Every company wants to grow faster, but what is the point of scaling up if you can’t retain the employees and customers you’ve already got? You have to deliver exceptional customer experience so that the growth you’re working on actually matters.
Ali Cudby is the Founder and CEO of Alignmint Growth Strategies, which delivers consulting and training so you and your team know what to do to prevent customer churn before it starts. Ali knows customer experience is not a department — it’s cross-functional. She is the author of the #1 best-selling book on customer retention, Keep Your Customers.
Straight out of business school, Ali was staffed on a project with the call center at the New York Times. She saw firsthand that the company was not engaging with its call center employees in a way that aligned with its global brand. She quickly learned that the way you engage with your team has a huge impact on the way that they engage with your customers, and that means the customer experience really matters.
The action steps to creating a culture that targets the customer experiences are simple. Make employees feel valued. Pay them an attractive wage. Give them swag or company merchandise so they feel like they are part of the team. Consider your customers. Do you give as much love to your existing customers as you do to your brand-new customers? Do you provide a higher tier of customer support to your higher-tier customers? Do you spend as much time maintaining long-term relationships as you do onboarding new customers?
Ali’s experiences — from bra fitting to lingerie consulting to the work that she does now with Alignmint — all underscore the same message. When you focus on the customer experience, you are fostering long-term loyalty and the potential for the kind of scaling up that lasts.
Interview Links:
Resources:
Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.)
Recruiter.com Short List (use code scaleup)
Scaling Up is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and our team for Scaling Up Coaches (formerly Gazelles). We share how the fastest-growing companies succeed where so many others fail.
Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach and host of the show, is an international business coach who works with C-Suite leaders to achieve breakthrough growth.
We help leadership teams with the biggest decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth. Scaling Up is based on Verne’s original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits.
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