4 steps to customer obsession: a webinar with Steven Van Belleghem
Transform your business with these four key steps to achieve customer obsession.
In today's competitive market, achieving true customer obsession is more critical than ever. While companies often claim to be customer-focused, they struggle to truly deliver on that promise—finding themselves stuck in a cycle of average customer service, despite their best intentions.
Renowned CX expert and author, Steven Van Belleghem joined Theydo CEO and co-founder, Jochem van der Veer to discuss how businesses can address this challenge head-on. Customer culture is the ultimate differentiator. With a focus on actionable steps and real-world examples, Steven outlined four key transformations essential for organizations aiming to move beyond good intentions and achieve true customer obsession: positivity with impact, credibility, effective empathy, and loyalty.
1. Positivity with impact
The journey towards customer obsession begins with a paradigm shift from a pessimistic outlook to one that is more positive, and a commitment to creating meaningful impact for customers and society. Steven challenged the audience by asking, "How interested, on a scale from 0 to 100, are your customers in your challenges, in your difficulties? I personally think it's close to 0." Instead of focusing on the doom and gloom, we should focus our efforts on infusing positivity into every step of the customer journey. Even mundane interactions like invoicing can impact the overall experience.
Steven encouraged companies to make a proactive impact on the future of their business by thinking about the day after tomorrow. He gave the example of the Miami Beach police department's engagement with communities from an early age, aiming to prevent future criminal behavior through technology education. He noted that in a world of AI and automation, making an impact as a human towards your customers will be by working from the heart: "Do you want to sell products, or do you want to create positive change?"
2. (Internal) credibility
Building credibility internally emerged as another cornerstone of achieving customer obsession. Steven introduced three pivotal questions to assess an organization's customer culture, urging businesses to build credibility by aligning actions with customer-centric values:
How do you deal with opposing interests? "Are you willing to hurt yourself in the short run to gain trust in the long run?" he provocatively questioned, emphasizing the importance of long-term trust over short-term gains. Assess your approach to balancing customer needs with other competing priorities, ensuring customer-centricity even in challenging situations, such as Steven’s example of sleeping subscriptions in the Telco industry.
When something goes wrong, are you a fixer or a fault-finder? Reflect on your response to failures or mistakes, distinguishing between a reactive ‘fixer’ mentality and a proactive approach focused on resolving issues swiftly while maintaining customer satisfaction. Steven translated this to the 95/5 rule where organizations grapple with balancing customer-centricity amid challenging customer behaviors: don't let the 5% of difficult customers dictate policies that negatively impact the 95% of good customers.
How empowered is your team to make customer-centric decisions? Empower employees to act autonomously and make decisions aligned with the organization's customer-centric goals, ensuring agility and responsiveness in delivering exceptional customer experiences.
3. Effective empathy
In the third transformation, Steven challenged the audience to move beyond vague notions of empathy often encountered in business, and introduced the concept of “effective empathy” as a pragmatic approach to understanding and meeting customer needs. He shared an example from the Atlantis Resorts and Residences in Dubai, where the CEO starts each day with a meeting to address guest questions and promptly implement new processes based on their feedback. This demonstrates the importance of fast feedback loops coupled with swift action to continuously improve the customer journey.
Steven said, “The quality that a lot of companies lack is to act upon it in a fast and efficient way. If you can do this, you actually show the market that you listen and that you react, and it becomes like a dance between you and your customer”. The key to this, though, is in mastering the art of keeping improvements small and making incremental improvements to the customer journeys. This leads to the ability to say ‘yes’ more often to customers and thereby creating a more customer-centric approach.
4. Loyalty
Finally, in the fourth transformation, Steven redefined loyalty—shifting from transactional rewards to emotional connections. He emphasized the need for organizations to initiate loyalty efforts, understanding crucial moments in the customer journey, and making them memorable by adding positive emotion. Instead of asking, "How can we make our customers more loyal?", we should be framing the question in terms of how we can show our loyalty to our customers. This approach drives business growth as customers return, buy more, and bring friends.
Shine like a diamond in the rough
Alongside the four transformations, Steven and Jochem also discussed the role of language in empowering employees and the need to bridge the gap between short-term revenue focus and long-term customer value. Identify the points of friction—the places in your journey where you waste your customers’ time, where you made it too complex for them, or you took the easy way out. Empower your team to solve these issues quickly and efficiently, to create a culture of continuous improvement.
According to Steven, the essence of customer experience lies in mastering the small details and executing consistently. He left us with a quote from Admiral William McRaven: "If you want to change the world, start by making up your bed every single day. If you can't succeed in the small things in life, how could you possibly succeed in the big things in life?" By adopting this mindset and executing consistently, organizations can achieve significant impact and shine like a diamond in the rough.
Webinar highlights
Watch the complete webinar to access all of Steven's valuable insights. Navigate to specific segments of the webinar that interest you by clicking on the timestamps provided below.
01:46 Introducing Steven Van Belleghem
04:13 Steven’s keynote: the CX paradox and 4 transformations to overcome the execution gap
Steven introduces the concept of transforming organizations into "beautiful, shiny diamonds" by bridging the gap between intention and execution in delivering exceptional customer experiences. He emphasizes the importance of cultivating a customer culture as the key differentiator for organizations, outlining four transformations to achieve this goal.
05:30 Positivity with impact
Steven highlights the importance of embedding positivity throughout the customer journey, advocating for organizations to prioritize creating positive change over product sales amidst technological advancements.
10:25 Internal credibility
Build credibility within organizations by addressing internal skepticism towards customer-centric initiatives. Steven provides three key questions to assess leadership and organizational culture.
17:27 Effective empathy
Steven introduces the concept of “effective empathy”, underscoring the significance of fast feedback loops and small improvements in creating a more customer-centric experience.
20:00 Loyalty to your customers
Redefine loyalty as emotional connections rather than transactional rewards. Steven urges organizations to initiate loyalty efforts and create memorable customer moments to drive business growth.
28:40 How to Become a Shiny Diamond Workbook pdf
In addition to his book, Steven created a complimentary workbook to help teams implement the strategies he discussed.
29:37 Unpacking Steven’s presentation and Q&A
Despite enthusiasm to implement customer-centric strategies immediately, the process may take time. It’s important to ensure that every aspect of the journey meets standards, even while pursuing grand initiatives.
30:07 What are the basic steps to take towards customer obsession? Start with friction hunting
Friction hunting involves teams identifying and resolving customer pain points collaboratively, which increases both internal morale and external customer satisfaction. It’s a practical strategy for immediate implementation and a litmus test for organizational customer-centricity.
34:27 Can a research culture be a bottleneck for companies? Need for structural research and speed of action
Steven discusses how structural research to address repetitive customer issues is often overlooked, with temporary fixes preferred over long-term solutions, resulting in escalated problems and frustration. Failure to promptly resolve issues also contributes to increased workload and dissatisfaction.
39:10 The importance of language in companies
Language in companies is pivotal; for instance, rephrasing terms like ‘frontline staff’ to more positive alternatives can boost morale, while shifting focus to loyalty to customers rather than expecting loyalty from them promotes a customer-centric approach.
40:46 How to confront ‘darker patterns’ on customer acquisition?
Confronting darker patterns in customer acquisition involves finding a balance between enticing new customers and delivering value to them. While bait-and-hook tactics may initially attract customers, the risk of negative word-of-mouth increases if promises are not fulfilled. Shifting language and subtle changes within organizations, like renaming departments to reflect a more customer-centric approach, can also contribute to positive changes in customer interactions.
44:00 Example: Sports businesses
Apply the methodology to a gym or sports center by anticipating drop-off points in the customer journey, and proactively offering workshops or events to keep customers engaged and motivated.
46:37 People in the ‘front line’ as the key friction hunters
Frontline customer service professionals, when empowered to provide feedback that is actively acted upon, can serve as invaluable ‘friction hunters’, identifying key areas for improvement within the organization.
47:55 Silos in CX
Many large organizations face challenges in accessing integrated data between customer experience and support teams, highlighting the need for organizational alignment and leadership focus to merge systems and utilize AI for better customer insights.
49:53 Advice for CX professionals to cope with short-term focus on revenue
Steven advises to align with the short-term strategy, demonstrate value through friction hunting initiatives over time, and collaborate closely with sales leaders to utilize their customer insights for addressing friction points effectively.
51:54 Create memorable moments for customers
Steven gives examples of identifying emotional touchpoints like receiving bills, celebrating milestones, and experimenting with personalized gestures, even if there's initial hesitation. It’s about adapting based on customer feedback over time.