshops, we made a number of promises to each other and to our customers that will help us to develop our customer experience. We spent some time thinking about the elements that make an excellent customer experience.
In the second round of workshops during the summer and early autumn of 2018, we continued to improve the customer experience, this time in our own teams. This time, we thought about the strengths and development targets of our team in terms of producing a customer experience. We also thought about ways of bringing joy to our customers and, thus, generating positive feelings. In addition, we defined team commitments in order to ensure a better customer experience.
In the third round of workshops during the autumn of 2018, we worked in teams to look back at the results of the previous round and to assess our success in achieving the targets we had set for our team. We also thought about ways of bringing joy and positive surprises to our internal customers, i.e. our colleagues, as well as to our external customers. The third round of workshops ended with fantastic displays of letting go as the teams created human formations. Great attitudes and team spirit!
A good customer experience arises from emotions
Today and in the future, emotions play an ever-greater role in cooperation with customers. Working with us must generate positive emotional experiences among our customers. Visionary sales and displays of empathy when giving attention to people are ways of generating such emotions. Our goal must be to make the customer smile!
In my opinion, the customer experience and producing it is all about making the effort. It is about being prepared to do something for the customer for the sake of kindness, something “the customer does not ask for and your supervisor does not require” (Kalle Ruuskanen). It is about doing something genuine for another human being, out of pure good will. At best, such experiences remain in the minds of people, forming powerful emotional ties. We Care!
