Making an impact during these unprecedented times - In an interview with Kim Oslob, Senior Director of Customer Engagement at MeasuringU

In this interview, Kim Oslob, Senior Director of Customer Engagement at MeasuringU, discusses the importance of why businesses need to continue to deliver their overall brand promises amid these challenging times. Doing so will help improve their brand reliability, long-term success, an opportunity to drive differentiation, and stability in the long run.

How should businesses adapt to the current business landscape?

It depends on how determined and committed organizations are to meeting or exceeding customer expectations. But the business that provides the best service, sustainable impact, and long-term value will stand out and separate itself from the pack. 

The most challenging and significant problem in business today is building or strengthening a customer experience that fuels brand loyalty. To guide them, here a few things businesses need to consider and think about when planning a path forward:

• Customers have gone remote. Therefore, face-to-face meetings have become fewer and fewer. With less human interaction, how should we engage customers more holistically?
• Most meetings today are held or conducted through video conferencing apps. These virtual meetings are always time-sensitive. How can we maximize or take advantage of this limited time to think of the most workable solutions against customer challenges or shortcomings?
• Today, it is a challenge to maintain a working relationship — unlike in the past when we could easily invite someone for a coffee break or have a quick chat at lunch or dinner. How should we deliver a delightful and insightful customer experience without losing the human element or value?
• Customers now are more siloed and isolated from their colleagues. How can we solve their queries and capture their business needs or challenges in a timely and organized way? 

With these prevailing challenges, businesses must make balanced decisions and instill a culture of accountability. They should all reflect on the same failures and successes they have overcome and think of ways to continue supporting each other. In this way, everyone is given leeway to make proactive and informed decisions.

How can businesses build an incredible connection with customers? 

If you look at the current situation, everyone is working in their homes, and they are juggling between personal life and work life. Since we were all busy, the human relationship is greatly affected.

Being busy should not be an excuse for us not to maintain a personalized customer experience or to have a personal relationship. We can start by understanding how the current situation affects them and how we can help them succeed. 

Customers will listen and open up if we give them a reason to do so. It allows us also to discuss or share our long-term vision that indicates their success now and in the future. 

There are many ways for us to build an incredible and personal connection with customers. I have always believed that open communication is most necessary. It is the best strategy to keep everyone in the loop. The cardinal rule is to always think about customers and how we can improve their business. 

How can organizations help CSMs in setting up the right foundation to deliver successful outcomes?

As we design and map the customer journeys, we can also empower Customer Success Managers to build one for themselves. In this exercise, CSMs should identify areas on how they can better align with customer challenges. They should plan or decide which solutions to implement that they think would help customers move along with their journey. 

Using this as the basis of their success will enable CSMs to determine where the friction is or where the challenges might arise or prevail. CSMs can use this as a precedent or blueprint that they can also apply to other segments of customers.

Any final thoughts or words you’d like to share?

Customers are now demanding more responsibility and transparency from the organizations they buy from, invest in, and work for. The challenge now is for all of us to understand that opportunity. 

To ensure that customer success is well-achieved in the post-pandemic world, we need to shift to a more conducive brand and help customers be better by enhancing the value we provide and commit to delivering.

We also need to rethink how we should deliver and drive lasting success or value that fosters customer loyalty. With the future still uncertain and how quickly things can change, we must listen and proactively take customer suggestions.